Rish's story "The Gold Bug" on the "Journey Into" podcast

Our buddy Marshal Latham has a contest every year on his show, "The Journey Into..." podcast, in honor of Edgar Allan Poe.  The rule of the contest (the only rule, other than length) is that it has to take the title of a Poe story or poem, and has to . . . I don't know, be in his style or milieu.

I considered entering the contest last time, thinking immediately of a time when our family traveled to California, and I saw the same car (with a copy of Hustler magazine in its window) both in Redlands and Santa Monica, California (despite the two cities being two hours distant from one another).  I didn't know what story I could make out of that, except that I could make the car a VW beetle, and call the story "The Gold Bug."

I missed it that year, but went ahead and wrote a story with that title for the next one, and it's available over there in audio form right now.  It tells the tale of an eleven year old boy encountering a mysterious car on a family vacation, and is narrated by Pat Krane of the "That TV Show" and "Convert To Raid" podcasts.

Writing is a funny thing.  As a would-be screenwriter, I often had premises or ideas for fantastic scenes that I knew would work (or make great movies or sequences in them), but the challenge was creating a framework around the scenes, or a narrative from the premise itself.  That is much harder, and most of the time (if I had to guess, I'd say 65% to 75% of the time), I realize that the work it's going to take to make a script out of an idea, or to come up with a series of events leading up to those brilliant scenes would not be worth it, not on spec, anyway.

I still hold to the theory that there is a bang-up story in the car with the dirty magazine in the window, but I'm not sure if "The Gold Bug" is that story.  Regardless, it was one of the winners of the contest (and Marshal swears he did not see the authors' names when he judged it), so it's conceivable that someone out there will like it.  Check it out here: http://www.journeyintopodcast.blogspot.com/2014/02/journey-88-gold-bug-by-rish-outfield.html

Rish Outfield, Goldbugger