Doppelgangers, Anyone? http://ping.fm/z94Wi

Doppelgangers, Anyone?

Photograph by J. Kyle Keener for National Geographic

OK, so really it's the annual Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio (as photographed by J. Kyle Keener for National Geographic). But it's inspiration like this that gives me some of these ideas I come out with like...

(spoiler alert! don't click if you don't want to know)

Isaac Pressman - A Free Will Flux Character Biography

Isaac Pressman was born in a Queens, New York hospital to Martin Pressman, a traveling industrial supplies salesman and his wife, Abigail (Gail), a sometimes substitute schoolteacher, sometimes one-woman child day care center, and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Isaac grew up a confident, if unsentimental, child, frequently having to share his mother's attention with several other random children, yet always being the hub of all playtime activities (as it was, after all, his home, his toys). Also contributing to the development of Isaac's self-contained (if aloof) personality was that his father was rarely at home. 

When it was learned that Isaac's father was spending his time away with various regular girlfriends who peppered his northeastern regional sales route, Isaac's mother did the then unthinkable deed of filing for divorce. She got the home, custody of Isaac, and a tidy alimony. Isaac saw his father even less after that.

A naturally bright young man who spent much of his alone time reading books on history and National Geographic magazines, he attended Princeton University for his undergraduate degree in Journalism, under a partial scholarship and working random part-time jobs for the remainder of his tuition so he didn't have to accept his father's money. It was there at Princeton, while in his junior year beginning the coursework for a minor in Acting (he thought, as it happened correctly, that it would aid in his one day becoming a famous television news anchor) where he met the woman who was to become his wife, Paulette Anderson (though her friends always called her Piper for her luscious singing voice) a sophomore in the Musical Theater department. 

Graduating one year ahead of Piper, Isaac stuck around taking a job as an editor's assistant at a local newspaper until Piper could finish school and join him on his cross-country relocation to Los Angeles to get his Journalism Masters at UCLA. Their plans got delayed by an extra year and a half, however, as he helped Piper battle, and thankfully triumph, over breast cancer. Upon her recovery and completing of her undergraduate studies, it was off they went to California, an extra bundle in tow, which they didn't discover until a week after landing. 

In Los Angeles, Piper took little short-term singing gigs, like recording radio commercial jingles or playing Mrs. Claus at the mall every winter, so she could stay home raising their son, Caleb (or at least keep him close), while Isaac completed his masters degree and immediately landed himself a job writing briefs for the weekend anchors at WNN TV, the cable television arm of World Network News, the world's largest news media network. Three years later, Isaac had climbed his way up to become the network's (and the nation's) #1 weekday and prime time news anchor. Of course this left him little time for his family, and when his wife's cancer returned, and this time won, the world's most famous newsman was left a bereft husband and the ill-prepared father of a bitter and confused pre-adolescent boy.

At the start of Free Will Flux, his son 14 and his wife gone near 5 years now, Isaac is 46.

Wow - I want to do this! Walkway over the Hudson. Mom & Dad's 2010 Labor Day Weekend Sunday Activty. http://www.walkway.org/

Deleted Scene: One Small Step For Otto

Otto Tannenbaum stood before a swelling hole in the iridescent sky which hovered above a desert swarming with the desperate vestiges of mankind. Beneath these heaving dunes of flesh, not a grain of sand was visible.

Otto raised a foot. The desert held its breath. The foot that bore the weight of the world breached the threshhold of the rift. Otto glanced back, flashed a tenuous grin. His foot was gone where no man (presumably) had yet, and he was still breathing. 

Then the rift gulped him down like tossing back a shot, smacked its lips and sealed them tightly.

Otto and his so-called "Bridge" were both gone. The shepherd had deserted his flock and the sheep went wild.