Marc Laidlaw
400 BOYS
AND 50 MORE
Short Stories
For My Parents
INTRODUCTION: 400 + 50 = 51
This collection contains 51 stories, well over a quarter of a million words, written over approximately 40 years, and assembled by the author, which is to say me, a fan of commas, and also afterthoughts. Most have been previously published, but apart from the occasional appearance in an anthology, they have never been collected in whole or even in part. Recently I made them all freely available at my website, marclaidlaw.com, rescuing numerous texts from paper and various obsolete electronic media; therefore it should be considered that this ebook exists mainly for the convenience of those who don’t particularly enjoy reading from a website and prefer the traditional, old-fashioned electronic book experience just the way Nikola Gutenberg intended it.
The decision to choose 50 additional tales to accompany the titular “400 Boys” is largely but not entirely based on my desire to have another zero in the title. Who doesn’t love more zeroes? I could have (and probably should have) included fewer stories; and with a bit more wincing I could have added several more. At the moment I’m on the verge of talking myself into 400 Boys and 40 More, a far more felicitous arrangement of numerals; or maybe I’ll settle in for another viewing of The 400 Blows (a title a much younger me once suspected a much older Truffaut had stolen from him). But no! My resolve is firm. 50—I mean 51—it is!
For now anyway.
Since this is an ebook, and essentially software, I intend, laziness permitting, to continue patching the collection, adding more recent stories without altering the title (though I will append a changelist). I suppose it’s possible that someday the title may have to be changed to “60 More” and then “70 More”; and in some distant future, provided I remain productive into a rich immortality, “Infinitely More.” But for now I’m sticking with 50. Which is to say, 51. I already have some ideas about 52 and 53.
Since my goal was to collect most of my stories in one place, and to exert thereafter very little editorial judgment, I decided to group them more or less in the order they were written and/or published. I have no particular thesis or argument to advance that would be strengthened by presenting them in any other sequence. The weakness of this approach is that the early stories are naturally weaker than the later ones. I have made no attempt to hide this structural defect. I trust that by arranging them by decade, I’ve provided a hint to the reader of what they are likely to find when they wade in at any particular point of their own choosing.
I include here no collaborations, since those have mostly been available in the collected works of my partners. I include no tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe, the gargoyle-handed bard, since I intend to collect those separately as The Gargoyle’s Handbook (“Hello, publishers! All serious offers entertained!). Nor will you find any stories I can’t bear to reread. While I had initially planned to present a “Compleat Laidlaw,” ultimately I could not bring myself to exhume a handful of lackluster stories which well deserve their current obscurity. A few I am not especially fond of were spared excision on account of kind words spoken in their defense by others over the past few decades, but no one has ever stepped forward in favor of “Buzzy Gone Blue” or others nearly as embarrassing. There is one very recent story, “Roguelike,” which I had intended to include; but it depends on typographic gimmickry, and given my limited self-publishing skills, I could not ensure it would hold up on various devices.
While providing a bit of context for each decade, I have mainly refrained from commenting on the individual stories. On my website, where these stories also appear, I have been adding occasional notes as anecdotes occur to me. You might look there for further illumination.
May you find here whatever it is you expect of me. If your minimum expectation is a quarter of a million words, most of them legible, prepare to have your expectations exceeded!
THE SEVENTIES: FAIL EARLY
What is there to say about the early years of any career, especially when they coincide with grade school, junior high, and high school?
Not much.
For some reason, I thought of myself as a writer almost as soon as I was aware of myself at all. Some of my earliest memories are of writing and illustrating (mostly horrendous) stories. My Dad sent my brother and me off to sleep with “The Telltale Heart,” my mother with encounters at the Moria Gate. The stories gave me nightmares. The nightmares gave me stories. I wrote quite a few about guests checking into Room 13 and being scared to death by nightly visitations from a bloody, glowing dagger which I had completely plagiarized from Rockwell Kent’s drawing of Macbeth in my parents’ copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. That illustration is still my favorite of Shakespeare’s works.
When, in 1970, I turned 10, my grandfather gave me a refurbished Underwood typewriter, heavy as a bank vault, and I set out in earnest to pursue my professional career, armed with all the advice Writer’s Digest could offer, and also a briefcase full of paperclips. Through the remaining years of elementary school, on into junior high and high school, I churned out story after story, and visited them on various hapless editors listed in Writer’s Digest, including a bemused editor for The Elks Magazine. Yes, if your name was anywhere near the masthead of an obscure club journal, you were in danger of receiving one of my beautifully typed onionskin manuscripts containing shallow yet belabored tales of catastrophic futures, rocketship countdowns, and blob monsters. I read somewhere that the average writer collects about 70 rejections before making a sale. My records, which I kept assiduously at that time, reflect I was perfectly average.
Toward the end of high school, I began placing stories in fanzines which paid in contributor copies (no one had yet learned to call this “exposure”). I encountered many other young writers in similar straits, and at similar points in their careers; among them I now number some of my oldest friends. As I headed off to college, this career thing finally began to click, and I made my first actual sales involving cash money—and might I add, it went a lot farther then! Two paragraphs in Amazing Astronautical Adventures paid six month’s rent on a luxurious bachelor pad, with plenty left over for champagne, or so I was told. I bitterly regretted that school posed such an interruption to my imminent success, as I felt myself perfectly poised to be a wealthy and famous bachelor. Bestsellerdom was just around the corner, as certain as anything had ever been.
And then, just like that, the Seventies ended!
Out of a hundred execrable efforts, including several novels long since reduced to ash, I include here three pieces from the very end of this innocent age.
SPAWN OF THE RUINS
I was disturbed from my leisurely pursuit of Leandro’s The Abstractions and Essence of Kaufer’s “Basaltic Culture” As Related to Quantum Mathematics, by the irritating jangle of my telephone. Setting that exquisitely rare and absorbing tome aside, I reached for the phone with one hand, while relighting my pipe with the other—not an easy thing to do, I assure you, as I have very often severely singed my moustache and caused the skin of my face great pain in so doing.