Bloody Harold (Episode 8) Transcript
The audio version of this episode can be found here.
Hannah: In the rural south, a bounty hunter struggles to partner with a young woman.
Jennie: Somebody write this.
Hannah: Hi, and welcome to Somebody Write This where we use a random plot generator to give us an idea. And then we brainstorm how that could be a thing somebody might want to write. I'm Hannah.
Jennie: And I'm Jennie.
Hannah: And to help us with our brainstorming today, we have a guest. Welcome, Shem Greenwood.
Shem: Good afternoon.
Hannah: We are very excited to have you here with us. And so before we get into our topic today, we just want to have a real quick chat with Shem and get to know him and his relationship with stories a little bit. And so I want to start with the fact that you teach high school English. I'm a teacher as well, also of high school and middle school, and so I'm curious, what stories or themes do you see today's high school students really connecting with, either in reading or in writing? What types of themes tend to come out?
Shem: Hmm, that's an interesting question. I think anything that surprises them seems to be the things that they get really excited about. We just finished Graham Greene's "The Destructors" in my AP language class, and I had a few kids sort of do the mind blown motion when when we sort of talked about what the theme of the story might be. And so things like that really excite me and tend to excite them as well. But they also are just the same things that excite the rest of us, a lovable character or urgent struggle someone has to overcome. Yeah.
Hannah: Yeah, no, I mean, there's a reason those themes are popular. They're universal and transcend age as well. You said you teach a short elective specifically about ghost stories. I would love to hear more about that.
Shem: Yeah, we do a little program after Christmas break where all the teachers get to teach anything they'd be interested in. So we have one of our math teachers doing rock climbing and another teacher does tae kwon do and stage combat, all sorts of different things like that. And so being not skilled in anything like that, I've taught a ghost stories class for like, I think the last five or six years I've done this. It started out as just scary stories in general. And it sort of evolved into-- There were so many good ghost stories, I just narrowed it down to that. And we do a lot of fiction, mostly short fiction. We do old time radio broadcasts, we do podcasts, we watch some films, pretty much any media you can imagine. Songs. We explore just how ghosts work in different cultures. And I'm especially intrigued when ghosts can be a symbol for something else, from something in the past that is haunting you or something in your history or someone who's gone but you don't want them to be gone. Those things are really intriguing to me. And so I really get a kick out of it. Plus, I think a lot of the classic ghost stories that I take for granted as being really important, a lot of my students never experienced, and so yeah, it's good to introduce them and have them watch The Sixth Sense for the first time and things like that.
Jennie: Can I come be in your class?
Hannah: Right? I want to be part of this. No, that's really cool. I know you're also an aspiring novelist. How has teaching others how to read and write informed your own work?
Shem: Well, I hope it has. That's my insecurity is that, well, you understand what makes all these brilliant writers brilliant. But it's one thing to understand and another thing to execute it. But just the the bulk of literature I'm able to consume-- I'm a really strong believer in you read what you write. And if you read flimsy, predictable, boring stuff, that's probably what your writing will come out to be. Not that anyone should ever feel ashamed or embarrassed to read whenever they feel like reading, but because I read so many amazing authors it really inspires me to create something at least approaching to reach that, something vaguely resembling their work.
Jennie: Yeah, totally agree.
Hannah: Has there been anything, a book or a genre or an author, that you've wanted to be able to bring in your classroom but haven't been able to for whatever, logistics or not quite appropriate for their developmental level or whatever? Is there anything that you're just like still aching to teach, but you know you can't?
Shem: There is an ever going ongoing struggle with I really want to teach this but because they are high school, or some kids are junior high students, it's just not on their maturity level. I am sometimes able to sneak little bits in, especially with these elective classes, but I just read last year, Octavia Butler's "Kindred," which is about time travel, but also slavery. It's brilliant, but it's also horrifying.
Jennie: Yeah, really heavy material, sounds like.
Shem: And so I wanted to bring some of it into the other elective class I teach, which is time travel. And we decided, me and the administrative decided, well, most of this is is much too graphic to teach, especially because these classes anyone can take, it's not just my 11th and 12th graders, but we did include just the first chapter of it. And that was very gratifying for me. I'm working my way through David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest." Me and some staff members had a little book club going and I think maybe they've sort of tapped out but I'm still going strong. And I keep reaching points where it's like, "Wow, this would be so good to teach rhetoric in my AP language class if he didn't say the F word nine times in a paragraph." But, yeah, I'm always struggling because on the one hand, they are brilliant, mature people, more so than we give them credit for, but they are still 17 and you don't want to ruin their lives too early.
Hannah: No, I completely feel that. I taught middle school theater and there was so much that is like, I wish that I could bring this but I know they're not ready for it yet. Oh, it's so difficult. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing a little bit about your your unique experience with this. I'm really excited to dive into our story. So as a reminder, our story is, "In the Rural South, a bounty hunter struggles to partner with a young woman." Where do you want to start?
Shem: I would say the story starts with something like, "Cynthia pushed her thick glasses up further on the bridge of her nose, wiped the sweat off of her forehead as she sipped her store brand cream soda, and waited for the bus." And I imagine the the young woman in our story to be a very bookish and athletically challenged, maybe middle school, girl and the bounty hunter to be an excessively macho, perhaps with tribal tattoos, swaggering around, but perhaps Cynthia is his only contact to track down his mark.
Hannah: Okay so we have we have a need for them to be together. Is the struggle primarily borne out of their different personalities? Borne out of the fact that she has a child still? Borne out of the fact that he just is a loner and wants to do this on his own and doesn't want to have to depend on anybody else? A combination of all three? Something else?
Shem: I think the struggle is going to arise from the fact first of all that he is a loner and sees himself as a very tough and capable and dangerous person. I think if I were writing the story-- I guess I am writing the story.
Hannah: We are, we are.
Shem: I would say that Cynthia is excessively polite and accommodating and doesn't seem fazed by, first of all, by his threatening persona, but also seems much more competent at everything he thinks he's good at than he is.
Jennie: Ooh, I like it.
Hannah: And she just keeps showing him up on stuff. Oh, I like that dynamic.
Jennie: But like not even in a pretentious way just like "Oh, that's how I do it."
Shem: "Isn't the murder weapon probably under the seat of the car?" Like, "Wait, no, I looked under there." "Well, look again," and it's there.
Jennie: I like Cynthia.
Hannah: I do too, I do too. Does she know exactly what the bounty hunter is after? Like, how much is he sharing with her?
Jennie: How much is he allowed to share with her?
Hannah: How much does she find out anyway?
Shem: Maybe we say bounty hunter is looking for Cynthia's uncle Dave.
Hannah: Okay. Yeah, a family member, I think.
Shem: Who has skipped his parole. And so he's been hired to track him down.
Jennie: Oh, does Cynthia like uncle Dave? Maybe she doesn't want him to get caught.
Hannah: Oh, undermining along the way.
Shem: Maybe. I think there's two ways to go, where either Cynthia takes down Uncle Dave because she's in different and Uncle Dave's entire smuggling ring, whatever, he's done. Or maybe our big twist at the end is that Cynthia knew about this all along and sets up bounty hunter guy to meet some sort of untimely demise and rescue Uncle Dave, and maybe Cynthia's like, "You owe me now, Dave." Cynthia is the most diabolical of them all.
Hannah: If she's still a middle schooler, her parents are absent here. And so trying to figure out why the bounty hunter goes after her... Maybe she and Uncle Dave are really close. And she's the only one who's had contact with him. And so he comes to their house, he checks in on them, Mom and Dad are both like, "No, we haven't heard from him, we have no idea." And then he like sees a text on her phone or something or hears her say something and realizes that she knows where he is or she knows at least where he has been. And so trying to find a way to to explain the fact that she is there without-- that her parents are absent. She's essentially just like off on this adventure to protect her uncle with a lot more autonomy than probably a middle schooler would get. Which is you know, obviously every YA story is finding a way to give teenagers and young people their autonomy to be able to make decisions and do things without somebody reaching over them.
Jennie: Right, and that's the feeling I'm getting about her here is that you're on the outside she's bookish and quiet and unassuming or whatever but she's obviously got skills somewhere to have that kind of self confidence and motivation to just do things for herself and like, "I'm gonna save Uncle Dave and I'm gonna get in this bounty hunter's car." Does he have a car or a motorcycle? He probably has a motorcycle.
Shem: I'd probably say, yeah, I guess a motorcycle would fit. That would increase the amount of irony if he cheats on some killer hog. I imagine our introduction-- We need a name for the bounty hunter, I guess.
Hannah: We do.
Jennie: Ernie.
Shem: I feel like a bounty hunter would be teased if his name was Ernie.
Jennie: Well, that's what makes him so tough.
Shem: Maybe so.
Hannah: It also occurred to me when we were setting it up for why he-- Like he partners with her and he decides that they're going to work together on this. But it also occurred to me, we're giving her this amazing sense of autonomy and control over the situation. Maybe she's the one who puts them together in the first place. Maybe she realizes that he is on the right track and she deliberately links up with him to throw him off. Maybe she's smart enough that she like accidentally lets something drop that makes him think she's got something but she's pulling the strings the whole time.
Shem: That's a really good little key in there. I think, I imagine, now that I've thought about it for a few minutes the first end of the story is that Cynthia saves Uncle Dave from Ernie, and then the second twist is that Cynthia turns Uncle Dave in and takes the bounty for herself and becomes the youngest bounty hunter in Savannah or wherever we are.
Hannah: It depends on on how devious this character gets.
Shem: Yeah. And I like the idea that she perhaps could be orchestrating the whole thing from the beginning. I'm not a huge Stephen King reader, I've only read a few of the short stories, but one of my favorite short stories by him is called Poppy, I think. Have either of you ever--
Hannah: I don't think I've read that one.
Shem: So Poppy is the story of this kidnapper guy. This kidnapper steals this little kid from a mall with insidious intent, to ransom this kid or do something terrible to him. And so for the first maybe three quarters of the story, you're just horrified at what this person is doing and horrified for the safety of this child. As the story progresses, the kid keeps saying, "Well, my poppy is going to come and get you and then you'll be sorry." And it becomes basically clear that this is not a normal child. And at the end of the story we realize the child is a vampire and "Poppy" is a grown vampire. And now you are very much afraid for the bad guy because he's very much going to come to a bad end.
Hannah: I'm actually going to pause for a second and share the title of this, because as we're looking for a name for our bounty hunter, this might be it. The randomly generated title is Bloody Harold.
Shem: Bloody Harold.
Hannah: Which could just be his name. Like he sounds a little bit like a pirate but--
Jennie: "My name is Bloody Harold."
Shem: Why don't we say his name is Harold Blood, but he's known in his circles as Bloody Harold.
Hannah: Yeah. Harold Blood is a great name too. That's fantastic.
Jennie: That's definitely a bounty hunter name.
Hannah: So Bloody Harold is our bounty hunter. And that's really nice, we don't need to do any more work for the title than that because that's right there. That is the easiest we've ever had with that.
Jennie: Seriously.
Hannah: So yeah, we have this-- Which is interesting though because he's the title character but she's clearly-- How obvious is it early on that she's the one in control of the situation? Is this like the Stephen King novel or short story where it doesn't become obvious until halfway through? Until the very end? Clearly he is our central character for much of it.
Shem: I love a good gotcha twist ending. So I think the story on its surface appears very edgy and maybe even a little bit noir. He seems to be like-- Where we're talking about maybe his internal monologue-- Maybe the whole story is written from his perspective. When you were talking earlier about how was it that they become connected, I would imagine-- Maybe the thing about her sipping the soda at the bus stop we put off for later. But maybe he has spoken to her parents who are of no help. Now they've gone away to Atlantic City or something. And so he's taken this opportune moment to break into the house and the only open window was her bedroom, which maybe later on we can reveal was by design. When he gets into the bedroom, he sees a movie stub, ticket stub for a movie, which is one of the last places that Uncle Dave was seen at, and we now can determine that Uncle Dave took Cynthia to the movies and so she might be our lead.
Jennie: Okay. Here's my question, though, and it's an important question, what is Cynthia's motivation? If she's not saving Uncle Dave but if she's turning him in for the bounty, what does she need that money for?
Hannah: Maybe this is a situation where she's got a-- Middle schoolers have incredibly intense and rigid moral codes at times. So maybe it's a matter of that Uncle Dave did a thing he shouldn't have done and should face the consequences for it, and the bounty hunter also should not get any reward. Maybe he does something that she disagrees with along the way. So maybe it's a matter of that she feels like she's putting the world to right by putting people where they belong, and if she gets a monetary reward along the way, so be it.
Jennie: She sounds a little psychopathic.
Hannah: She's learning how to generate ethics. Maybe they're a little bit warped at the moment.`
Jennie: I have two theories. The first one is like the typical, oh, somebody in her family is like dying of cancer, and she needs it for the medical bills and whatever, which makes her you know, like very clever or altruistic. And then my second theory will only make sense to those of you who have seen the previous episode. I think she's raising the money and is going to give it to The Daughter.
Hannah: Okay, which, as we've established in our previous episode is a giant worldwide crime organization of teenagers. Maybe. Yeah, I definitely don't see her as being out for the money, but maybe she is. Maybe that's a piece of it.
Shem: My first impression was we create some humor in that the whole time she's scamming these two dangerous adults she just wants some like limited edition Polly Pocket set or something. When you were talking earlier about motivation-- I feel like we start the story with some really gritty self-important monologue from-- we said Harold?
Hannah: Harold, yes.
Shem: Talking about how "evil can't escape me and I'm the law," and then we end the story with her giving a similar monologue that "I am the law, and even Bloody Harold thought no one knew about his double dealings, but justice has been served, they cannot escape my all-vigilant gaze" or something like that.
Jennie: Okay, I want to read this. I want to read it now.
Hannah: Just coming around to the idea that-- Again, you're looking at universality, the universal like desire to be in control and to be the one making the decisions, and we see it in this in this kid as well as in this bounty hunter, manifesting in different ways.
Shem: In fact I would say maybe it starts with Harold crushing a beer can and throwing it away as he delivers his little internal monologue, and we end with her like crushing a Capri Sun bag or something and throwing it away.
Hannah: I love this sort of dark ironic comedy. Oh, I like this a lot. We are right about at time for discussing the plot specifically. Are there any pieces that you think that we're really missing? Do we need to get into depth about why it's in the rural South? Or is that not as essential to the heart of it?
Shem: I think-- I mean, obviously because that was the prompt we were given, but I think just so we can amplify the gun-toting sort of backwoods element that we get in like a Coen Brothers film or something.
Hannah: It's setting the atmosphere.
Shem: Maybe we could even introduce a racial element possibly where maybe Cynthia's black and Harold is white and say he expresses some less than open-minded views, and so it's maybe more gratifying when she gives him his comeuppance. That's a possible element. Maybe it's not necessary, I don't know.
Hannah: Yeah. But I think there's definitely a lot that you could explore in the dynamics between these two to set it up to be extremely satisfying when she does get this.
Jennie: And don't forget about Uncle Dave. Like, What is his history? What did he do to get a bounty hunter after him? What's his relationship with his family? And does he already have a history with Harold?
Hannah: Yeah, so I think we are at this point going to take what we've pulled out of those, which is really fascinating, and go ahead and turn it over to our listeners to fill in the gaps.
Shem: Terrific.
Hannah: All right. So as we close out, let's go ahead and we'll each take a second and we'll share a story that we think our listeners should check out. I think this time I'm going to share a book series that I first read when I was in high school. It's called the Otherland series. It's by Tad Williams. It's a giant series. Well, it's not so many books, but every book is like 800 pages. It's this long, sprawling sci-fi, vaguely fantasy, epic about a virtual world a little bit further in the future from now. And it follows all these different characters who end up, for various reasons, end up stuck in the virtual world. And because it's set in this virtual space, the characters move from virtual creation to virtual creation, and so there's this variety of worlds within it, some of which are based on actual fictional places. Like there's one that's entirely inspired by the Wizard of Oz, that somebody got into this virtual system and decided to make a Wizard of Oz world. And so it's kind of exploring all the different ways that-- I find it fascinating to see all the different possible places that they could go with it. And the characters are really, really interesting. I just reread it about a year ago, the entire series, and loved it just as much now as I did then, so I definitely recommend that, the Otherland book series by Tad Williams. I'm going to toss it over to Jennie. What would you like to recommend this week?
Jennie: Well, I just learned the other week that there are grown people in this world who have not actually seen The Princess Bride. So if you're like everybody and have seen The Princess Bride, go watch it again. But Google "Yubi Princess Bride," that's Y-U-B-I, Yubi, to find this person's Twitter thread live tweeting their discovery of this classic, iconic, beloved, intrinsic-to-our-culture movie. And if you haven't seen the movie, you got homework. The book is fantastic also. It's fantastic in a different way than the movie is.
Hannah: Alright, Shem. What would you like to share?
Shem: Well, it's really tricky for me to pick just one, but the one that came to my mind first is Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Ted Chiang is a science fiction writer who's getting a lot of attention right now. And I think the titular story, it's called Story of Your Life, might be the best science fiction story I've ever read in all my literates days. I haven't seen the film Arrival, but it is the story on which that film was based. Although my understanding is the director of the film takes the story in a different direction in a very also artistically meaningful way, but not how the story plays out. But Chiang has this gift of writing these stories that feel realistically scientific. Almost everything, it seems very hard science, not inaccessible, but it seems like he must have had a degree in whatever this field of study was to write this story. And then he'll take it in some just slightly interesting science fiction sort of direction that just makes these really fascinating, really intriguing, really human stories that I just couldn't get enough of. So Stories of Your Life and Others is the collection. The individual story is called Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. And it's just spectacular.
Hannah: Fantastic. We don't get enough folks plugging short story collections. And so I'm glad that you did. All right. Before we take off, is there anything you want to plug for yourself Shem any social media or blogs or works that you'd like to share with our listeners?
Shem: Not for me personally, but I would actually, maybe there is I started a tradition just for myself and my friends a few years ago that I called book brag. And all it is is keeping track of all the books you read in a year. And then at New Years, when everybody is talking about their resolutions and their favorite albums of the year. I just put up my list and it becomes a really great discussion for things that I would like to read when I read other people's lists and People can say, Oh, I read that. And I loved it too. And so you can make connections with people. And I think it's just one more way to celebrate reading and create a community around reading, which I think is terrific.
Hannah: Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. We had an awesome time and ended up with something really, really fascinating. And I hope we get somebody sending us in something based off of this.
Shem: Well, I might just have to write this myself as well.
Hannah: Yeah. We had one of our one of our previous guests write out a chapter of the story that he guested on. So go for it. If you do, we will-- Anybody who sends anything into us, we will read a little bit on the podcast, if you'll let us and put up put some of it up on our podcast blog if that's okay. We'd love to continue showing people where these stories get taken, especially if they go in a very different direction than where we started. Well, that's our episode. As a reminder, you can find us every other Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.
Jennie: Follow us on Twitter @writethispod and if you've been inspired by this episode and have questions or comments or a script or anything else, email us at somebodywritethis@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Hannah: And we'll be back with one more episode in two weeks. See you then.
Jennie: And as they say, if the sun shines it will be warm.
Hannah: In the rural south, a bounty hunter struggles to partner with a young woman.
Jennie: Somebody write this.
Hannah: Hi, and welcome to Somebody Write This where we use a random plot generator to give us an idea. And then we brainstorm how that could be a thing somebody might want to write. I'm Hannah.
Jennie: And I'm Jennie.
Hannah: And to help us with our brainstorming today, we have a guest. Welcome, Shem Greenwood.
Shem: Good afternoon.
Hannah: We are very excited to have you here with us. And so before we get into our topic today, we just want to have a real quick chat with Shem and get to know him and his relationship with stories a little bit. And so I want to start with the fact that you teach high school English. I'm a teacher as well, also of high school and middle school, and so I'm curious, what stories or themes do you see today's high school students really connecting with, either in reading or in writing? What types of themes tend to come out?
Shem: Hmm, that's an interesting question. I think anything that surprises them seems to be the things that they get really excited about. We just finished Graham Greene's "The Destructors" in my AP language class, and I had a few kids sort of do the mind blown motion when when we sort of talked about what the theme of the story might be. And so things like that really excite me and tend to excite them as well. But they also are just the same things that excite the rest of us, a lovable character or urgent struggle someone has to overcome. Yeah.
Hannah: Yeah, no, I mean, there's a reason those themes are popular. They're universal and transcend age as well. You said you teach a short elective specifically about ghost stories. I would love to hear more about that.
Shem: Yeah, we do a little program after Christmas break where all the teachers get to teach anything they'd be interested in. So we have one of our math teachers doing rock climbing and another teacher does tae kwon do and stage combat, all sorts of different things like that. And so being not skilled in anything like that, I've taught a ghost stories class for like, I think the last five or six years I've done this. It started out as just scary stories in general. And it sort of evolved into-- There were so many good ghost stories, I just narrowed it down to that. And we do a lot of fiction, mostly short fiction. We do old time radio broadcasts, we do podcasts, we watch some films, pretty much any media you can imagine. Songs. We explore just how ghosts work in different cultures. And I'm especially intrigued when ghosts can be a symbol for something else, from something in the past that is haunting you or something in your history or someone who's gone but you don't want them to be gone. Those things are really intriguing to me. And so I really get a kick out of it. Plus, I think a lot of the classic ghost stories that I take for granted as being really important, a lot of my students never experienced, and so yeah, it's good to introduce them and have them watch The Sixth Sense for the first time and things like that.
Jennie: Can I come be in your class?
Hannah: Right? I want to be part of this. No, that's really cool. I know you're also an aspiring novelist. How has teaching others how to read and write informed your own work?
Shem: Well, I hope it has. That's my insecurity is that, well, you understand what makes all these brilliant writers brilliant. But it's one thing to understand and another thing to execute it. But just the the bulk of literature I'm able to consume-- I'm a really strong believer in you read what you write. And if you read flimsy, predictable, boring stuff, that's probably what your writing will come out to be. Not that anyone should ever feel ashamed or embarrassed to read whenever they feel like reading, but because I read so many amazing authors it really inspires me to create something at least approaching to reach that, something vaguely resembling their work.
Jennie: Yeah, totally agree.
Hannah: Has there been anything, a book or a genre or an author, that you've wanted to be able to bring in your classroom but haven't been able to for whatever, logistics or not quite appropriate for their developmental level or whatever? Is there anything that you're just like still aching to teach, but you know you can't?
Shem: There is an ever going ongoing struggle with I really want to teach this but because they are high school, or some kids are junior high students, it's just not on their maturity level. I am sometimes able to sneak little bits in, especially with these elective classes, but I just read last year, Octavia Butler's "Kindred," which is about time travel, but also slavery. It's brilliant, but it's also horrifying.
Jennie: Yeah, really heavy material, sounds like.
Shem: And so I wanted to bring some of it into the other elective class I teach, which is time travel. And we decided, me and the administrative decided, well, most of this is is much too graphic to teach, especially because these classes anyone can take, it's not just my 11th and 12th graders, but we did include just the first chapter of it. And that was very gratifying for me. I'm working my way through David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest." Me and some staff members had a little book club going and I think maybe they've sort of tapped out but I'm still going strong. And I keep reaching points where it's like, "Wow, this would be so good to teach rhetoric in my AP language class if he didn't say the F word nine times in a paragraph." But, yeah, I'm always struggling because on the one hand, they are brilliant, mature people, more so than we give them credit for, but they are still 17 and you don't want to ruin their lives too early.
Hannah: No, I completely feel that. I taught middle school theater and there was so much that is like, I wish that I could bring this but I know they're not ready for it yet. Oh, it's so difficult. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing a little bit about your your unique experience with this. I'm really excited to dive into our story. So as a reminder, our story is, "In the Rural South, a bounty hunter struggles to partner with a young woman." Where do you want to start?
Shem: I would say the story starts with something like, "Cynthia pushed her thick glasses up further on the bridge of her nose, wiped the sweat off of her forehead as she sipped her store brand cream soda, and waited for the bus." And I imagine the the young woman in our story to be a very bookish and athletically challenged, maybe middle school, girl and the bounty hunter to be an excessively macho, perhaps with tribal tattoos, swaggering around, but perhaps Cynthia is his only contact to track down his mark.
Hannah: Okay so we have we have a need for them to be together. Is the struggle primarily borne out of their different personalities? Borne out of the fact that she has a child still? Borne out of the fact that he just is a loner and wants to do this on his own and doesn't want to have to depend on anybody else? A combination of all three? Something else?
Shem: I think the struggle is going to arise from the fact first of all that he is a loner and sees himself as a very tough and capable and dangerous person. I think if I were writing the story-- I guess I am writing the story.
Hannah: We are, we are.
Shem: I would say that Cynthia is excessively polite and accommodating and doesn't seem fazed by, first of all, by his threatening persona, but also seems much more competent at everything he thinks he's good at than he is.
Jennie: Ooh, I like it.
Hannah: And she just keeps showing him up on stuff. Oh, I like that dynamic.
Jennie: But like not even in a pretentious way just like "Oh, that's how I do it."
Shem: "Isn't the murder weapon probably under the seat of the car?" Like, "Wait, no, I looked under there." "Well, look again," and it's there.
Jennie: I like Cynthia.
Hannah: I do too, I do too. Does she know exactly what the bounty hunter is after? Like, how much is he sharing with her?
Jennie: How much is he allowed to share with her?
Hannah: How much does she find out anyway?
Shem: Maybe we say bounty hunter is looking for Cynthia's uncle Dave.
Hannah: Okay. Yeah, a family member, I think.
Shem: Who has skipped his parole. And so he's been hired to track him down.
Jennie: Oh, does Cynthia like uncle Dave? Maybe she doesn't want him to get caught.
Hannah: Oh, undermining along the way.
Shem: Maybe. I think there's two ways to go, where either Cynthia takes down Uncle Dave because she's in different and Uncle Dave's entire smuggling ring, whatever, he's done. Or maybe our big twist at the end is that Cynthia knew about this all along and sets up bounty hunter guy to meet some sort of untimely demise and rescue Uncle Dave, and maybe Cynthia's like, "You owe me now, Dave." Cynthia is the most diabolical of them all.
Hannah: If she's still a middle schooler, her parents are absent here. And so trying to figure out why the bounty hunter goes after her... Maybe she and Uncle Dave are really close. And she's the only one who's had contact with him. And so he comes to their house, he checks in on them, Mom and Dad are both like, "No, we haven't heard from him, we have no idea." And then he like sees a text on her phone or something or hears her say something and realizes that she knows where he is or she knows at least where he has been. And so trying to find a way to to explain the fact that she is there without-- that her parents are absent. She's essentially just like off on this adventure to protect her uncle with a lot more autonomy than probably a middle schooler would get. Which is you know, obviously every YA story is finding a way to give teenagers and young people their autonomy to be able to make decisions and do things without somebody reaching over them.
Jennie: Right, and that's the feeling I'm getting about her here is that you're on the outside she's bookish and quiet and unassuming or whatever but she's obviously got skills somewhere to have that kind of self confidence and motivation to just do things for herself and like, "I'm gonna save Uncle Dave and I'm gonna get in this bounty hunter's car." Does he have a car or a motorcycle? He probably has a motorcycle.
Shem: I'd probably say, yeah, I guess a motorcycle would fit. That would increase the amount of irony if he cheats on some killer hog. I imagine our introduction-- We need a name for the bounty hunter, I guess.
Hannah: We do.
Jennie: Ernie.
Shem: I feel like a bounty hunter would be teased if his name was Ernie.
Jennie: Well, that's what makes him so tough.
Shem: Maybe so.
Hannah: It also occurred to me when we were setting it up for why he-- Like he partners with her and he decides that they're going to work together on this. But it also occurred to me, we're giving her this amazing sense of autonomy and control over the situation. Maybe she's the one who puts them together in the first place. Maybe she realizes that he is on the right track and she deliberately links up with him to throw him off. Maybe she's smart enough that she like accidentally lets something drop that makes him think she's got something but she's pulling the strings the whole time.
Shem: That's a really good little key in there. I think, I imagine, now that I've thought about it for a few minutes the first end of the story is that Cynthia saves Uncle Dave from Ernie, and then the second twist is that Cynthia turns Uncle Dave in and takes the bounty for herself and becomes the youngest bounty hunter in Savannah or wherever we are.
Hannah: It depends on on how devious this character gets.
Shem: Yeah. And I like the idea that she perhaps could be orchestrating the whole thing from the beginning. I'm not a huge Stephen King reader, I've only read a few of the short stories, but one of my favorite short stories by him is called Poppy, I think. Have either of you ever--
Hannah: I don't think I've read that one.
Shem: So Poppy is the story of this kidnapper guy. This kidnapper steals this little kid from a mall with insidious intent, to ransom this kid or do something terrible to him. And so for the first maybe three quarters of the story, you're just horrified at what this person is doing and horrified for the safety of this child. As the story progresses, the kid keeps saying, "Well, my poppy is going to come and get you and then you'll be sorry." And it becomes basically clear that this is not a normal child. And at the end of the story we realize the child is a vampire and "Poppy" is a grown vampire. And now you are very much afraid for the bad guy because he's very much going to come to a bad end.
Hannah: I'm actually going to pause for a second and share the title of this, because as we're looking for a name for our bounty hunter, this might be it. The randomly generated title is Bloody Harold.
Shem: Bloody Harold.
Hannah: Which could just be his name. Like he sounds a little bit like a pirate but--
Jennie: "My name is Bloody Harold."
Shem: Why don't we say his name is Harold Blood, but he's known in his circles as Bloody Harold.
Hannah: Yeah. Harold Blood is a great name too. That's fantastic.
Jennie: That's definitely a bounty hunter name.
Hannah: So Bloody Harold is our bounty hunter. And that's really nice, we don't need to do any more work for the title than that because that's right there. That is the easiest we've ever had with that.
Jennie: Seriously.
Hannah: So yeah, we have this-- Which is interesting though because he's the title character but she's clearly-- How obvious is it early on that she's the one in control of the situation? Is this like the Stephen King novel or short story where it doesn't become obvious until halfway through? Until the very end? Clearly he is our central character for much of it.
Shem: I love a good gotcha twist ending. So I think the story on its surface appears very edgy and maybe even a little bit noir. He seems to be like-- Where we're talking about maybe his internal monologue-- Maybe the whole story is written from his perspective. When you were talking earlier about how was it that they become connected, I would imagine-- Maybe the thing about her sipping the soda at the bus stop we put off for later. But maybe he has spoken to her parents who are of no help. Now they've gone away to Atlantic City or something. And so he's taken this opportune moment to break into the house and the only open window was her bedroom, which maybe later on we can reveal was by design. When he gets into the bedroom, he sees a movie stub, ticket stub for a movie, which is one of the last places that Uncle Dave was seen at, and we now can determine that Uncle Dave took Cynthia to the movies and so she might be our lead.
Jennie: Okay. Here's my question, though, and it's an important question, what is Cynthia's motivation? If she's not saving Uncle Dave but if she's turning him in for the bounty, what does she need that money for?
Hannah: Maybe this is a situation where she's got a-- Middle schoolers have incredibly intense and rigid moral codes at times. So maybe it's a matter of that Uncle Dave did a thing he shouldn't have done and should face the consequences for it, and the bounty hunter also should not get any reward. Maybe he does something that she disagrees with along the way. So maybe it's a matter of that she feels like she's putting the world to right by putting people where they belong, and if she gets a monetary reward along the way, so be it.
Jennie: She sounds a little psychopathic.
Hannah: She's learning how to generate ethics. Maybe they're a little bit warped at the moment.`
Jennie: I have two theories. The first one is like the typical, oh, somebody in her family is like dying of cancer, and she needs it for the medical bills and whatever, which makes her you know, like very clever or altruistic. And then my second theory will only make sense to those of you who have seen the previous episode. I think she's raising the money and is going to give it to The Daughter.
Hannah: Okay, which, as we've established in our previous episode is a giant worldwide crime organization of teenagers. Maybe. Yeah, I definitely don't see her as being out for the money, but maybe she is. Maybe that's a piece of it.
Shem: My first impression was we create some humor in that the whole time she's scamming these two dangerous adults she just wants some like limited edition Polly Pocket set or something. When you were talking earlier about motivation-- I feel like we start the story with some really gritty self-important monologue from-- we said Harold?
Hannah: Harold, yes.
Shem: Talking about how "evil can't escape me and I'm the law," and then we end the story with her giving a similar monologue that "I am the law, and even Bloody Harold thought no one knew about his double dealings, but justice has been served, they cannot escape my all-vigilant gaze" or something like that.
Jennie: Okay, I want to read this. I want to read it now.
Hannah: Just coming around to the idea that-- Again, you're looking at universality, the universal like desire to be in control and to be the one making the decisions, and we see it in this in this kid as well as in this bounty hunter, manifesting in different ways.
Shem: In fact I would say maybe it starts with Harold crushing a beer can and throwing it away as he delivers his little internal monologue, and we end with her like crushing a Capri Sun bag or something and throwing it away.
Hannah: I love this sort of dark ironic comedy. Oh, I like this a lot. We are right about at time for discussing the plot specifically. Are there any pieces that you think that we're really missing? Do we need to get into depth about why it's in the rural South? Or is that not as essential to the heart of it?
Shem: I think-- I mean, obviously because that was the prompt we were given, but I think just so we can amplify the gun-toting sort of backwoods element that we get in like a Coen Brothers film or something.
Hannah: It's setting the atmosphere.
Shem: Maybe we could even introduce a racial element possibly where maybe Cynthia's black and Harold is white and say he expresses some less than open-minded views, and so it's maybe more gratifying when she gives him his comeuppance. That's a possible element. Maybe it's not necessary, I don't know.
Hannah: Yeah. But I think there's definitely a lot that you could explore in the dynamics between these two to set it up to be extremely satisfying when she does get this.
Jennie: And don't forget about Uncle Dave. Like, What is his history? What did he do to get a bounty hunter after him? What's his relationship with his family? And does he already have a history with Harold?
Hannah: Yeah, so I think we are at this point going to take what we've pulled out of those, which is really fascinating, and go ahead and turn it over to our listeners to fill in the gaps.
Shem: Terrific.
Hannah: All right. So as we close out, let's go ahead and we'll each take a second and we'll share a story that we think our listeners should check out. I think this time I'm going to share a book series that I first read when I was in high school. It's called the Otherland series. It's by Tad Williams. It's a giant series. Well, it's not so many books, but every book is like 800 pages. It's this long, sprawling sci-fi, vaguely fantasy, epic about a virtual world a little bit further in the future from now. And it follows all these different characters who end up, for various reasons, end up stuck in the virtual world. And because it's set in this virtual space, the characters move from virtual creation to virtual creation, and so there's this variety of worlds within it, some of which are based on actual fictional places. Like there's one that's entirely inspired by the Wizard of Oz, that somebody got into this virtual system and decided to make a Wizard of Oz world. And so it's kind of exploring all the different ways that-- I find it fascinating to see all the different possible places that they could go with it. And the characters are really, really interesting. I just reread it about a year ago, the entire series, and loved it just as much now as I did then, so I definitely recommend that, the Otherland book series by Tad Williams. I'm going to toss it over to Jennie. What would you like to recommend this week?
Jennie: Well, I just learned the other week that there are grown people in this world who have not actually seen The Princess Bride. So if you're like everybody and have seen The Princess Bride, go watch it again. But Google "Yubi Princess Bride," that's Y-U-B-I, Yubi, to find this person's Twitter thread live tweeting their discovery of this classic, iconic, beloved, intrinsic-to-our-culture movie. And if you haven't seen the movie, you got homework. The book is fantastic also. It's fantastic in a different way than the movie is.
Hannah: Alright, Shem. What would you like to share?
Shem: Well, it's really tricky for me to pick just one, but the one that came to my mind first is Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Ted Chiang is a science fiction writer who's getting a lot of attention right now. And I think the titular story, it's called Story of Your Life, might be the best science fiction story I've ever read in all my literates days. I haven't seen the film Arrival, but it is the story on which that film was based. Although my understanding is the director of the film takes the story in a different direction in a very also artistically meaningful way, but not how the story plays out. But Chiang has this gift of writing these stories that feel realistically scientific. Almost everything, it seems very hard science, not inaccessible, but it seems like he must have had a degree in whatever this field of study was to write this story. And then he'll take it in some just slightly interesting science fiction sort of direction that just makes these really fascinating, really intriguing, really human stories that I just couldn't get enough of. So Stories of Your Life and Others is the collection. The individual story is called Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. And it's just spectacular.
Hannah: Fantastic. We don't get enough folks plugging short story collections. And so I'm glad that you did. All right. Before we take off, is there anything you want to plug for yourself Shem any social media or blogs or works that you'd like to share with our listeners?
Shem: Not for me personally, but I would actually, maybe there is I started a tradition just for myself and my friends a few years ago that I called book brag. And all it is is keeping track of all the books you read in a year. And then at New Years, when everybody is talking about their resolutions and their favorite albums of the year. I just put up my list and it becomes a really great discussion for things that I would like to read when I read other people's lists and People can say, Oh, I read that. And I loved it too. And so you can make connections with people. And I think it's just one more way to celebrate reading and create a community around reading, which I think is terrific.
Hannah: Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. We had an awesome time and ended up with something really, really fascinating. And I hope we get somebody sending us in something based off of this.
Shem: Well, I might just have to write this myself as well.
Hannah: Yeah. We had one of our one of our previous guests write out a chapter of the story that he guested on. So go for it. If you do, we will-- Anybody who sends anything into us, we will read a little bit on the podcast, if you'll let us and put up put some of it up on our podcast blog if that's okay. We'd love to continue showing people where these stories get taken, especially if they go in a very different direction than where we started. Well, that's our episode. As a reminder, you can find us every other Thursday wherever you get your podcasts.
Jennie: Follow us on Twitter @writethispod and if you've been inspired by this episode and have questions or comments or a script or anything else, email us at somebodywritethis@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Hannah: And we'll be back with one more episode in two weeks. See you then.
Jennie: And as they say, if the sun shines it will be warm.
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