Here’s the long overdue author’s commentary on “Debaser” — my personal favorite of the Duty Calls shorts!
First up, the cover image. Since the story includes a wiki known as Cyclo, I mocked up a relatively faithful version of a mobile Wikipedia page.1 Liked it so much I dropped plans to have a designer punch it up and went with my original. Years later, it inspired building an actual Cyclo Wiki chronicling the Duty Calls connections.
Google’s AI mode does a decent job of summarizing before I go deeper:
Tidbaser:
- It’s debatable whether the official title is just “Debaser” or the longer “Debaser (Disambiguation)” in full. I like the disambiguation to tie to the wiki theme and to acknowledge it’s more than just pilfering the title of a Pixies song.
- The opening was inspired by the real-life event of mobile carrier Sprint firing its most high-maintenance customers. I wrote it as a completely standalone short while on vacation, but later thought it was a fun lead-in to a Duty Calls story do drop the reader into the middle of a screenwriter’s pitch. In the full novel version of DC, I was going for a reaction of “Um, is this suddenly a different book?”
- 333 is a recurring important number across the Duty Calls stories, so the actual real-world math of 40,000 phone calls divided by 1200 fired customers equals 3.33 was a fantastically fun coincidence. (As was 40,000 phone calls echoing back to the prank calls received by Shawn in “Fester”.
- Sometimes I can’t quite shake TP narrator speaking in song lyrics voice since it’s something I do in real life too, hence “…these were the baddest of the bad.”
- CPBBBDB has a bit of a CBGB’s vibe to my ear.
- When we transition into the main story, the setting shifts to Doug ‘N Donuts from the “Donuts & Deadbolts” double feature.
- This book already existed when I came up with the not-so-original “prosecutors will be violated” line. This one did not.
- I probably already mentioned this elsewhere, but here’s another good place to say The Handoff is an unfinished screenplay I wrote back in 2001 that found its way into the Duty Calls universe for Nate Pepper’s benefit.
- The line “You know Wikipedia, right?” hasn’t aged very well. Does anyone NOT know Wikipedia these days?
- I have a longstanding irrational pet peeve where seeing someone refer to “EST” during Daylight Savings Time makes my blood boil. “Origin of daylight savings time” as an editable Wiki thing is a tiny nod to that.
- If memory serves2, the opening section was written in 2007, the donut shop part in 2008/9, and the last segment in 2018. Many of the Duty Calls shorts were written in two parts a decade apart; this might be the only one with three distinct writing eras.
- The screenwriter’s name isn’t revealed3 until the third part, though in the full novel version a reader will know his full name and occupation before reaching this story. I started working on this while still deep in my “no character names” obsession, which later softened into “names when needed, but do not force the introduction.”4
- The whole third section isn’t exactly a play by play of how I brainstorm & research, but it’s pretty close.
- Psychics are referenced to cross into another yet to be released Duty Calls story, which will also tie into the business of TTM, INC, LLC.
- Seventeen….something about a yellow pig…
- “How a math major became a screenwriter” was one of those “solely for Jon Mack” jokes.
- My wife used to incorrectly use “offstandish” when she meant “standoffish,” which became handoffish + offhandish here.5
- The film Not An Ordinary House is referenced in the story “Copper on Parchment.”
- “He needed some meth” was the line that made me want to finish this one.
- “The wiki entry for jury duty was so poorly written and organized he considered rewriting it himself.” Again, sometimes these stories write themselves.
- The ePub file I’m reading along with while composing this commentary has a random single red word “repeat” in it I can’t recall if I put there on purpose or by accident, but I like it.
- Google has since stopped showing the very high number of results at the top of the page while actually only having a few hundred available (perhaps due to this short story calling them out?), but that is how it worked while I was writing this and for several years thereafter.
- Generative AI and its potential to eradicate society was purely a sci-fi concept when “Debaser” was written and released, but feels way more real today.
- The least realistic part of this story might be a screenwriter using a web-based program to write in circa the time this story was written.
- The meta twist at the end has Allan type the opening to a screenplay that would mirror the opening line of the full novel collecting the Duty Calls stories while framing an additional courthouse adventure around them. Now I just have to get around to finishing it…
Check out Debaser.
FOOTNOTES
- I might’ve had a little inspiration from The Black Keys and their album cover for Brothers. ↩︎
- Which it probably doesn’t… ↩︎
- His name is Allan Smithee, so perhaps it’s never revealed… ↩︎
- Duty Calls helped force me out of the “no names” stunt, as managing a cast of 12+ without names would prove more difficult than the smaller, mostly familial cast in TP/DG. Jury duty does allow for touch of anonymity, but not really. ↩︎
- In her defense, offstandish is better. ↩︎