I talked to my friend the other day and he complained that I write faster than he can read. I can't help it. Once I get an idea I need to get it in words and get it out for people to read. And hence, there's another story in the pipeline. Starting today, Adams' Apples is ready for your reading pleasure.
Farce, satire, lampoon... Call it what you will. Back in January when I was sitting in a hotel in Tulsa waiting for my trailer to be repaired, I started going through my file of story notes. I needed something to write as I'd just finished Things I Never Told My Wife. I came across a very old concept. Back in the early 70s, my father-in-law (#1) gave me a very funny book and suggested I write a play based on it. I started work, but got bogged down in life and his daughter. My story note just said "Modernize Adam's Apple."
I couldn't remember the actual name of the book or the author, so I just sat down to start writing the story of a mass sterilization of all the men on earth except one. I remembered some names and some funny details. The cause in the original book was a nuclear power plant blowing up and destroying Mississippi, which no one cared about. But a new kind of radiation was released that sterilized all the men in the world except one who was a mile deep in a lead mine.
After giving that much of a lead-in, a reader wrote to tell me it sounded a lot like the book Mr. Adam by Pat Franks, published in 1946. I checked it out and indeed it was the book but by that time I'd already written over a third of it and was having a great time making up the weirdest crap I could about how the world would respond to a virus that sterilized all the men in the world except one who happened to be orbiting the earth doing satellite maintenance.
As I continued to write into March and April, I couldn't invent ridiculous responses to this virus that I didn't read about the next day in the news about CoVid-19. I kept getting more and more ridiculous and the news kept a step ahead of me. I tried to leave no group of people out of my lampoons--president (based on Stanley Kubrick's Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove), bureaucracy, the military, the press and media, religion, medicine, protesters, pro-life, congressional committees, Disney princesses, Homeland Security, domestic terrorists... If I missed anyone it was unintentional. But the result is now fully edited and ready for consumption. Hope you enjoy it. I'll post two chapters every three days.
Enjoy!