When last we chatted about writing, I was trying to finish the play “Stacks.” It’s now been finished, rewritten, and sent to a very good trusted reader. I got some fantastic notes from him and the next rewrite is imminent.

In the meantime, another idea that had wormed into my consciousness (months before Fake Preznit Drumpfuck was barfed onto our nation by droves of drooling right-wing morons) took hold. I imagined that a right-wing doomsday prepper nutcase is proven right, and just before the bombs fall, gets his family and the neighbor couple tucked safely into the underground bunker he built into his backyard.

It’s all downhill from there. 

I’m not sure what prompted the idea. I may have read a story about someone building a bunker. It may have been a location in the XBox One game Fallout 4 – a post-apocalyptic first person RPG that has eaten up too many writing hours. I know that it wasn’t Mango Mussolini’s penchant for dick-waving.

That’s just turned out to be a somewhat timely accident.

I love stories where people who really don’t belong together get stuck in a limited space where they cannot help but encounter each other in a significant and unavoidable way. These five people will be stuck in here for 6 to 8 weeks. The demand on me will be to be brave enough to let these people be as fucked-up as they seemed to me before I put them in a hole together.

And if it blows up and everybody dies, I need to show it.

I spent so much of my writing life making my characters be the very best people that I would hope to be in any tense situation.

That makes for really shitty drama. Perfect people aren’t interesting. They’re nauseating.

Imperfect people, however, are fucking awesome, and putting two or more of them together is like dropping  match in gun powder. It will be loud, painful, and disastrous, but it will be really fun to watch.

I hope.