A short story of mine called “The Pacifier” was just published by Samjoko Magazine in their Summer I 2022 issue.
It was only after the story was accepted for publication that I bothered to search the internet for the title and discovered there was a movie called The Pacifier too. My story is better than that movie, though. (I haven’t seen the movie.)
My “The Pacifier” is a superhero story which is part of a subgenre that I think is popular now: taking superhero tropes and plopping them into the mundane world. It’s meant to be humorous, as such stories usually are, but I also hope it lingers. It deals with a question that I myself have often struggled to answer.
The story has a two-part origin. When I was much younger, I used to speculate idly about what it would be like to have a particular superpower. It occurred to me that this could be the seed for a story, so I jotted it into my notebook of potential story ideas, where it sat untouched forever. I had the idea, but no notion of where to take it.
Years pass. I’m working through the exercises in a writing manual by Ursula Le Guin—an experience I blogged about last time too. One exercise instructs me to write a story about an old woman who is doing something in the present while thinking about something in the past. (The point, from a writing craft perspective, was to practice writing in the present and past tenses.) This gives me my main character—the old woman—and my structure, ping-ponging between then and now.
I popped my languishing superhero idea into this story structure and began writing to see what would happen.
Because I’m a lot less young now than I was when I jotted down that old idea, my tendency (unconscious at first) was to start out taking my younger self’s dreamy notion of superpowers seriously, but to end up putting a twist on it by the end. Maybe not pulling the rug out from under it entirely, but at least tugging the rug to make it say whoa! and wobble on one leg.
In this way, I and my old woman character are in parallel. Each of us has had some growing up to do. Each of us, like an old fluorescent bulb, needed a while for the lights to start to flicker on.