This may well be the first time I’ve ever written a story inspired by a word. I heard something called “toyetic” and discovered it was an actual industry term, used to describe a character design that is amenable to selling toys. Well hell, if it was a real word, I thought it should be used a little bit.

Even before I had a child of my own, I wrote a lot of stories that featured children in one way or another. As I go back and look at them again as a father, they hit differently. My son is the same age now as Lucas is when this story begins (but not ends – this was the Christmas story with the longest time-frame until the novella Santa’s Odyssey ate up over a year), and as I mentally place him into the story, it gives me feels I didn’t expect. I also…I hate to sound like I’m bragging, but I really like this one. One of my favorite filmmakers, Adam Green (of the Hatchet franchise) contends that it takes artists of any type about seven years of distance before they can look at something they’ve created and see it the way the audience does instead of just seeing the flaws that all creative types obsess over. I think he’s got a point. I don’t think I’ve actually read this story since I first presented it 13 years ago, and damned if I don’t think it’s actually pretty good.

This is another story from the world of The Curtain, by the way. It’s easy to pick out which stories belong to my two ongoing universes. The Siegel City stories are about superheroes. Curtain stories are about monsters. 

Christmas 2010: Toyetic