Stories Are Better When They're Local

 Recently I finally finished and released the Eric Filler gender swap story Swapnado.  After a couple of tries, the story I ran with focuses on a pair of storm chasers who get changed when an experimental chemical is sucked into a tornado.  That was my third attempt at a story but it wasn't the third idea.  I had other potential ways of doing it.

One of those ways was to have a swapnado hit some small town--or maybe even a big town.  But I resisted this idea.  Why?  Because it would have gotten too big.  If you have a whole town affected by it then you've got a lot of people and you have all these excess issues to deal with.  Like what happens to women who get hit with the swapnado?  What happens to children?  And before you know it, you have a bunch of different storylines and it would wind up the size of a Stephen King novel.

This was to some extent the problem when I did the Gender Swap Outbreak trilogy in 2019.  I created a disease that would cause people to swap but then that brought up the issue:  if it changes a man into a woman, what happens to a woman?  Does she change into a man?  What happens to kids who get it?  So I had to come up with answers for that.

It was kind of the same problem in 2013 with the third Girl Power novel, League of Evil, where a feminizing weapon is used on the whole world.  Because it was literally the whole world, there was a lot of stuff to cover about how people were affected and the damage caused and so on.  In the end I think I only skimmed the surface of it for the sake of the narrative.

To me the same thing is true with "the blip" in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  There's so much stuff brought up by simply vaporizing 3-4 billion people and then having those same 3-4 billion people return 5 years later.  They hardly skimmed the surface of all the issues this would create.  It's something that could have its own anthology series--for a few seasons.  That's one of many reasons I thought that was pretty lame.

So when I was conceiving Swapnado, I never wanted anything that would create a ton of additional issues.  I wanted to keep the focus small--and thus the story smaller.  It still wound 85,000 words, but it could have been 10 times that if I'd made it a much larger phenomenon.

At least to me, I always think it's better to keep stories as small as possible.  Even the Sharknado movies on which that was based do that for the most part by focusing on just a small group of people.  In movies and TV (or TV movies) that's practical as you can't hire millions of actors to do a ton of different stories.  It's easier to do with books because you don't have to hire people, but stories with a lot of characters are usually long and confusing.

So that's why I'm saying, keep your threats on a local level and it makes the story a lot easier to deal with.