Audio-Play: “Finding Victor”

Many years ago I entered one of the quarterly “24 Hour Short Story” contests at Writers-Weekly.com. Essentially, the idea was to write a story based off of a single first line, no longer than the given word limit (1,000 words in the case of that particular contest), within 24 hours. Now I am by no means a fast writer. It may or may not have taken me forty-five minutes just to write the last three sentences. But it sounded like fun, and 1,000 words was surely doable.

For example, as the saying goes, this picture alone is worth 1,000 words.
Not sure to whom, but an aphorism is an aphorism.

The website’s primary tip was this: The judges have to read over 700 stories, all with the same beginning, so for the love of GOD, be creative and give them an unexpected ending. I took that to heart, worked backwards, and at the end of the contest, turned in something I called “Finding Victor.” (Okay, so originally it was called “Meeting Victor,” but the title got mixed up along the way and wound up as “Finding.” It’s a shame, because I liked “Meeting” better, but it’s my own fault, so, oh well.)

My story took 2nd place, netting me $250 prize money and a nice little ego boost, especially since a number of Internet-strangers who read the story wrote to me afterward to say they liked mine better than the 1st place winner. So I call that a moral victory, at least. Yet that wasn’t the end…

Years later, my buddy David Taylor at SciFiCommons was looking for some short stories to turn into audio-plays for a project called Reality’s Edge, intended to be something of a modern, audio-only answer to The Twilight Zone. He and a few others took “Finding Victor” and made it into a reality.

Or nearly so. Technical and scheduling difficulties, unfortunately, ended the Reality’s Edge project before its time. Still, “Finding Victor” was mostly completed, and I have to say that everyone who worked on it did a fantastic job. I didn’t want to let that effort go unheard, so today I present to you the mostly-complete version of the audio-play adapted from “Finding Victor.” All that’s really missing is the intro, and I understand a little music was intended to be added as well, but I think the acting and sound effects stand on their own, and the lack of music works to make it just that much eerier.

So here it is! Give it a listen, and please enjoy…