Byuck vs “Marital Matters”

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I honestly can't quite remember how Dave and Curses and Ref first arrived into my mind. It's hard to image they weren't always there. But I'm quite certain they did not exist prior to the essay that serves as Byuck's preface.

That essay quickly spawned two more. And for a while, I intended to write an entire book under the pseudonym "Institute for Marital Concerns." But all my cleverness seemed to have been tapped. None of the later attempts quite sung.

Which may be why I turned to fictional characters.

I suspect the essays were not part of my original plan for Byuck. After all, the original title was Byuck: A Play. Because Byuck started out as a . . . play. (You probably saw that coming.)

Now that Byuck is published and dead, it feels moderately less monomaniacal to quote myself. So this is from the acknowledgments:

My first thank you also dates to ’99 when Donlu Thayer read character sketches and early scenes printed off my old 386 and told me they were good but maybe I wasn’t quite ready to write this yet. She was absolutely right.

Byuck was difficult to write when I, like my principals, was also single, also a BYU student, also crazymixedup, also just off my mission. I was just too much like them. I had no perspective.

But after two years of marriage and having left BYU, Byuck came quickly. I arranged all the extant scenes in order, started from the beginning, translated drama to prose and filled in the gaps. Wrote the ending and voila! I was done! Rough draft! Fob was incredibly helpful in turning it into a legitimate work, and then it was just a matter of (lotsa) time until it showed up in print.

"Marital Matters" meanwhile had served it's purpose. Though it came from the same primordial sludge, it had incubated its brother and no longer mattered.

That said, "Marital Matters" (and its successes) surely kept me going through the Byuck-writing process. And thus it is with great pleasure that I announce its release as an ebook.

I'm offering it for free. First because it's from so long ago I don't feel right making money of that other Theric's work. Second because, full disclosure, this is mostly a promotional gambit. The first one's free, etc.

But I am much better for you than heroin. I am. So click. Click. Click. You know you want to. Click. C'mon. What are you waiting for? Click!