Popping

“Some enthusiasts favour inflation. It's cheap, simple and as near as your local filling station. But there's a very serious risk of being carried away, as many inflation writers have discovered. Many promising young ladies have exploded at the hands of the inflation addicts. That's if they haven't drifted away over the rooftops…”

     Research and Development newsletter, Issue #1

A shocking state of affairs, to be sure, but largely apocryphal. Best as I've been able to determine, this issue went out sometime around September, 1995. At the time, popping stories were pretty much non-existent. Certainly there was a lot of talk about it, and writers would often hint that an explosive outcome was a possibility, but it never actually happened. The first popping stories wouldn’t appear until 1997.

Nailing down the timing of various “firsts” in the inflation community is admittedly tricky. In many cases I’m writing purely from memory, since I have very few records of what happened twenty years ago. So I’ll do the best that I can, and I fully acknowledge that the passage of time has likely introduced inaccuracies into my account.

“Where’s the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!”
    — Marvin the Martian

It wasn’t until I met Champagne Moon that I seriously considered writing a popping story. Miss Moon was a big fan of popping and quite disappointed by the lack of such stories. We discussed the subject at length, covering much of the same ground that I had with others in the past.

Inflation fiction was rife with mechanical malfunctions, magical mishaps, accidental overdoses, and other unfortunate happenings that resulted in people blowing up to absurd sizes. It seemed odd that none of these situations resulted in anyone doing what overinflated balloons so often do. Despite so many instance of people inflating out of control, control was always regained before anything too unfortunate happened. There were definitely people interested in such stories, but the subject was controversial enough that nobody was willing to cross that line.

At least that was the case until I encountered Champagne Moon. She had written several stories already, although she hadn’t posted any publicly at that point. She asked me for feedback on her work. The first story she sent me was The Reunion. I highly recommend reading it if you haven’t already, as it’s a wonderful piece and spoilers lurk ahead. Although if you haven’t read it in the nearly two decades since its release, you’ve nobody but yourself to blame.

She asked me if she’d made it clear enough that Jamie was going to burst. I had to go back and reread it. In retrospect, the hints at Jamie’s impending explosion barely even qualified as hints; it was pretty clear that Bob was out for revenge and Jamie was going to go boom.

What shocked me was that I’d completely missed it. Despite the obviousness of it, it never occurred to me that Jamie might burst because that simply never happened in inflation stories. Any indication that a character might burst carried no weight at all; it was a threat that no author would follow through on.

I encouraged her to release her stories. She encouraged me to write a popping story. In the end, we both prevailed. I convinced her to let me post one of her stories anonymously (eventually she would let me add her name to it). The Ballad of Joe and Moira became the site’s first popping story. She convinced me that popping was a subject worth tackling, helped to a great extent by my reaction to The Reunion. When someone shouted, “Look out, she’s going to explode!” I wanted my readers to be concerned that it could actually happen. This resulted in The Stargazer, the site’s second popping story.

That's how it got started. Afterwards, popping stories began to appear fairly regularly. The rest, as they say, is history.