The Story Behind "The Soul of Andrew Scott"

“The Soul of Andrew Scott” started as a serialized short story that I wrote early on when I started Armadillo & Sands. I had the parts slightly mapped out, but the story still went a little longer than I originally anticipated. The story was originally meant to go for only four to sex posts, but ended up being seven posts long. I haven’t done any real revisions on the piece, although I did review for some small revisions when moving the story from Armadillo & Sands to here.

I’ve always been interested in the concept of Satan. He’s the ultimate villain, but you rarely see him humanized. I wasn’t really seeking to humanize him here, I did that in a ten minute play that I wrote that you’ll see here in the future. With “The Soul of Andrew Scott” I wanted to focus on the concept that the power that Satan has is given to him by the individual. This was in response to seeing Christians post comments about how we need to watch out for Satan.

The story was loosely, very loosely, inspired by stories like “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and “The Devil and Tom Walker” as well as “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. The concept was mainly centered on reinventing the idea of selling your soul to Satan as well as defining the motives for his actions. I feel like the end result ended up being partially satirical and partially transgressional. It also sets up the character of Satan in my form of fiction for the possibility of future use, which is something that I have considered.

Naturally, this isn’t a perfect story though. This is just the beginning of this story, and I intend to do further revisions of this story. I feel that I do need to make it more concise and shorten the length. I also primarily placed the focus on the Satan character, and I want to revise it to make Andrew Scott the focus of the story. Since I just reread it for the first time in a while, I think I’m going to sit on it for a bit. I’ll let you know when I revise it though.