About
A lot of people have asked me what I’ll be doing when House of the Muses wraps up in 2012. I’ve always answered that I’m not sure–I’ve invested a lot of emotion and time into this current series and found it inconceivable to consider switching gears at this time.
Here’s a scene from near the end of the first issue of a series I was muddling through the creation of back when I was still in high school in 1980. It went through numerous stupid names back then (Galaxy Guardians, Operation MindCrime–yes, that’s the title of a Queensrÿche album), and I finally settled on a title for the first story as “A Deviant Mind”, but to this day I have still not come up with a title for this series that I like.
Holy crap. I just realized that this particular story just turned 30 years old. I am one heck of a late bloomer.
So there you have it….the telling factor of what I’ll be doing sits entirely on readership interest. And no, that’s not Dika in the cryotube…or IS it?
No, really it’s not. I was just joking. If I get enough actual comments from interested readers, and not just a lot of rubbernecking, I might consider dragging this series out of the storypile.
Skewered_Viewpoint: Excellent storyline, but I meant to ask if you have “tuned” the story a little from when you first wrote it?
Pam Harrison: Slightly…
the scene where Villam and Peter rescue Tara has been redone a little. The original sketches involved a police firefight between Vill and Pete and Tara’s pursuers aboard a starship as the boys grabbed her and shot their way free, then teleported out and arrived in Dion’s office to announce the rescue of a wirehead. Not too practical actually.
On the other side of the coin, as far as character development, for starters I wasn’t out of the closet at age 16, and yet the tension between three of the characters was laughably already there. In this rewrite 30 years later, I can let’er rip.
The story is still taking place right now on a medical outpost orbiting some planet in the Alpha Centauri system, but the science is now more like hard science than a ripping scifi/fantasy jaunt.
But I do like the breakneck action pace, so I’ll make sure to keep that a part of the series. 
But the basic premise of the series has not really changed a bit. The details have only been fine-tuned over 30 years. Heh! If I hadn’t tuned the story one bit since I wrote it in 1980 that would make me a …prodigy….
…or it would make this one hell of a very vivid past life recollection.
Sometime back in April 2010 I spent half the night online at Facebook with an old friend of mine from high school who remembers quite a lot about me from those days. We continued to be friends during my college days until the late 80s and had played numerous RPG (role-playing games) with our group over those years, so he wanted to know what my proposed series was about.
So we talked. It was an exciting time, plotting the rebirth of an old story, looking at what parts weren’t so solid back in 1980–in the era before the Internet, Twitter and cell phones, if you can all conceive of such a time–! Then we looked at what I had and how best to make that work. It’s not so much that this type of plot may have been done before, he said, it’s that you present it in a completely new and exciting way, without all the tired old backstories. And I think I’ve succeeded there–the premise was the same in 1980, and in this current political climate, the year 2010, the 21st Century, the possibility that this sort of premise could actually come true in our own world might scare the bejeebers out of quite a lot of people.
The tagline of the series is, “How Do You Find Yourself–When You Don’t Know WHO You Really Are?” The Square commentators, the old fogeys, might mark this as one of those “Coming of Age” stories, but it’s so much more than that. You bet, the main character is gay, and it becomes very clear throughout the series that there is so much more to her than that. Her journey is heartbreaking and lonely sometimes as she tries to overcome what’s been done to her and find a human connection.
What makes the series even crazier is when Tara is rescued and taken into Imperial custody. A hunt begins to find out who she was and what is going on. Imperial Agents become involved who claim to have some idea of what is afoot, but their dogged determination to hold Tara in custody indefinitely, keep “Classified” information under wraps, and withhold the results of their investigation regarding her case from coming to the surface, pushes Tara to find out on her own.
When Tara takes it on herself to discover the truth, what she finds has her on the run again. This begins a whole new journey for her as the more she learns, the worse it gets. The more Tara learns, the more she realizes she may not be one of the good guys after all.
So…does Tara ever find out who she is and where she comes from? Follow the adventure here, or at my mirror site, and learn what haunting, dark secrets lie deep within…A Deviant Mind.
