Now that I’ve assumed the persona of Jake Barter, my whole life has changed. Jake Barter is no ordinary man. At the very least he has the training of a double nought secret agent and the social connections of Bruce Wayne. His resume is a combination of special forces operator and philosopher king. And because of this I told Camera Girl that she needed to treat me with much greater respect and an almost religious awe.
I don’t think she “gets it” yet. You know what they say about a prophet in his own country. Well, that goes double for a pseudonymous author. I think I may now begin to write the memoirs of Jake Barter in my spare time. I think he will be a picaresque character who gets involved in serious situations like wars, revolutions and social movements and ends up causing things to go south in horribly predictable ways based on his sloth, greed and phenomenal incompetence. His only redeeming qualities are monumental overconfidence, enormous likeability and unbelievable luck. I’m thinking I’ll start him off as a special advisor to Trump on constitutional law and then take it from there.
But seriously, I am thinking about new characters for future stories and I think the next thing I do will have a strong humorous streak in it. And this is because I do enjoy making fun of things I don’t like and combining that with a writing project should make it a lot of fun for me. But what I must do is decide if it will be in the same “universe” as “The Sniper.” So far there isn’t a lot of humor there and maybe it would be better to separate a new project from a place with so much trauma lurking around every turn. And that’s fine. Making up multiple fictional worlds allows the author to escape from any traps he’s gotten himself into in the old ones. You can get tired of a scenario or you just need a break from figuring out how to keep your characters from either getting killed or solving all their problems. After all, either of those paths ends the story. So, you have to be constantly threading the needle to maintain the overall “problem” but still carve out a piece of plotline to make the present installment interesting.
I think I might want to do an extraterrestrial story. I’ve played around with some short story / novella length things in the past but they just petered out. I think this time I’ll try to storyboard a whole bunch of stuff first so I have a direction and enough plot lines and an overarching direction for the thing before I get really started. And what is currently completely stymying me is deciding what kind of Earth this will be. Will it be like the actual current day disaster we are living through or will it be some kind of “day after tomorrow” where we’ve gotten our act together and learned how to live like human beings. Well, I’ll let Jake Barter work on that for a while.