UPDATE (30 Oct. 2013): Cleaning up my database, deleting the tables for the plugin used to host this file, so, no more link. The story, incidentally, has been trunked, though I may try revise it eventually.
UPDATE (2 January 2006, 12:30pm): The story is now attached. You may download it here!
Writing Jesus of Nazareth as a character in one’s own story is, well, as you might imagine it’s ridiculously difficult. So of course, when drafting my most recent short story, “Soul Competency”, I found myself blocked at the point where the protagonist was about to meet Him.
Yes, capital-H him. It may surprise some of you, but some old habits stick. Well, finally, today, after a couple of days of basing him on other people — most prominently basing some of his conversation with my protagonist upon a conversation I once had with the wonderful saxophonist Dewey Redman, whom I met during my teenage years in Saskatoon, and who had me missing his mother’s cooking — I had a singular breakthrough and went back to one of the parables from the synoptic gospels to retrofit it to what I think is a version He’d approve of, were He to show up today in the situation set out in my story.
So anyway, I’ve completed a draft of “Soul Competency” and will subject it to some editing tomorrow morning. After that, I suppose I’ll post a draft here for any critique that anyone feels like offering. I’ll add the PDF link to this post in an update so check this post again later, if you’re interested in offering criticisms.
Thereafter, I gotta get my butt in gear prepping something short for the Canadian SF/fantasy anthology Tesseracts10 anthology, which is taking submissions from Canadian writers until March. And of course there’s all the other short (and longer) stories that need sending out to magazines. They’ve mouldered long enough and I think the week after camp, I’ll be making a big trip to the post office.
But for this evening… since I’ve finished a story, I’m going to go back to reading, as a kind of treat. I’m a third of the way into Max Barry’s Jennifer Government and, well, it’s an alright book, I think. Good so far, as satire; I’m worried about the ending that was so widely panned, though. (Some of you may know Barry as the creator of the Nationstates online game, which I played for a while. My nation, dyscraxia, is sadly no more. Ah well.)