David Tai on "Executive Decisions"

As a side piece to last night's blog, David Tai wanted to share his own take on writing his first Oziana story.

I blame David Maxine and Jared Davis for "Executive Decisions," let me explain why.

It began, basically, with Jared's "Borderlands"... what he now is calling Outsiders from Oz. He'd asked me to review what he'd written. So naturally, I'd said that Dorothy was being overused for these kind of adventures, and why not, for once, leave Dorothy home? (Jared note: Dorothy was never going to go on this adventure.)

Naturally, then, I suggested he use the opportunity to make a secondary plot out of that if he wanted to write a novel. He chose, instead, to merge it with a different secondary plot. But that left Dorothy sitting around the Emerald City doing nothing, and that left me sad that something wasn't being done with that.

Around the same time, Jared wrote a blog entry about The Lost King of Oz. In the comments, David Maxine discussed how wildly out of character Ozma was, which led me to wonder, just, if there was a way to make the seemingly out of character attitudes make sense.

Why would Ozma so casually execute a witch?

And at around that same time, I'd been talking to Kim McFarland about her own work, A Refugee in Oz, and talking about how she should consider, for a new project, writing about the girls of Oz. She returned that a) she hated cute girls and b) she didn't see much distinction between the girls. So breaking down Trot, Betsy, and Dorothy turned out to be a fun exercise. Putting all that together, naturally, I had to use Betsy and Trot to help illustrate the difference between how each girl would approach a situation, and especially to highlight the decision that Dorothy would have to be making.

So naturally, first, why would Ozma execute someone she'd vowed to take care of?

Answer: she wouldn't.

But how the heck would she manage to do that? Looking again at Lost King, I couldn't help but note that they'd not shown the body, only brought back her shoes... and the answer was pretty obvious after that. But why spoil it? Read for yourself!

"Executive Decisions" is available exclusively in Oziana #38.