IT'S - The Novella

"NOT THE SPEPHEN KING'S 'IT'"
by Dan Culberson

Stephen King's IT, published in 1986, begins "Chapter 1 -- After the Flood (1957): The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years--if it ever did end--began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain."

IT'S: THE NOVELLA/Eventually to Be a TV Microseries (If Not a Minor Motion Picture) (And NOT the Stepen King IT), finished in 1993 after 2-1/2 years by nine different writers, begins "Chapter 1 -- After the Flood, Before the Preface, and During the Intermission: It was not exactly a dark and stormy night, but it was certainly a 'real frog-strangler.'"

The time was 1990, and King's horror novel had just been shown on TV as a miniseries with Tim Curry as the terror Pennywise, who sometimes manifests himself before his victims as a clown.

I remembered reading about a serial novel written in the Sixties called Naked Came the Stranger, for which each chapter was written by a different writer who didn't know what had been written so far until everything had been sent on for the next chapter. I proposed the idea of writing a serial novella as a parody of IT on a computer bulletin board devoted to the intricacies of writing, language, and proper grammar, and I got a favorable response almost immediately from a number of people all over the U.S. and both New Zealand and Amsterdam.

I suggested that we would call our parody IT'S, because many discussions on the BB in the past had centered around (or "on") the proper use and spelling of "its" and "it's." I didn't think a full-blown novel was possible or necessary, and so after many discussions with other participants, we settled on an even 10 chapters by 10 different writers.

The other nine participants who were eager to join the project were John in Dallas; Bob in Austin; Angus (not his real name) in Boulder, Colorado; Emily in San Francisco; Len in Amsterdam; Warwick in New Zealand; Richard in Raleigh, North Carolina; Zack in San Francisco; and Richard in New York. Some of us had actually met before, but all of us knew one another from our bulletin-board and private correspondence.

We then established the ground rules about the writing. We settled on an order for writing the chapters and decided it was up to the writers whether they wrote their chapter "blind" without seeing anything that had been written before or whether they received all the chapters written up to the point of their chapter before writing anything. We also decided that the comparable menace to Pennywise the Clown would be a Miss Thistlebottom, the bane of everyone's grade-school days, the one spinster teacher who insisted on the "correct" rules and taught by terror. And we decided that every chapter had to mention water in some way and had to have at least one horrible death in it.

However, after the first three chapters had been written, things started falling apart. Richard in New York, who was to be the author of Chapter 4, dropped out of the project. Meanwhile, Warick in New Zealand was chomping at the bit. He had specifically chosen to write Chapter 10, because he wanted to kill off any of the other remaining characters and run off with Emily, whom he had never met in person, but on whom he had developed an electronic crush. However, before he could write his chapter, Warwick left the company and had to drop out of the project. Zack quickly followed.

So, we were stuck at Chapter 4, and I needed to find four new writers. I quickly enrolled Diane in New York and Dave in Toronto. Dave even took over Chapter 4 and managed to crank it out in style as "Don't Look Back."

The middle line of Stephen King's IT is "Oh God it's Hansel and Gretel it's the witch the one that always scared me the worst because she ate the children--." The middle line of IT'S: THE NOVELLA is "We led it to its victim."

Then, Len in Amsterdam met another Bob from Austin, in person, talked him into writing Chapter 9, and I decided to round out the project by writing Chapter 10.

Stephen King's IT ends with a last line of "Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it."

IT'S: THE NOVELLA/Eventually to Be a TV Microseries (If Not a Minor Motion Picture) (And NOT the Stephen King IT), after 30 months, 13 writers, 10 cities, 4 countries, 3 continents, 10 chapters, 33,965 words, and countless puns and wordplays, ends "Eek!"

Chapter 1
After the Flood, Before the Preface, and During the Intermission
- (Dan Culberson)

Chapter 2
The Fat Lady Sings
-(Angus Q. Bogus)

Chapter 3
Books Do Furnish a Mind
- (Emily Breed)

Chapter 4
Don't Look Back
- (Dave Mooney)

Chapter 5
The War of the Words
- (Len Brown)

Chapter 6
Washington, Wet and Wild
- (Diane Reese)

Chapter 7
Poet in Residence
- (Bob Blair)

Chapter 8
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
- (John Shea)

Chapter 9
Trophies, Imposters, Posters, and a Serial Comma
- (Bob Kusnetz)

Chapter 10
Now We Lay Us Down to Sleep, After the Horror, and Before We Die
- (Dan Culberson)