Writer's Blog?

You know, I can't help but feel that this blog has strayed somewhat from its original intent of late. Not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily. Evolution is all part of the creative process, but it is that 'creative' bit which I feel I've been neglecting recently. I'd always hoped that I could give some insight into the creative processes behind the stories published over at The Sleaze, so I'm going to witter on for a bit about how difficult writing them can be! I'm currently struggling with the task of coming up with the sixth and last story for 'Issue 41'. Don't misunderstand me, I've got plenty of ideas, but most of them just don't feel right for this story - some aren't sufficiently developed, some rely on topicality and won't really be relevant until later in the year and some simply don't want to be written yet. However, I've been harbouring a vague story idea for this slot for some time now, based around the conspiracy theory that Clinton is actually a very sophisticated robot. The trouble is, that in itself is a bit thin, it is difficult to see where it can go in satirical terms, beyond a few tried and tested knob jokes.

The secret of a halfway decent story, I always find, lies in finding the right angle of approach. Here, the obvious question would be just why anyone would build a robot that became Bill Clinton. Unfortunately, my inspiration failed me again and I quickly realised this approach was a dead end. However, when thinking of Clinton, one's thoughts tend to quickly move to the subject of pornography (well, mine do) and his fabled White House porn stash, with which he whiled away many an afternoon (allegedly). Now, this turned out to be a more fruitful angle, immediately throwing up the question: why would a robot be so interested in pornography? The answer was obvious - this was a robot fuelled by porn! He had to plug his penis into the internet to download new supplies at regular intervals. At last, the story seemed to be getting somewhere. Nevertheless, another question now posed itself - where would such porn-fuelling technology be derived from? There could be only one answer - aliens. But again, the big WHY raised its ugly head: why would anyone (alien or human) build a porn-powered robot and have it elected President of the United States?

The solution to this conundrum came from an unexpected source. For a while I'd been toying with the idea of a story inspired by that British geek who is being prosecuted in the US for hacking into their military's and NASA's IT systems. One of the defences he's tried making is that he was seeking proof of US knowledge of alien contact. Recently, he's even claimed that he did come across some images of alien spaceships (but somehow neglected to either download or print them). I had some vague idea of a similar hacker discovering something like the secret homemade porno films of the Presidents stored on the White House IT system. A bit thin, but it had possibilities. Anyway, I recently came across this guy's latest version of why he was hacking into these systems: he was looking for evidence of the US developing alternative energy systems using alien technology. It all fell into place! The new energy source was porn power! This explained the rapid growth of the porn industry in a supposedly God fearing and moral country as the US - it was all part of the plan for cheap energy derived from sexual arousal! The Clinton-bot was developed both to prove the viability of the technology and to promote it via the White House. It was all a conspiracy on the part of the Military-Industrial complex, who'd cut a deal with aliens! One last question arose - what did they exchange for the porn power technology? The answer lay with an old story I'd never bothered archiving because I wasn't entirely happy with the way it had turned out: the aliens are intergalactic sex-perverts and the US government has agreed to let them abduct a certain number of humans every year for their bizarre sex games!

Finally, it all made sense (to me, at least). By combining two vague story ideas, I had eventually come up withe something concrete. So, having worked it all out here, I can at last get on with writing this bloody story. Hopefully it'll be finished and posted within the next week, or so. Hopefully this will also have given another (scary) insight into the tortured creative processes behind The Sleaze!