Perfect GPA, Part 1 (Patreon)

I tell ya what, if this is the kind of story that hits your buttons, it's gonna punch the fuck out of 'em. The other day I had a stray idea, and what I thought would be a long-winded intro leading to a hot scene or two blossomed into what's so far 20k words and maybe halfway done. So here we have part 1 of Perfect GPA.

I'm not even going to bother to preview. We had a brief talk the other day on discord about mind control tropes, specifically about those super old stories on the EMCSA from the late 90's and how it was cool to see fresh stories foreshadowing tropes. This one is just... yeah, you'll see the plot coming a mile away (about 1600m for those of you born into the metric system). But I think it's still plenty of fun anyway. I will warn that the intro's sort of long, but I think in this case that only makes the transition into The Good Stuff more exciting.

It's similar to what happened when I sat down to write Losers. It just started with a morbid desire to see some young women experiencing dread. You get that opening scene, the slumber party, where it's this resignation to their obliteration by the Lottery with nothing left but the dread of what specific form it would take. It grew from there, but that sentiment is no doubt why so much of the story is the asides of what happened to this girl or that, the way none of them could have anticipated the shape of their downfall before it arrived.

GPA has some of that same darkness, but I just wanted to see what would happen if we put a bitter control freak, the sort of model citizen dickwad who feels he's done everything right but was somehow wronged by an injust world, in the position to retaliate against that world. There's a line I love (and I know I've quoted in stories) from a short story I used to teach, "The Lady or the Tiger."

"When every member of his domestic and political systems moved smoothly in its appointed course, [the semi-barbaric king's] nature was bland and genial; but whenever there was a little hitch, and some of his orbs got out of their orbits, he was blander and more genial still, for nothing pleased him so much as to make the crooked straight, and crush down uneven places."

So yeah, this is a story about a semi-barbaric petty bureaucrat/husband/father making some crooked straight, and crushing down uneven places.

I've got part 2 done but not edited. I might even have it done later tonight, but for sure by the weekend. It's way, way more fun, too. So yeah, more to come!