This is the 15th in a deep-dive series on the stories in Rick’s newest book, Random Precision. The following blog includes spoilers.
 
“Ghostwriter” is me throwing in the towel.
 
What does that mean? It means that “Ghostwriter” resulted from a long, painful effort to write a novel to follow Radiance. Actually, its history is more colorful than that.
 
Years ago, a film producer I know asked me to write a script for his next project. I penned the story of a woman, Nessa Trent, who is found in an alley, beaten and horribly burned. Eventually she recovers but has no memory of her past. Meanwhile, shadowy assassins keep trying to kill her. Eventually Nessa partners with an experimental physicist, and they discover Nessa is a time traveler from the past who is caught up in a plot from the future to wipe the Christian church from history.
 
I loved the premise of the story. Loved the beginning, loved its ending. But the middle simply wasn’t interesting. The more I worked at it, the more ho-hum it became. Just filler. Not enough there to make it riveting. After the filmmaker turned it down, I tried to make it into a novel. Same problem.
 
Finally, around the time I started thinking about Random Precision, I decided to skip the boring middle and keep the parts I found interesting. This, of course, changed the tale dramatically. Now Nessa and her partner are the same person. She doesn’t travel in time herself, and amnesia doesn’t show up at all. But the Parabolani do—or one of them does, anyway. And the ending twist is even bigger than the one I originally wrote, though perhaps unsettling for some readers.
 
If I’m right, we’re living in an alternate timeline right now. And yet it doesn’t matter. The past readjusted itself so the outcome was (virtually) identical. How exciting to learn that a recent scientific study lends credence to the idea!
 
I was sad to let go of Nessa’s original story. But this one ought to leave you just as satisfied. Or just as terrified.

This is the 14th in a deep-dive series on the stories in Rick’s newest book, Random Precision. The following blog includes spoilers.
 
My son recently told me he thought “Telephone Tag” would make a great episode of The Twilight Zone. While I appreciate his kind words, I’m not sure how it would work. The entire story is an exchange of voicemail messages in which one person is living a single day in the future, progressively terrifying the career-obsessed Stella Caine.
 
You could do it with actors living out moments of the messages, instead of 30 minutes of voiceovers. But I think it loses something that way.
 
Anyway, what prompted “Telephone Tag” was a particularly tough period in my corporate life, when I was wondering where this was going—and wondering why I didn’t care about climbing the corporate ladder like others did. Writing this story didn’t really give me any insights. But it did remind me of that Bible passage where a successful landowner has such a rich harvest that he builds new barns to hold it all, then leans back to prepare for a comfortable future focused entirely on himself. Instead, he dies before he gets to enjoy any of his reward.
 
It’s certainly not a fate I would wish on anyone, but it does happen. The important thing to remember is to live in the moment, enjoy life as it happens, and to have compassion for those around you. Caine didn’t—but her business machinations didn’t matter in the end.

This is the 13th in a deep-dive series on the stories in Rick’s newest book, Random Precision. The following blog includes spoilers.
 
This story started with its title. That, and the thought that a short story collection called Random Precision ought to have a story so named.
 
“Random Precision” was slightly inspired by a 1989 film, Millennium. Rather than repopulating the distant future, my about-to-die time travelers are drafted as workers just a few decades down the line. In exchange for their services, they’re granted a three-year, comfortable reprieve—after which they must be returned to the moment of death. They can, of course, choose whether to take the three-year offer or be returned to face death immediately. No surprise, nearly all take the offer.
 
The real motivation for this story is the human obsession with avoiding death. We all face it at some point, but we also do our utmost to dodge it, sometimes at the cost of others. “Random Precision” is a metaphor for the American health care system—if you’re rich enough and wily enough, you get the best care. If you’re not, illness and death are much nearer.
 
But what’s the point of gaining a longer life at the expense of someone else, only to lose your own in the end?
 
Lorelai cheats the system for a few years, but in the end she still faces … well, the end. And not just any end, but perhaps the most horrifying in modern times.
 
“Random Precision” is a line from the song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” by Pink Floyd. The song was about former bandmate Syd Barrett, who suffered mental illness. The story goes that the day Pink Floyd recorded that song, Barrett showed up at the studio—so out of shape, with his hair and eyebrows shaved, that no one recognized him for a long time.
 
That said, I think the line also works with my story: Well you wore out your welcome with random precision/Rode on the steel breeze/Come on you raver, you seer of visions/Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine.

*  *  *  *
[Note: The music and lyrics for “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” were created by David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Roger Waters for the 1975 album Wish You Were Here, produced by Pink Floyd and owned by Pink Floyd Music Ltd.]

This is the 12th in a deep-dive series on the stories in Rick’s newest book, Random Precision. The following blog includes spoilers.
 
“Pièce de Résistance” may be the most deceitful story I’ve ever written.
 
Allow me to explain. I’m an epically finicky eater. It’s a lifelong issue, one that, thankfully, hasn’t caused any health issues so far. For example, I hate vegetables. All of them. The tastes, the smells, the textures. Rarely I’ll pick at a salad. I dislike nuts, eschew nearly all fruits and most seafood. (I recently learned this is an actual condition akin to a sensory disorder.)
 
So, knowing all this … how was I able to describe the tastes and textures of the foods in this story if I never tried them?
 
The answer is, a lot of online research. I perused cooking and baking websites, looking for descriptions of the smells and flavors. At times I swapped out food choices that I thought might send the messages that the Breadbreakers or President Grimes intended because I couldn’t be sure if I truly understood what a dish tasted like.
 
My closest friends, when they read this story, would ask, “You didn’t actually try all those foods, did you?” I always owned up.
 
President Grimes isn’t modeled on any particular POTUS, though I’ve got a couple in mind. He mostly reflects that common human desire to leave a legacy—a desire that drives some people to do the most outrageous things.
 
In case you missed it, “talking on the big white telephone” is a euphemism for vomiting into a commode. I thought it was a funny, if gross, way to start the story. For the record, I actually did try calamari once—but it was deep fried. Even so, I’m not a fan.
 
This story won a Science Fiction Writers of Christianity short story contest. Given my earlier observation that this is my most deceitful story, I’m amused by this.

This is the 11th in a deep-dive series on the stories in Rick’s newest book, Random Precision. The following blog includes spoilers.
 
Is it possible to start writing a story, put it aside for a bit, and then mostly forget you wrote it in the first place? If this tale is any indication, the answer is “yes.”
 
As far as I recall, “The Good Person” had no particular inspiration. I vaguely remember starting it, but I don’t recall why or even when. I do know what I wanted to say: When we convince ourselves that we’re “essentially good,” we tend to hand-wave away the ugly truths, the dark secrets, that every person has. We shouldn’t dwell on the ugliness, but we ought to face it and deal with it.
 
Somewhere along the line I started to tell this story, grew disinterested, and put it aside—until I started perusing my stories for Random Precision. I stumbled across this one, read what I’d abandoned, and was drawn back to it. What if the dark side of ourselves challenged the “good” side overtly? What if we came to realize, as Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor opined, “life is a pile of good things and bad things,” and we need to face them both to fully understand who we are.
 
“The Good Person” takes a beat from “The Enemy Within,” an episode of the original Star Trek. A transporter accident splits Captain Kirk into good and evil versions, and they both learn that they cannot exist apart. Admittedly, that probably doesn’t reflect a Christian view—Christianity is about being redeemed from the darkness. But what I do think tracks with the faith is the idea that one must recognize, confess and deal with it.
 
This story asks some hard questions of the reader. Maybe too hard. Maybe that’s why my early memories of this story are hazy—perhaps deliberately so.