When Elbert Or (he who administers countless people with regular doses of Cast) announced an April Fools Day contest on the Nautilus mailing list, I was immediately intrigued. The only thing that the contest required was a treatise on the origin of April Fools Day, and I figured that if a ten-year-old essay on Beta Carotene could make it into the pages of Cast, then what more for a freshly-written entry?
So I went and did my research; There's certainly no shortage of data on the origins of April Fools Day on the Internet. Apparently, the basis for the "holiday" came about as a result of the creation of the Gregorian Calendar in the late 16th century. Prior to that, Europeans based the first day of the new year on the vernal equinox (the "official" start of spring, in a way). When the Gregorian Calendar was adopted to compensate for minute differences between the statistical year and the solar year, January 1 was designated to be the formal New Years Day. People who persisted in celebrating New Years on the vernal equinox (sometime in the beginning of April) were widely derided as "April Fools".
That's the long and the short of it, really. I've conveniently left out the opposing theories, the minor details, and the occasional Kick-Me sign.
What matters more is that, about an hour after I enthusiastically started writing, I found the essay and explanation to be as dull as dishwater. It was most definitely not what I wanted to submit for a contest, much less for something centered around April Fools Day. I tried spicing it up a couple of times, only to give up after a few lines. I simply did not feel very funny that day.
That's when it hit me - why not write something whose tone was totally serious, and yet by its very nature was a joke? Such a thing would certainly qualify for April Fools Day. And as for exactly what to write, I only had to ask myself who Elbert Or least expected to submit an entry for his contest.
The result? Here.
Considering that I was writing to a person who probably didn't know who the heck I was, I felt that it was important that the letter look like an obvious April Fools prank. If I downplayed the joke too much, there was the possibly that it could be mistaken for spam and consequently thrown away. The Back to the Future series of movies got a lot of references in the letter for this reason - I wanted to ground it on a pop-culture work that people would recognize as pure fiction. With this setup, I could then put in all the improbable wackiness I could think of.
The character of Nerus Salamanca came into the picture when I started worrying that the letter wouldn't be counted as a proper submission for the contest. As a result, the future Elbert Or predicted that a young man named Nerus Salamanca would be submitting the winning entry, with dire consequences for the future. By noting that, I figured that I could submit a more serious treatise later in the same week under Salamanca's name. If Salamanca won, then I would be happy. If Salamanca lost, then Elbert Or would save the world. That's a win-win situation right there. :)
For the final touch, I registered a brand-new Yahoo account so that the letter would appear in Elbert Or's inbox under the name "Elbert Or". I also felt that it was important for the letter to have an April 1 date for the sake of credibility, so it was all dashed off within a couple of hours.
I realized that I had underestimated the impact of the letter only when it appeared on Elbert Or's blog, although I did get a good laugh when people speculated that Elbert had written the piece himself.
Over the last number of days, I've considered the possibility of hiding my involvement in this creative exercise. That way, I could continue to write similar pieces for different people over the years. The nature of Nerus Salamanca convinced me otherwise, though; Now that the concept of the future overlord was out in the open, there was the possibility that some other writer would claim ownership of him, and utilize him in any number of other nasty pranks.
So here I am, everyone. I'm right in front of you. Feel free to throw whatever stones you've got in hand. (I just know that I'm almost certainly going to get one of these pranks in return when I least expect it.)
Oh, yeah... I almost forgot about the actual entry. On the Friday deadline of the April Fools Day contest, I planted myself in front of my computer, went through my research once again... and proceeded to get bored. It was as though the sow's ear was resisting my abilities to turn it into a silk purse.
So, in a position where I simply couldn't write anything profound about April Fools Day, I took my cue from the alternative time-travel theories and submitted this, care of Nerus Salamanca himself. It was a lot less subtle than the first letter, but I feel that that's exactly how Salamanca would phrase it.
Stones ready? :)
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