You've probably noticed by now that Bookburners can be a little... weird? I've mentioned before that one of my main worries when I first joined the team was that I wouldn't be able to keep up and bring enough weird to fit in.And then I was assigned the one episode where an entire town is swallowed up by magic gone wild and Our Heroes have to save the day (or... try to, anyway). This had to be absolutely as weird as Bookburners ever gets. A tall order, my friends. As tall as the sky.Now, I was always the weird kid in school, but my brand of weird was the kind where you're bad at combing your hair and you use words your friends have never heard before and you don't get anyone else's TV references. An affable, out-of-touch kind of weird.This is in no way the kind of weird you need for world-threatening magipocalypses. We needed weird to the max. Weird that was unsettling. Weird that was terrifying. And alas, nobody is terrified by your blank look when someone cracks a joke about Full House. (If they had, my middle school experience might've been very different, I tell you what!)Luckily by the time Shock and Awe rolled around, I had two full seasons of other writers' work to pilfer from. Most notably, Brian set the stage for me beautifully in Episode 10 by describing the first stages of this magical infestation: the one-ness of it all and people melting like wax. It was a brilliant foundation to build on. But in Shock and Awe, we needed the situation to progress, like a disease rapidly getting worse.Listen, nobody can out-weird Brian Francis Slattery. It is hopeless to even try. Dude's some kind of weirdness savant. The best one can hope for is to tack on a couple of gargoyles and fancy columns and hope you haven't ruined the effect.It was not easy to get into the right frame of mind. I did a lot of hand-wringing and soul-searching. I worried I was going to let the team down. I worried I was going to let the readers down!But at the last minute, a secret weapon fell into my hands. The week that I wrote Shock and Awe was the very same week that Gravity Falls had its series finale. (It was amazepants, by the way, as is the whole show.)Gravity Falls has its own flavor of weird, and it's definitely not in the same category as Bookburners weird. But seeing that magic apocalypse swallowing up a small town freed me up to think a lot bigger than I had before. Among other things, I realized that I could have lots of little different kinds of weird going on instead of sticking too closely to what Brian had done already. And so Shock and Awe dabbles in dozens of little weirdnesses. I call it the throw-everything-at-the-wall strategy. Let us know if it works for you?
