Two Thousand was an idea I’d come up with sometime in 1991 while working in the Media Center of the Emerson College Library, back when it was at 150 Beacon. (I still miss that place.) I’d been puttering through our multimedia collection of 16mm films and videotapes in the back office when I stumbled up on our copy of Howard Hawks’ pre-code screwball comedy Twentieth Century. Though the title comes from the train in the film, I kind of liked the idea of a story title evoking a second meaning: the coming of a new era. I thought: in just a few short years we would be sliding into not just a new century but a new millennia. What about a story about a group of people of different ages coming to terms with 2000 being just around the corner? (Yes, yes, I know technically they both start with the year 2001. But I refuse to be a pedantic doofus.)
Originally the idea was to write a handful of intertwined short stories about Gen-Xers of different stripes making their first tentative steps into the real world and moving towards their own personal and career goals. It was a lofty idea and I wrote quite a few short snippets, notes and story arc maps, and though I was never quite able to make any of them work at the time (mainly due to inexperience of writing in particular and life in general), I always thought it was a great basis for a project.
One particular story thread from this project was about a young man with dreams of fame with his band Billow, and what it would take to achieve more than just local success. I was continually drawn to this idea (I had a secret desire to be a busker to make extra change, but I never had the time or the emotional stability then, and felt my guitar work was far from decent) and revived it in 1994 as a new writing project unrelated to any of my much older trunked ideas. I made some rather significant headway with this one, writing perhaps a dozen or so chapters and mapping out nearly the entire story. And yes, I even created a two-cassette mix tape soundtrack for it.
As you may have already guessed, this too fell by the wayside due to the Great Fail of ’95 when I moved back to my hometown, broke and broken. I was not in the best of mindsets to work on the project, and besides; I’d already started working on True Faith with my ex-gf by then, which set me on the very long road of writing science fiction and learning how to actually write.
Neither version of Two Thousand ever really disappeared. Every now and again I’d revive it, if only for a short time, then file it away when a more important project came along. Thankfully, at some point in the late 90s I’d made extremely detailed index cards of the short story ideas, character names, places, quotes, and even soundtracks.
Recently I tried reviving the story about four or five years ago that I trunked almost immediately, as it wasn’t anywhere near what I was trying to achieve with the idea. I did, however, give Billow some page time as guest stars in Meet the Lidwells! as the Lidwells’ favorite Boston band to tour with, and the climactic scene of Thomas performing “Listening” live was borrowed from a similar idea that was to be part of Billow’s story.
Thirty years on, and I still think of this project now and again, especially when I think about my college days in Boston. (And yes, listening to a lot of music from 1991-94, especially early Britpop, brings back the memories as well.) Will I ever revive it? Should I? Some stories should of course stay trunked, but it doesn’t hurt to dust off some of these ideas, especially if I can use them elsewhere or in new ways. Lately I’ve been thinking of playing around with these short stories for my Daily Words, just to keep the writing muscles active. I don’t plan on being too serious about it, but if it ends up being something worth expanding on, then it’s worth a shot, right?
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