Curse of the Were-Weasel: A Retrospective • by Bruce Bethke

In the first decade of the 21st Century—an unimaginably long time ago, it now seems—long before there ever was a Stupefying Stories, there was a sort of an online writing workshop called The Friday Challenge. The Friday Challenge pulled together a talented but eccentric group of promising young writers, and produced a number of equally promising but eccentric literary projects, one of which became Stupefying Stories, but the strangest of which had to be Curse of the Were-Weasel.

Curse of the Were-Weasel was, in technical terms, an attempt to explore the question of whether a blog engine could be used to construct a multi-author, multi-character, multi-threaded serial fictional narrative, and along the way to develop over time a correspondingly complex and collaboratively designed fictional universe in which there was lots of room for different writers to play without treading on each other’s toes.

In a sense, at the time, things like this were already being done. There were plenty of other blogs out there that contained nothing but the purest fiction, although most purported to be the non-fictional chronicles of the blogger’s sex life and/or political activities—or all too often, both. We already knew that a first-person blog describing, say, the wild and uninhibited sexual adventures of a beautiful young bisexual female advertising copywriter turned pole-dancer and political campaign web 2.0 consultant would draw a large and loyal, if perhaps demented, readership. Probably even land us a movie deal.

But we were not interested in trying to pass off fevered prurient fantasies as reality. And we certainly didn’t want to produce porn. 

Hence, Curse of the Were-Weasel: an intentional attempt to develop, over a planned course of two years, a shared universe populated by a large cast of fascinating characters, and to use this universe to present stories in weekly, serialized, interactively developed, and not necessarily linear installments. 

But why this story? We considered a number of other potential story lines, but this one seemed to provide the greatest openness for aleatoric development and require the least hands-on guidance. The market category of “paranormal romance” was just beginning to become unbelievably hot at the time, as evidenced by the collected works of Laurell Hamilton, Yasmine Galenorn, Kim Harrison, and my own personal favorite, Ronda Thompson—

Ah. The giants.

—and it showed no signs of dying off any time soon. It’s tempting to blame Joss Whedon and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) for this state of affairs, but I’d put the point of inception at least five years earlier, with Ron Koslow’s 1987 TV series, Beauty and the Beast.

But how could we be different? Vampires have been horribly and heavily overused in gothic serial romances ever since the dawn of the genre (Dark Shadows, anyone?), but while the conventions of the werewolf trope were equally widely known, they were not, at least at that time, so heavily overused. Besides, there are a lot of variations on the were-creature trope from cultures all over the world, and the genre is not without its opportunities for humor.

So were-critters it would be. 

Then the question became, how do you free the werewolf trope from its more inconvenient limitations? (Only in full moonlight, deathly allergic to silver, tendency to black-out and experience periods of bestial homicidal insanity followed by amnesia, etc., etc.) How do you turn were-creatures into intelligent, articulate, and sympathetic first-person narrative voices? In short, how do you bring them out into the light of day? 

The answer came to us in a flash. This is the 21st Century. What if were-creaturism was now known to be a disease, a terrible, communicable, debilitating disease with potentially deadly outcomes, true, but nonetheless, only a metaphorical curse? Why, that would make the people who contracted this disease victims, deserving not fear and scorn but sympathy and understanding—and all the manifold services of the entire Victim Support Industry! Why, we realized, if such a thing as were-wolfism were real, werewolves would be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, and not only could you not fire a werewolf who went feral in the office, you’d be required by Federal law to accommodate their disability! 

And thus was born ALPS: Acquired Lycanthropic Polymorphism Syndrome. A retroviral disease passed on by exchange of bodily fluids (usually, but not always, via the blood/saliva interface involved in “biting” behavior), ALPS by some as-yet-not-fully understood mechanism activates dormant sequences in the victim’s DNA, resulting in a so-called “transformation” into a temporarily altered physiognomy and accompanying reversion to primitive, predatory, carnivorous behaviors. Given that this transformation usually involved changes to the mandible structure and hair-growth patterns, the conventional (if distasteful) expression would be to say that the victims “turned into wolves…”

But why stop there? World folklore abounds with tales of were-bears, were-cougars, were-jaguars, were-tigers, were-badgers, and many, many more—including, yes, were-seals. So on further reflection we decided our ALPS victims should be capable of changing into a very wide variety of forms, according to the nature of their character, and all of which resembled large, carnivorous mammals. (We decided to make a sticking point of the large, carnivorous mammal requirement, so no were-tunas or were-banana slugs or anything really silly like that.) Further, we decided it would make them more interesting if their transformations were not slaved strictly to the lunar cycle, but rather were erratic, hormonal, and in some cases, possibly even voluntary, thus making it more akin to getting really in touch with their inner animal avatar, rather than just reverting to mere mindless beasts.

With those basic rules in place, all that was left was to come up with some excuse for our ALPS victims to get together on a weekly basis, in order to interact and tell their stories. Once we couched it in those terms, the answer was obvious: Were-Creatures Anonymous. Because here in Therapy Nation, what else would werewolves do but form a 12-step group to help them deal with their issues, their feelings of alienation, and that ever-present urge to solve their interpersonal problems by ripping some jerk’s throat out, tearing open his rib cage, and feasting on his still-beating heart?  

Curse of the Were-Weasel launched on Sunday, June 8, 2008, with “The Were-Weasel’s Tale.” Almost immediately, it went careening wildly off the rails. What went wrong? 

What didn’t?

 

[To be continued…]