It’s time once again for a story from the archives! This week it’s “Stuart Lem: War Hero.” Man, I used to dream about a book/TV series based on Stuart Lem all the time in late high school/early college. It’s weird to re-read it now because 1.) I think it’s still lots of fun 2.) I wonder why haven’t I dreamed about working on it again in recent years? Seriously, I’ll have to revisit this idea sometime.
But, anyway, you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you? Let’s quote part of a note a wrote about it for a collection I made way too long ago:
Author’s Note: Ah, “Stuart Lem: War Hero.” This is the second complete reworking of a short story from high school, if you don’t include the television script I started. This is the original Stuart Lem, a name (for reasons too uninteresting to explain) later given to a megalomaniacal personality invented for the early Derailed Trains website (a writer’s website) and then transferred to the despotic headmaster in The Story Project. This story holds a perennial fascination for me—the love story running beneath an action flick that has been transmuted into an everyman’s life. It’s my attempt to fill the modern world with a sense of wonder, to pull out the wars that exist in anyone’s life and make them overt, comical, and interesting. Stuart Lem deserves a book. Stuart and Miranda’s love story deserves a book. Other characters that did not make it into this reworking deserve a book. Maybe, someday, they’ll get one.
So, download the story, read it, and if you like it, tell me! Maybe someday I’ll finally get around to writing more stories of Stuart and Miranda.
Download here–>Stuart Lem: War Hero by Nick Hayden