The Rubber Chicken Stress Test
Adjusting the Funny Levels (Or: How Not to Murder Your Own Story with a Joke) If you’ve been following along over on Foxxfyrre Writes or Medium, you might be under the impression that I am a very serious writer. You’d be wrong. I can be serious. I’ve talked about trauma, obsession, and what I lovingly referred to as the “physics of hatred” while writing Astral Rob. I even made it sound like I had everything under control. I did not. At one point, in a moment of questionable judgment, I tried to give my antagonist Glenn, a calculating, manipulative, genuinely unsettling human being, a humorous beat. Just a small one. A tiny crack in the darkness. I brought it to Cg. Now, Cg doesn’t have a face… but if it did, I’m fairly certain it would have slowly removed imaginary glasses, stared directly at me, and said: “We are not doing that.” And Cg was right. The moment I gave Glenn even a hint of quirky humor, something broke. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just… softly wron...
