"Old Soldier" Commentary
One of the cool things about DVDs is that you can turn on the director's commentary and hear about what they were thinking when they were making the movie. What's cool about this website is that I can do the same thing.
This story had its genesis back in 2007, when my friend Mickey told me I should write a story based on his experiences. You see, Mickey had gone goose hunting in Sasketchawan several years ago and shot a sandhill crane. He had winged the thing, and as his dogs went to go retrieve it, the crane popped up and pecked towards the dogs. The dogs didn't want anything to do with the crane. So Mickey went over to the crane, and as he got close, the crane popped its head up, and Mickey decided to stun it into submission by using karate on it, roundhouse kicking it multiple times until he could snap its neck. To hear Mickey tell it, it's pretty damned funny, because imagining him karate kicking a crane is a pretty humorous visual. (By the way, what technique did he use? Crane technique, of course!)
After everyone had a good laugh at Mickey's story, he challenged me to write a science fiction epic of the incident. I started with the idea that the aliens were crane-like; except for the leather wings and the long razor sharp beak, they are sandhill cranes.
The reason for having the protagonist use karate was a bit harder to come up with, but I thought zero-g combat was a good reason. I imagined that zero-g, close quarters combat would use a lot of martial arts. My thoughts were that just as the air marshalls deal with today, you might not want to be shooting too many projectile or beam weapons within the confines of the ship; hit the wrong thing and you're liable to blow up or get sucked out a tiny hole into space.
In the original draft, I had a lot more background on the zero-g soldiers, but I cut out a lot of backstory. It's still something I found fascinating, and will probably cover in another story.
One other thing I worked into the original draft were a lot of hidden references to Mickey. Most of them have been removed in this final draft in the interest of getting the story going faster, but there's one Easter egg. "New Casthaska?" That's an anagram of Sasketchawan. Plus, I liked the idea that there's a place with a "new" name when no one could remember what happend with the place with the "old" name. (Oh, you think this was a gruesome story? Wait until you find out what happened on Old Casthaska!)
I hope you enjoyed the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Comments are always welcome.
Thank you for reading it!