Preliminary Remarks (edited)

Preliminary remarks.

Don’t expect stylistic pyrotechnics here: the point of this exercise was to re-draft various synopsis I produced back at the end of the nineties (twentieth century). The style is supposed to be as descriptive as possible. The stories are supposed to progress from scene to scene, main ideas by main ideas, with no step-back reflections or extra-diegetic references. The sentences will therefore be flat. Indicative. As straightforward as possible. Their syntax has been simplified.

Events are meant to propel the stories forwards. I have therefore tried to stick to the action (or actions) described as closely as possible, taking on the point of view of the audience: what is presented is what happens, chronologically.

This doesn’t mean that the following works are one-dimentional (i.e. strictly narrative). All the stories are supplemented by post-script sections that suggest possible interpretations, cast light on references, suggest thematic variations, fantasize about casting, indicate possible soundtrack and so on. 
The reason why these contextualising appendices appear after the stories is that I don’t want to influence the reader’s apprehension of the plot. The reader ought to be allowed to make up his / her own mind about the factual story per se ...and chances are that these interpretations may dramatically differ from my original intentions.

This is perfectly fine. Once a piece of work is out in the open, it takes on a life of its own and pretty much becomes its audience’s understanding. (Up to a point of course: complete misunderstanding and bad faith from a bigoted audience must not be condoned.) The audience will logically engage with these writings according to its parameters of reference. A feminist will not mentally process them the same way a religious fanatic will, or a philosopher, or a Sun reader.

On the other hand (and if I have done my work cunningly enough), the reader’s general feeling may very well end up corresponding to the (author’s) original intentions. It may well be that your reactions will find vindication in the “explanations” offered afterwards. Vocabulary is always important, and if I decide to use –for example- the term “freedom fighter” instead of “terrorist”, this is not innocent. I am clearly sending a signal here –namely, that this character’s struggle is somehow justified rather than violently tribal- that will shape receptive minds’ understanding of the text.   

Talking of details... 
It is a bit of a cliché to claim that there is no such thing as a detail. ...But we all know that, by definition, clichés are extrapolated from a modicum of truth.

Sometime a whole story can be inspired by one detail. Sometime all it takes is a simple line, a mere situation (no matter how brief it is), or even a fleeting feeling. It stirs you, it inspires you, it sets something in motion. For example –not that I will reveal which story is concerned here, ha ha-, you will find a synopsis inspired by a segment of the first “Scream” movie. Length of that segment? No more than 20-to-30 seconds at the most. A-ha, I hear you wonder... and which scene is that, then? This I am prepared to answer; just pull up your chair and gather close.

Well, if there is one moment in the Wes Craven film that physically grabbed me, it is the one (about fifteen minutes into the movie) when our wonderful Neve / Sydne (I prefer this spelling OK!) falls asleep in her isolated house surrounded by trees. She takes a nap in the sunny tranquil afternoon and when she wakes up, it is night-time. Shivering, she closes the window and locks the door (...if I remember correctly). Now that spoke to me. Coming from the countryside where I inhabited a fairly isolated villa, I could relate to this seemingly hardly existent feeling of possible danger, this vulnerability. I found it genuinely unsettling. (Then your man piles up on the ketchup splatter, chases up and down staircases and demented laughter, blah blah blah, and my receptors switch off.)  Fast-forward a couple of years and a whole story is born. ...I just hope that Mr. Craven won’t sue me for plagiarism though.

On (a rare) occasion, you may also see different versions of a story, with the second one possibly incorporating dialogue. If this is the case, the first version featured will be the latest, re-edited, more complete one. The second will give an indication of early premises, possible variations, angles of development...

On an autobiographical note, I have always been a writer. In fact, I remember coming up with a sci-fi story, complete with drawings, for my father’s birthday when I must have been around eight. It was about two competing space-rockets engaged in reaching a planet that could have been the Moon and then returning to Earth, one got damaged for some reason (alien attack maybe?) and started leaking oxygen, and the American pilot offered shelter to his Soviet rival (it may have been the other way round). Everybody survives, hurrah! Peace and cooperation, man. Anyway. One of the most developed stories you will come across down below (should you wish to progress beyond this –admittedly- masterful introduction) stems from an idea I came up with at a very early age (12?) and carried for a number of decades. I have always wondered how come nobody else seems to have thought of it, it seems so... obvious to me, so simple –and therefore so powerful. Remember: the simplest concepts are always the most influential ones.

I'll be honest, clever titles are not my forte, and so I hesitated between various ones to embellish it ...before I came to my senses and decided that the most straightforward had to be the “best”. This is how I eventually called the story “The War Against The Shadows”. Or “The Rise Of The Shadows”. Or –you see? I am still not satisfied!    

Most of the stories have been reconstructed from various drafts; but for exceptional cases, the plots are complete.

It may happen, nevertheless, that I haven’t been able to trace back all complete versions ...and I will squarely lay the blame at that nice Mr. Murdoch’s feet. Let me explain why. Back in the days when I first got “onto the Web”, I signed up with AOL. That would have been around 1997 or so. I chose the biggest brand so as to maximise my “surfing” abilities and posting opportunities. AOL provided its suscribers with free publishing space, which allowed me to upload my stories among other projects (I maintained a highly detailed “Film Incoherences” website for many years, for example). Sadly, after the catastrophic fusion of AOL with Murdoch’s empire, this complimentary space got taken down. We suscribers received a notice telling us to make copies of our stuff or else lose it. I therefore set about making copies / back-ups ...but have lost track of what ended up where -remember that we are talking about PC / floppy disks / recordable CDs days. I like to think that these back-ups still exist ... somewhere ... in my archives. But I don’t have access to them anymore.

One day maybe, should there be sufficient interest in the matter and should I have plenty of available time on my hands, I suppose I could try to wade through my masses of accumulated mementoes and attempt to locate the missing, more complete versions ...I wouldn’t hold my breath though. 

What you will find here are the (summer of 2015) redrafted, developed versions of stories usually dating back to the 1996-to-2006 period. The world has obviously dramatically evolved since, and the stories’ references are bound to be dated, irrelevant, if not obsolete. Hopelessly so? I don’t think this has to be the case. Just because rich Westerners did not walk around with “smart-phones” glued to their ears or were hooked 24/7 to s’lebs worshipping soshalmedia networks in those days does not diminish the quality of their lives. You wouldn’t blame Hamlet for not peppering his speeches with the likes of “PM me yeah, does wot it say’s on the tin, should have gone to Sp*cssavers, lol” would you?

 ...But it introduces a different set of rules. In different times, people and characters behave differently, they have different references.

Now you would be much mistaken in considering this a banal remark. This matters greatly. Why? Because the discrepancy (between the original setting of the stories and the timing of their belated presentation) throws up all sorts of questions. One of them being revisionism (re-writing historical perception through the prism of current thinking), another one being naivety as opposed to prescience (knowing what we know now, it would be easy to look down on the characters’ reaction). In fact the latest remark comes under the remit of what is called “dramatic irony”.

After careful consideration, I was reminded of Robbe-Grillet’s preface to “un Régicide”. In this preface, your man recounts how he originally started to re-edit his first effort (years later after it got turned down by publishers) before realising that this would mean re-writing it pretty much entirely. 
Similarly, I resisted the temptation of updating these (my) stories with recent technological innovations. Meaning: the characters won’t take to Facebook or Twitter at the first sight of trouble; instead, they may actually write letters (gasp).