Author's Note - "The Scarecrows"

If I only had a brain

My original plan this year was to write a new short story every week, but that obviously hasn’t worked out. Still, I hope The Scarecrows was worth the wait.

To encourage myself to write more, I have been following

Miguel S.

’s daily “Microdosing Fiction” posts on

THE FICTION DEALER

. Basically, he gives you a word or phrase, along with a very tight word limit, to encourage creativity and verbal economy.

I was particularly proud of this horror haiku—

Inspiration

It’s hard to say exactly where I got the idea for “The Scarecrows” from, but it was at least in part a response to this comic—

It’s a strawman that doesn’t remotely approach the issues with student debt forgiveness, but then again, political comedy is hard.

The Perfect Political Joke

There are a couple of movies about repossessing more than your car, Repo! The Genetic Opera and Repo Men. They’re so similar that many fans believed the latter ripped off the former, but the story is more complicated than that.

If I had a nickel for every internal organ repossessing movie, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

I know I saw the Jude Law one, but barely remember it. I never watched the Darren Lynn Bousman film, because I don’t care for torture porn. (Bousman went on to direct four of the Saw films.)

References

Margaret Hamilton really did appear on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and it’s just about as heartwarming as you’d imagine—

Speaking of Wizard of Oz, the title character’s full name is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. That was so long, so he thought he would go by his initials: O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D. But since it spelled out "pinhead," he shortened it further to just Oz.

The “old movie” Aiden mentions is, of course, Citizen Kane. Here’s the scene in question—