Armageddon Trigger Finger

In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy book 4

Armageddon Trigger Finger

Liam Gibbs

If you purchased this book without a cover, you are a rare individual indeed. Note that not many people would want a coverless book. You're different. You see the beauty within, not the outward appearance. You don't need a cover because you don't want to judge this book. I get it.

But this book is naked without a cover. Naked and ashamed. It has no love. It's cold in winter. Won't you please donate to the Clothe a Book Foundation? Every dollar you give goes to providing a cover for a book in need of your help. Please. Donate today.

Thank you.

IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWRY book 4: ARMAGEDDON TRIGGER FINGER

Copyright (c) 2017 Liam Gibbs

All rights reserved.

Cover picture: Azer Babaev.

Cover art colors: Stanislav Leonov.

Cover concept and design: Liam Gibbs.

Cover me. I'm going in.

Intergalactic Protection sponsorship art by Jarrod Atterbury.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The book's permission, that is. So ask it before heading to the photocopy machine.

This book is a work of fiction. It's not even inspired by true events. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, incidents, grand-mal seizures, blatant lewd public displays, and things that come out of someone's uncle's mouth at Thanksgiving are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events, and locales is entirely coincidental. Even the stuff on page 18. Don't look yet! Work your way in to it!

ISBN 13: 978-0995964976

First printing: February 2017

{ PLOT DEVICE PUBLISHING }

The Table of Contents That One Day May Save Your Life

At the Front

Other Books in the Series

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Book 4: Armageddon Trigger Finger

Chapter One: The Pajama Party for Your Preapocalypse Warmup

Chapter Two: Sugar-Rushing the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory

Chapter Three: The Last Brain Cell Never Dies Quietly

Chapter Four: Stupidity Has a New Name, and That Name Is Biff-Like

Chapter Five: Telemarketing Turntable

Chapter Six: Maturity, Begone!

Chapter Seven: Factory Defect in the Think Tank

Chapter Eight: This Chapter Was Written before a Live Studio Audience

Chapter Nine: Product Misplacement

Chapter Ten: Half-Cocking an Empty Gun

Chapter Eleven: Creeping Meatballism Strikes Again!

Chapter Twelve: The Armageddon Checklist...Double-Checked

Chapter Thirteen: Short Interlude into the Preposterous Wasteland of Thought

Chapter Fourteen: Unwelcome Home

Chapter Fifteen: The Plot Convolutes

At the Back

Book 5, Chapter One: Crapping the Terran Genome

Appendix: Frequently Asked Questions

Appendix: Intergalactic Protection: List of Advertisements

About That Guy You Just Put in Your Will

Connect with the Series

Available on the Author's Super-Awesome Site

This stupendous, amazing, spectacular, not-at-all-overhyped comedy/science-fiction series can be found in the following parts:

Book 1: Serial Fiction Sideshow

Book 2: Home Sweet Home Invasion

Book 3: Technophobia

Book 4: Armageddon Trigger Finger

Book 5: The Genetic Equation

Book 6: Power Tool

Book 7: The Lesser of Two Egos

Book 8: Untitled of Attitude Adjustments

Book 9: Those We Left Behind

Book 10: Metaphor for Life

Book 11: Oh, Crock, Here Comes a Meteor!

Book 12: His Kingdom Come

Book 13: A Wolf in Sheep's Armor

Book 14: Man Versus Machine Part 1 of 1

Book 15: Our New Hiring Policy

Book 16: Life like Broken Glass

Book 17: The Church of Steeple

Book 18: Blood Bunny

Book 19: Disease of Behavior

Book 20: The Paper Tiger's Yardstick

Book 21: This One Has a Dancing Gibbon

Book 22: My Brother's Captor

Book 23: Marching Orders

Book 24: To Wake the Deactivated

The Story So Far Vol. 1

Please visit the In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy site for all these free e-books and more information.

Other Dissertations by the Author concerning the Socioeconomic Condition of Society

Maybe check out these other things 'cause they're superfine too!

Not So Superpowered, available at tiny.cc/nssuperpowered

Three Flash Fictions, available upon request from the author

Episodes of random television shows playing in your head

Dedicated to...

Mom and Pop Gibbs for tolerating me, sometimes to within an inch of my life. Kudos for raising this fine, upstanding gentleman and releasing him into the wild.

(P.S. I didn't buy the fine, upstanding gentleman bit either.)

(P.P.S. I do eat all my vegetables, though.)

Acknowledgements

Yes, it's that time again for me to slightly regard with a how-do-you-do to all the people who helped this story roll off the couch one morning, dust the cheese puffs off its stained T-shirt, and become a real book so it could pay rent for once.

These are the shout-outs I like to offer my backup singers in the hopes that they'll stop shooting me that predatory look every time I ask for more help. So, let's give it up for...

...Matt Levesque. The editing job you do on my books keeps my facts and details straight. Without you, Reef would probably be missing the gun he was using to pistol-whip generics two pages before.

...Steve Baptista. Your brainiac mind helps my details and facts to stay the course. Without your keen eye, the milk Power Plant splooged out of his nose would no longer be all over Franchise's hair.

...Mark Nadon. Your expertise and advice help me keep the details in Legion's battle against Master Asinine realistic, or at least as realistic as a space opera comedy that involves something called a Face Blitzkrieg can get. And our occasional writing hangouts really help get the creative juices flowing. It's been too long. Let's do one again soon.

...LeAnh Gibbs. Without you handling the day-to-dayness at home, Smithereens would probably have far fewer ways to rig Kamikaze to detonate.

...Bernie Pallek. Without your help, without your web-site expertise, without your assistance at the expos, cons, fairs, and appearances, Schizophrenic might not have made it out of the publication of book 2 for a few more rousing insults at anyone within shouting distance. Or broadcast range when he gets his hands on the right equipment.

...my grandfather, William Gibbs. Without you and your persuading me to pick up this writing bug in the first place, Ace Spandex would never have graced the world. The world could have probably done without Multipurpose, though.

...kitchen appliances. Without you, I couldn't nuke, bake, refrigerate, toast, or brew my fine breakfast goods. You helped, too, kitchen appliances. Pat yourselves on the back. (Not you, stovetop. That's the last time you burn my eggs while I'm not paying attention.)

Prologue

The whole deal about writing is you have to love it. It's not even a like relationship. Love it. Adore it. Loving is giving 100 percent. Liking is giving somewhere around 40 percent, 50 percent, maybe 90 percent. In this regard, even 90 percent will get a manuscript 90 percent done. Trust me. I have a few 90 percenters on my computer, a few I'll-get-back-to-you-one-day-manuscript manuscripts. I liked those manuscripts. I even enjoyed them. A lot. But I didn't love them. It takes love to finish a manuscript. It takes dedication. It takes sweat—literally during those trying stages. It takes adoration (and a lot of humility) to get feedback.

So let me elaborate on what I said earlier: You want to see a manuscript from word one to word ten or word one thousand? It takes like. You want to see a manuscript from word one to publication? It takes love. End of story (pun maybe a little intended).

The whole deal about writing is you have to love it. And loving it means enduring all the drafts you don't want to go through before you move on to your next great story. I typically go through several drafts before I consider a manuscript ready for professional editing (or professional soul-shredding).

So, whether you're thinking of writing your first novel, novella, short story, or poem, let me walk you through the road ahead...if you decide you like the look of my road. (Everyone's is unique. Pick your own creative road, but dedicate yourself to walking it.) Here we go.

The first draft for me is just the junk: I barf up my ideas on paper. I just spew the stupid, ugly, stinky thing out. I think a lot of writers trip themselves up by needing to have something near perfect the first time around. Does a first manuscript need to smell nice and look like a bouquet? No! I live by the following unwritten (that pun wasn't intended) credo that I've heard on a lot of writing forums: Just get it down on paper. (Or computer. Or stone tablet. Or whatever.) Don't worry about character motivations or whether yell or bellow is the perfect word. It's all just details. First draft is dedicated to disgorging your story on paper. The only detail you might need to worry about is story structure: it might be tough to fix act II in later drafts than on the first try. (Easier than you think, though.) So just get your grand adventure on paper.

Save the tidying for later. In the later drafts, worry about if you misused, repeated, or forgot words. Reorder your paragraphs and sentences if these two sentences make more sense together than those two. Or if that other sentence is altogether unneeded. That's the second draft.

The third draft and those that follow involve making sure to engage the reader's senses more. Don't limit yourself to telling them what to picture, but broaden their experience: what to smell, hear, taste, and feel. How is setting lending its own foreboding feel? What does damp air feel like? What texture does animal fur have? What aggressive smell is Multipurpose wearing today?

Make sure there are enough props in your story instead of moving characters around a lifeless soundstage. Give them things to handle, things to move around, things to bump into.

Remove redundancies.

Give your work a mix of computer and paper editing. Yes, print the story on paper. For some reason, your eyes work differently when you look at something on paper rather than on the screen. Use your pen. Mark things up with crazy arrows, circles, and scratches. Gut it! Don't make the mistake of doing this just once either. Twice is good. I try to get at least two paper edits in.

By the way, this is what I mean by putting sweat into your story. Literal sweat. Paper edits are the edits I dread most. When there are parts you'd rather skip in your art, this is mine. Why? It's the most time consuming. This takes weeks, while an on-screen edit might take one week at most. And you have to slog through a paper edit twice: one time to mark changes on paper and then another to add those changes in to the computer. But do it. It pays off. This is part of the love of 100 percent.

At this point, I usually give a story to one of my betareaders. This is before I continue editing. Why not give your betareader the unpolished, perfect-as-it-can-be version, Liam? There's a pro and a con to waiting. The pro is your betareader reads the closest to publication you consider your manuscript to be. The con is, if you wait, in the meantime, you'll edit things your betareader might not like, sometimes small things but sometimes sweeping changes. Why edit through something that will be gutted later if you'll just have to repeat the process on those rewrites? It's up to you and your creative process if you want to wait. This is my road, but yours might be different. This is why I always ask more than one person to read any manuscript. You get an early opinion and can make repairs before getting that later, close-to-publication view.

Ask your betareader questions. What characters did they like or not like? What were their opinions on those characters? Who stood out? Whose story was this in their eyes? Who did they relate to? What chapters worked? What settings lent a tone to those chapters? Come up with a list of questions and hit up your betareaders later.

You can use further drafts to change or remove uninteresting words (don't say walk when you can say amble or strut) or remove