Who doesn’t love a good courtroom drama? And, for that matter, who doesn’t love a solid “sold yer soul to the devil” tale?
Who loves combining chocolate and peanut butter? This guy, that’s who.
I don’t have a heartfelt, in-depth explanation for this story. I wanted to combine the courtroom drama cliché with the deal-with-the-devil cliché, and Chuckles Mulrooney was born. Sometimes, you just want to write something that will make people laugh.
The oldest date I have on this one is October 6, 1997. I know it’s older than that, but that’s the oldest last-modified stamp I have. So as I write this author’s note, it seems Chuckles was a tale I penned fifteen years ago. Man, how time flies. Oh, and if you’re just discovering this after I’m already dead, go fuck yourself. You whippersnappers don’t appreciate life the way we dead people did.
For a story I wrote in my mid-20s, I’m pretty happy with it. By that time I had already spent five or six years as a reporter, so I was a pro writer and created many column inches per week (you might have had to be a reporter in the ’80s or ’90s to know what a “column inch” is, you goddamn whippersnappers). I was still relatively new to the game of writing stories to submit to fiction markets. This was one of them, and, no, it did not get published.
Because it was a mid-20s story, I was trying to write about “stuff I know.” I didn’t know about deals with Old Scratch, but I knew the frustration and hopes of being an aspiring horror writer. You can see a lot of those emotions in the main character as a window to how I felt at the time.
It’s a fun story. I think it has a great twist. I hope you like it.