Westerns

I find myself fascinated at times by westerns.

Not the happy, family ones like Little House on the Prarie but the brutal and violent ones which, in all honesty, are probably less accurate historically but far more exciting to watch like For a Fistful of Dollars. Albiet, not a terribly fair comparison there, a televison show versus a movie, but I think it kind of gets my point across. Grim, gritty, unforgiving is much more interesting to watch then happy, family, farming.

This fascination with westerns doesn't limit itself solely to the shiny magical box that sits in my living room. Western novels amuse me as well. I have to make a quick distinction here though, Lonesome Dove isn't a western as much as it is literature. When I say 'western novel' I mean the serial novels that are very much the male equivalent of romance novels. The ones like Longarm or The Gunsmith which are very much male romance novels, down to the bodice-ripping scenes. In a very serious way, you could probably transplant characters back and forth between romance novels and westerns and the only major changes would be the transitions between the 'wild west' and 'victorian england'.

Western inspired video games amuse me to, to a degree. One of my favorite PS2 games is Wild Arms 3 which is a very cool western / post-apocalyptic / fantasy game. Interesting setting, interesting mood and characters. Just a fun game.

I guess two things brought this to mind to me today. Watching the last few episodes of Firefly on dvd again and working on a writing project of mine very very tentatively named Two Suns.

I love the mix of sci-fi and western in Firefly. It just works soo damned well and so very often feels very very fitting. Plus, it just kind of has a nice bit of logical'ness to it. Colonization of new worlds really isn't likely to jump to metropolis style city living immediately, the idea of agrarian and very 'western' style towns and settlements developing into something more 'modern' just sort of makes sense in my head.

Two Suns is one of my.. uh.. fourteen or fifteen writing projects that I have general outlines for and scribble away at from time to time. Very weird mix of western, steampunk, and fantasy that originally started out as three seperate stories but in a moment of clarity ( possibly aided by vodka ) turned out to work much better as one single story and concept. Been writing on it a bit today ( it and another project that I haven't named yet which is pretty purely fantasy ).

It currently, like many of my writing bits, suffers from this problem of having some of the major bits written, but nothing connecting them togethor into a cohesive narrative. Right now it reads like the sketch comedy version of a story. Weird disconnected bits of story that make sense in a surreal sort of way.