The Surprise Birthday Party!

Title: The Surprise Birthday Party!

Somehow the cross country team learned that Sara, one of its runners, had never had a surprise birthday party.  One of us brought up throwing a surprise party for Sara as a team and since it was summer, that seemed doable.  We recruited Grandma into our scheme and began to plan.  Then on a beautiful weekday night, we showed up before Sara got home from work.

We talked about how we were going to surprise Sara and finally we decided we’d hide all over the house and see which one of us she found first.  Carefully we picked out our hiding spots and then we waited for Sara to get home.  She pulled in and we scattered to our spots.  In the door she came and we heard Grandma talking to her calmly as she hung up her keys.  Grandma and Grandpa didn’t give a thing away as Sara left the kitchen and headed into the house.  Suddenly she screamed and we all came running out of our hiding spots.  We found out that Sara had opened the basement door and discovered Brandon Owen sitting there.  

Sara was very surprised by the birthday party and enjoyed it very much.  The rest of us did too!  In XC we usually celebrate everyone’s birthdays at the Piñata Invitational but Sara was a nice exception to that rule.  We hung out and played games until darkness fell and then we left. 

Surprises are wonderful but I have learned from my favorite authors that it is a difficult thing to pull off.  I have learned that many successful authors have a formula or rhythm that there stories follow.  I read Dan Brown long before his books attacking Christianity became popular.  Dan is a solid writer but he has a tendency to want to make the person you trust, the Gandalf figure, to be the bad guy.  He did so in “Digital Fortress” and “Deception Point”.  It was a surprise the first time he did it but I encountered it enough that I was not surprised in Deception Point.    Terry Brooks has certain elements in his Shannara fantasy series that are always there.  One element the reader encounters is early on a party of elite “elf hunters” that accompany the quest and are serious cannon fodder in the story’s journey!  As the reader you get to the point where you know these warriors are toast!  I think a red shirt in Star Trek has a better chance than these “elite” warriors!  LE Modesitt does the rags to riches concept in a fantasy genre.  In most of his books (and he has dozens and dozens) he starts with a character who generally is a nobody from all different walks of life.  Nobody hero has some magic about them that they discover and are always smart and tough.  They generally have to fight a war with someone with an army and they rise through the ranks, despite plenty of obstacles.  (If they are not a soldier, they soon become invaluable to the army as their magic person or in some other capacity).  As the story progresses they accumulate respect and higher rank, until they are the greatest general in the land (or king... or magician... or whatever).

Sara loved being surprised but can you imagine if threw a “surprise” party every day for two months?  That would turn from a cool memory, to something odd, to something annoying.  The writer’s dilemma is that to a certain extent, the reader wants a formula and yet they want to be surprised too.  The famous video game Zelda is a fantasy story.  Game mechanics change but the general feel of the game remains the same because it is placed in a fantasy mold.  Can you imagine in the next Zelda game if Fox McCloud suddenly crashed his R Wing next to Zelda’s castle?  The mighty Gannon rears up on his horse letting out an immensely evil laugh as he prepares to do some horrible deed.  Then suddenly Fox shoots Gannon with his energy pistol and Gannon dies.  The princess goes off with Fox and becomes the Galaxy’s best R Wing pilot.  This would be a different twist on the game but those expecting a fantasy puzzle game might be very angry to find that it is really a space ship shooter.  One of my favorite author’s David Weber wrote a dreadful book called, “Out of the Dark”.  It was a book about aliens invading earth and at first it was amazing!  The humans put up a valiant fight at first but the aliens were just too powerful.  Decimated humanity fights the aliens in the ruins of their civilization hit-and-run style.  Finally the aliens get sick of these pinpricks and decide to wipe out the whole planet (with a plague maybe?)  Since the aliens are hovering above the planet in huge technological fortresses and humanity is hiding in holes and sewers, things look hopeless.  And then before the aliens activate their plan they lose an entire base mysteriously.  As a reader you perk up.  What is this?  I wondered if it was a secret government force for this sort of emergency or perhaps another alien race was on planet and the human heroes were about to get allies!  Excitedly I turned the page into the last little bit of the book.  Vampires.  What?  Yeah, vampires save the day.  OP vampires ride on shuttles back up to the big ships in space and kill everyone on board.  Considering they flew through the thermosphere which has temperatures up to 1830 F, those are very scary creatures of the night.  They don’t seem to be bothered by the sun either.  The aliens futuristic weapons are useless against these super vampires.  If only they had known they were fighting vampires they could have stocked up on holy water, crosses, wooden stakes, or garlic.  At the end of the story our main human hero is now a vampire and the vampires are headed out to attack the aliens that attacked earth.  As a human myself I’m like, “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”  So to sum up, the story was certainly a surprise but it wasn’t a good surprise.  It was like, getting to the last chapter of a book where the Western hero is about to face all the enemy ranch hands and the big city gunslinger and suddenly the author writes, “But suddenly vampires came and saved the day.  The end.”

Aware of this weakness I try to change even the rhythm of my stories but try and keep them similar enough in formula not to drive off my readers.  Trying not to fall into a predictable pattern can cause problems, even if you don’t choose to have a vampire deus ex machine.  My series “Wolf Hunting” seems to jump genres from book one to book two... okay it does:)  In the first book it was a survival book of a kidnapped girl with some skills up against a large group of men.  I didn’t want to write the first book over again in a different setting and call it book two.  Why?  Take the movie “Under Siege”.  That is a once in a life time story.  What are the odds of it happening again?  Apparently excellent, because in the sequel the exact same kind of thing happens on a train.  In Speed 2 they are on a boat instead of a bus and in the Die Hard movies we go from an office building to an airport.  To me this seems very unlikely.  What are the odds a navy seal who was on a ship being taken over by rogue CIA operatives would be on a train taken over by paramilitary types with even bigger stakes?  I’d say almost impossible.  So I chose to have the Die Hard type hero tangle with the villain again but in a totally different situation... a different genre even.  I had left bread crumbs for the reader all through book one to set up the second book.  Wolf Hunting 2: Trick Shot, has the same hero (although she has been very changed by her experience in book one and is NOT the same person... readers were disappointed by that I think) and it is still an action story (we don’t jump genre’s that hard:) but it is more military science fiction, than a survival story.  Reactions to it has been mixed.  Even a reader with a positive reaction said, “At first I was very surprised!”  Some decided it was a nice surprise but other readers didn’t like it I think. 

*** Author Adrian Essigmann has eighteen books in print on Amazon.com, soon to be nineteen!  All of them are $.99 cents on Kindle, with the exception of “An Assumed Risk” which will be (Lord willing) an e-book before summer.  All of his books are available in soft cover too!  Type Amazon Adrian Essigmann and his author’s page should come up ***