Scum is what I would call my first venture into the world of hardcore narcotics users. Heroin has occasionally been featured in my other stories, usually in passing or by someone who has a casual habit, but I never really attempted to show the darker, bleaker side that accompanies the use of heroin. The one where you find yourself living in the streets and sucking a dick for a fix, idly dreaming about the days where you locked yourself in your parents' bathroom and the assured yourself that you'd never get hooked as you fired your spike home. It was always a world that fascinated me, however. It's not a pretty world, or a happy one, but I don't sweep things under the rug and ignore them because they're unpleasant.

It's a fairly dark story, even though I approached the whole thing with a comic sensibility in the very beginning (maybe comic is not the right word) but as the story went on it changed and became something much more disturbing. The ending was not something I originally planned for either, but when I saw where the story was going, I thought it was the best course to take. I guess what I was really trying to say with Scum is that love cannot survive the disaster that is heroin addiction. Once you become hooked, everything takes a backseat.

It was somewhat painful for me to end the story the way I did. I really fell in love with these characters, particularly Maya, but I couldn't end it with the two of them conquering their addictions and living happily ever after, because, sadly, things rarely work out like that in the real world.

So please, if you followed Jack and Maya to the end, don't look down on drug addicts as self-destructive trash that deserve all they get. Bear in mind that some of them had nowhere else to turn, and in the end, they probably had no one to shed tears for them when the end did come.

All credit to Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon for the chapter titles.

Until the next time, take care.