vaudeville ghosts, and other haunted tales

In 2006, I wrote a few short scripts called "Sophie Swanson, Titular Heroine," for a stop motion film featuring our titular heroine defeating the evil forces of Dr. Haiku. I think only the first script was ever animated. It drew heavy and unapologetic inspiration in style from the webcomic Scary-Go-Round, where the narrative itself often operates on a kind of moon logic; the humor was focused less on jokes and punchlines and more on clever quips and absurd situations. (We even submitted a few fan comics, done with clay figures, to Scary-Go-Round's guest weeks.) It's far from the best thing I've ever written, though it had some things I'm still proud of: the title amused me to no end, and the name of the pub where the characters meet up once or twice is "The Jaded Old Crone." And the voice acting from the friends we got to act in it was really good; I still think about it pretty regularly.

I'd recently moved to Seattle from Moses Lake at the time. I barely knew how to live in the city or be an adult living on my own. I made most of my money by driving my friends around, and that really wasn't very much money. (One of the lines I think about constantly is Dr. Haiku telling a bus driver to keep the change. It just doesn't make sense if you've ridden a bus, even if the bus driver clearly thinks it's kind of weird. I didn't think that bus drivers even got tips, but like . . . I clearly just didn't know how public transit worked. It was new and scary and we didn't even have smart phones back then. A different time.) A few years later I moved out to Boston, and lived there for a while and learned even more things about myself and about living, and moved back to Seattle a few years later. 

Each of those moves represented a major change in my life, sharply defined borders for a new era. I'd been back in Seattle for almost two years when, in late 2011, I started writing another script for Sophie Swanson: Titular Heroine. At the time, that was the only name I had for them. The title was another joke, because for some reason, Sophie, in my mind, had become a villain. The early stories mainly focused on the adventures of Melissa, a character I'd imported from a morose story I never really finished (though who appears in her morose incarnation in my 2013 project on this very blog!), and her best friend Sarah, who I think I made up for the series.

Sophie doesn't even merit a mention in several of the earliest stories; the joke, of course, was that the titular heroine of the series didn't even show up that much and was actually a villain, but by the tenth script in this ongoing series it became clear that I needed something else. So I went back to the very first episode, about a group of spectral theater performers trying to cover Tom Waits, and I called the series "Vaudeville Ghosts."

There are two things about Vaudeville Ghosts that I think are important to note: the first is that the scripts were never intended to be made into anything. The second is that, for the first month or so, these scripts just flowed from my mind to the page. It was like I was channeling them onto the page. The cast of characters expanded, eventually it started developing lengthy, convoluted storylines, and eventually even though I had some ideas for what was coming next I think the whole thing collapsed under the weight of itself. I think I wrote something like 100 episodes, spanning three "seasons" 20-30 episodes long and then two aborted seasons which each got no more than three or four episodes. I loved it all.

Reliably, when I read these old scripts, there are jokes that I still think are hilarious, and bits that I wish I hadn't written. Much like Sophie Swanson: Titular Heroine in its original form, I think it's transparent to anyone who reads this that I drew a lot of stylistic inspiration from Scary-Go-Round, but I like to think there's more substance to it than that first script, so long ago. And many of these characters still live rent-free in my head.

Vaudeville Ghosts will be ten years old this year. I got a restraining order against the animator from the original script after he made some murder threats; I've moved to a new place, there's been a whole-ass apocalypse out there (you might have heard about that). But as is traditional at the start of a new year during a pandemic, I've been thinking about it again, and I want to at least keep the name and spirit alive, even if I don't know if I have any other stories in that universe coming any time soon.

I've owned the vaudevilleghosts.com domain for a very long time now; I was originally planning on using it to do a "reboot" of Vaudeville Ghosts, featuring a series of Twine games I was planning on writing. I wrote half of one--"The Vaudeville Ghosts Crash Your Party," about preventing a party demon from feeding on party energy by making sure the party it's hanging out at really, really sucks; and a part of another, "The Vaudeville Ghosts Ruin Your Childhood," where the cast starred in a live-action Pokemon movie. I maintain that this twine game willed the Detective Pikachu movie into existence. I will not apologize.

And recently I've been thinking: I don't really have a place to just put all of my assorted writing projects. This blog has . . . a tone, or a brand, or a theme, or something, and some things feel odd to put on here. Reviews, essays, poems, weird scripts, character sketches and worldbuilding notes, they all live in their own scattered places, and I'd like a place to put them. I've always wanted to have, for want of a better word, a brand to put all these things other, something cohesive.

I think now that Vaudeville Ghosts could be that brand. It was always weird, scattered, experimental; it's been where so many odd ideas found a home. Perhaps it's time to open it up again, attempt to consolidate the disparate entities that I've created, and, who knows? Maybe it's time for the Vaudeville Ghosts themselves to ride again.

I don't think I'll abandon this blog; I've taken a fondness for writing a prelude for the months, and these little bits of morose microfiction will always have a special place in my heart. But it was never meant to be a container for all of my projects, and I think having a place for all of them to live will help encourage me to work on more of the things that my brain is constantly thinking about.

The aforementioned domain will update soon.