These are the story notes that will go at the books end, thought some here might like to read 'em:
Story Notes
Stray Dog
Everyone places this after Ghost, because of chronology. But I wrote this one first, and it was my first attempt to write for an audience: a scary thing all by itself. That it concerned extremely personal events that were still raw to me at the time made it even scarier. Over the course of a few weeks I serialized it on the forum of anti-state.com. I kept waiting for people to laugh, or to lose interest. Neither happened. So I kept going.
Ghost
Of a piece with Stray Dog. Both of these essays were a sort of therapy to me: allowing me to chew up and spit out the anger and self-pity that was keeping me from concentrating on fiction or important -- to be honest -- non fiction.
Odd trivia: created quite a little flame war when a well meaning bridge-builder posted it on the left-anarchist site infoshop. Based only on a short segment where I praise the market as a civilizing force in even the most hellish of places, I was called a liar, a fake, a fraud, a poseur, etc. That it was a true, not at all fantastical story of an ordinary guy kidnapped and abused by the state over nothing didn't matter. I was a dirty capitalist and deserved it.
That taught me everything I needed to know about socialism.
micropiece
When I first discovered the world of 'free market anarchism' I nearly exploded. At last someone made sense!
I tackled Ludwig Von Mises' Human Action and discovered something I hadn't experienced in years: a brilliant and difficult text that actually challenged me. That it rewarded me at the same time was the clincher: this guy knew what the hell he was talking about.
I consider this to be my first 'mature' piece of writing. Inspired partly by Leonard Read's I, Pencil this was also my attempt to explain free market dynamics on an emotional, passionate level. To grab people by the balls rather than the brain, so to speak. It seems to have worked, because this remains my fastest spreading, most 'viral' piece of work. It popped up all over the place in the months following my posting. I got loads of mail from it.
It's probably the perfect explanation of my philosophy, warts and all. I love it.
Wake
I'll be blunt: I dig big chicks. Plain and simple. I wonder, all the time, if the stressed out - need pills - need therapy paradigm of the 'modern woman' is the direct result of so many women wandering around permanently hungry because they are attempting to force their bodies to be something they'll never be. Have you ever met a content hungry person? I haven't. Hilariously, I struck a nerve amongst the starve-myself-skinny crowd. One lady called me a 'monster' and said I was encouraging teenaged girls to have heart attacks. Umm. OK. Have a cheeseburger and chill, hon.
The Liberators
I received more flack from (L)ibertarians for this story than I did from conservatives. Liberals seemed to love it (for all the wrong reasons, of course: one person actually thought it was a freakin' pro-gun control parable! *shudder*), the conservatives mainly accepted it as food for thought, but interventionist (L)ibertarians took it for the slap in the face that it was meant to be. I know why -- I was using their own first principles against them to show why they were wrong. It flat out pissed them off. Good.
Years ago I saw this little snippet of video on the news. A young Iraqi girl, dancing with great joy on a Baghdad street while her grandfather played the accordian. I looked at that baby girl and could see no difference between her and my baby girl.
When the war cranked up she stayed close to my thoughts. A lady I spoke to often on the phone (met and started flirting on the 'net) was pro-war. I asked her, as a mother, how she could condone an invasion where the youngest of the population took the brunt of the horror. She told me her children were different from 'raghead' children. I slammed the phone down in disgust and never spoke to her again. I started writing the story that day. It was hard: I got so pissed off that I had to take breaks. Eventually took me a year to finish.
The only one of my stories extensively edited. She knows who she his, and has more thanks.
Lullaby
My most personal story. Utterly self explanatory. If you don't get it, I apologize. I can't explain it any better than it explains itself.
Roberta
Probably my best story on a technical level, and probably my favorite. All this despite the fact that only a specialized audience will get the fundamental gag (not to mention all the in-jokes!). That's why it's my best -- and my favorite. once I thought of the concept, I couldn't not write it.
I gotta thank my bro Carl Rose for it. One night we were goofing off in IM talking about the 'perfect libertarian story'.
'Gotta have Rand. And probably Heinlein.' I said.
'And Zeppelins.' Carl reminded me.
"Hells yeah." But the voice took notice, and wheels started turning.
Oddly enough I think this just might be the perfect libertarian story in a sense. While serializing it I averaged about about 30-75 emails per DAY, demanding more. "Dear god," I said. "I've invented libertarian crack."
On a more serious note, this takes micropiece and screams off into speculation with it.
I hope to god this is where we're going. Call my hopes pinned. Watch 'em dangle.
Round Eyes
My most metaphysical piece, and a sort of attack on one of the silliest habits we humans have: living in the past, obsessing over the future, and ignoring the only thing that matters: now.
This was also a structural experiment -- I wanted to see if I could pull the tricky structure off without diluting the sheer emotion of the narrative.
I don't believe in destiny or fate, not really. But if it existed, I think it would be a little something like this.
Xangurl
Lots of people disliked this story, were offended and disturbed by it. Maybe that's why I wrote it. I know the gal I based this on, and consider her a friend. After she got it through her head that 1) she couldn't seduce me and 2) I didn't judge her, she was a pretty damn good friend right back.
This is one of the rare stories I sat down and wrote in one go. Lullaby is the only other. The reason I wrote it is because the damn thing wouldn't leave me alone.
But the reason I posted it is a different animal. I readily admit that I write for a ghetto. I don't mean that as an insult. Hell, I love my ghetto. I write for libertarians and anarchists, and I do it for two reasons: The first is simply so that I don't have to explain why liberty and freedom are good things in and of themselves. The second is that it's hard for folks like us to find fiction that isn't insidiously statist in some way.
But that doesn't mean I can't challenge my audience to a certain degree. Not everything about liberty and freedom is sweetness and light.
Think what you want about my little Xangurl, but never deny that she lives life on her own terms and by her own rules. This little adventure in the skin trade and the party scene is a paean to freedom: the kind of freedom you might not like thinking about.
Of course, if she could just walk to the store and buy her drug of choice, maybe...
*Edited to fix bizarre word processor cut/paste/insert mistake by most likely stoned writer*
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Topic: The Best of George Potter (Read 152813 times)