NSE #9

Strange news I didn't use

As with any other week, I found several stories that don’t quite work for fiction, at least not in a way I found immediately apparent or appealing. In some instances, this was because the story repeated something I used in a past “Not Strangely Enough”, as in the case of this Lego trafficking ring in Oregon, a story reminiscent of one from NSE #5 involving a Washington toy store with hundreds of stolen Lego sets. 

In other cases, a story was weird but not quite eventful enough, as in the incident of this shirtless man grabbing a baby and attempting to breastfeed it, only to have the mother take it back from him and the cops arrest him. Or a story was weird but too disgusting for me, as in the case of this zoologist who is alleged to have been sexually abusing dogs.

And there are often stories each week that are weird, but are actually quite common. For instance, a man recently jumped into the Grand Canyon and, unsurprisingly, he died. Which would be an oddity, if not for this being an instance of someone practicing BASE jumping, i.e., a not uncommon occurrence of people jumping off of Buildings, Antennas, Spans, and Earth. Another seemingly uncommon event, a customer receiving a burger covered in human blood, is actually one I can attest to not being that rare: I’ve worked in many restaurants, and getting blood on a plate or packaging is not rare at all; it’s simply rare for the soiled plate or packaging to be given to a customer.

I couldn’t figure out how to use the above news stories, but I thought I’d share them for the fun of it—and to see if you would have an interest in trying your hand at what I try to do every "NSE". Do you think the above stories could be reshaped and recombined into something new and fictional? Did any of that give you an idea for a story? If so, would you like to see if I can write it for you? 

Let me know in the comments below, or e-mail me at NSE@chadfiction.com

The real news behind 
"Counter Gambit"

As the title suggests, I’ve taken this series of news stories, which are almost all incredibly bleak and disturbing, and I've tried to create a fictional counter to them. 

The first, and probably worst, involved two grandparents and an uncle torturing a young girl by routinely locking her in a room until, one day, she died from the heat. Following that story's focus on a disturbed family, I found the story of a police confronting and then arrested a raving woman, only to end up under heavy fire when confronting the rest of her family. One officer was held hostage, another was killed, and the entire family committed suicide. And, to make my week worse, I discovered the story of a poor mother accosted by the man who sexually assaulted her daughter--and who set the man on fire in retaliation. 

None of this news turned out well, even if some monsters are going to prison or are gone from this planet, but the events were so strange and dramatic that I knew I could do something with them. I just needed something more than destruction to add to the mix.

Ironically, I found it in a story about almost total destruction: an elderly couple's house was completely blown to pieces, with them in it--but they survived. Suddenly, the universe seemed more benevolent. I then found another repeat from NSE #5, wherein a dog set fire to a house, with this instance involving the dog chewing a battery rather than playing with a stove. A disaster, sure, but a somewhat amusing disaster. But how could these two tragedies with a hint of positivity inform my attempts to recreate the above monstrosities?

Enter a devilish little girl in Russia, who decided that, rather than outperform her competitor on the chess board, she chose to smear mercury on the chess set to poison her rival. And while this is a disturbing story, it got me thinking: what if the girl killed by her family had overcome them, had been able to rise to the challenge with something to counter them? I turned the sinister chess player into someone with resilience, and I began to reshape the other negative news around a more heroic, albeit damaged, sort of girl. One capable of a counter gambit in the face of these monsters.

The real news behind 
"A Hat in Crimson"

When I read the news of the first robot to perform a full dental procedure, I knew I had to use a robot in a story again. But I went bigger, to something more company-wide, as I didn’t want to focus so much on the robot but on how people may use them or abuse them. 

Which led me to find a way to incorporate the idea of a McDonald’s manager-in-training setting fire to his store because it was successful, i.e., it was too busy. Stress, money problems, drug issues—these are the common causes of such workplace destruction or self-destruction, but I thought I’d take it at face value: what if an employee wanted to hurt his employer because it was successful? And what if they were successful at making… robots?

But setting a little dumpster fire at a robotics facility wouldn’t disrupt things that much; I needed something more explosive. Luckily, I had read news of a man who was booby-trapping toilet seats with fireworks, injuring three people, and I realized I could reconfigure this into a form of sabotage, while also using it to inform the nature of the robotics company.

To wrap it all up, I needed some characters to put in the middle of all of this, and I found them in this couple who were scammed while using an app for renting private spaces, Swimply, a sort of AirBNB for pools. Unfortunately for the pair, their excursion at the pool was interrupted by police, guns duns drawn, as the owners of the property had not been the ones to list the pool on the app and had called 911 regarding the accidental intruders. 

This couple, and their situation, gave me the basic idea of the plot for this story, but I have to leave it at that, as saying much more might ruin the surprise. And if that works on you as a teaser, let me know in the comments below!

And make sure to come back Monday for the first pages of these two stories, "Counter Gambit" and "A Hat in Crimson".