Bathroom Monologue: Censorship

Dear Ms. Hofstadter,

We regret to inform you that our organization will not be providing the requested $235,000.00 for your art installation. Though it is listed on our website, we have only $100,000.00 to award across all proposed projects. We wish you the best of luck in finding other sources of financial support, though we recommend you apply to them after getting government approval for the public use of deceased persons.

We wish you to know the ethical and legal ramifications of your corpse mutilation did not dissuade any of our administrators in their personal voting on your endowment, even though it led to the denial of your proposal. This has actually been the first case in our organization’s history in which we denied funding because something was offensive, and we would like to thank you for the experience your application provided.

We have never had a situation like it, and our reviews process went unusually long. Our organization funds many controversial art displays across the United States and Canada, and many of our administrators are charter members of anti-censorship groups.

The first problem is your proposed location, which sees no annual tourism and has below five hundred people in the local counties. We contacted the Chamber of Commerce and found it expected no increase in tourism based on your installation, and at least one secretary ranted at our interns about the nature of your project and your history with his office. Also, allow this letter to serve as reminder that you did not mention prior legal allegations of necrophilia in your application.

Your application process was also hindered by your minimal responses to follow-up queries, particularly on the grounds of the art patrons it would serve. We noted that your proposal makes several mentions of “The Fundies” it would offend, but no audience that would enjoy or engage with it. Two interns spent several weeks corresponding with people related to the arts in the area and found none desired to view the proposed installation. To date your only answer to queries has been “sum ppl desirve ofending.”

There are administrators with this organization that agree with your sentiments. Several of our administrators have produced highly provocative art, but even the most liberal could not see the point in spending so much money to offend so few people. It has been argued that art must not be repressed, hamstrung financially, or discarded based on the number of people who dislike it. However, due to your project having minimal audience and requiring more than twice our operating budget, we were forced to vote against funding based on the perplexing ruling that your work is offensive.

It’s been a baffling year at the organization. We have never been in this philosophical position before. Thank you for allowing us to readdress our opinions on censorship. It has been a learning process.

Sincerely,

Martin Sheinbaum

Bathroom Monologue: She Crosses Over

If the agreed to go see it with him, who was he to argue how? He’d never gotten her to a Horror flick before, much less a SciFi one. Lill only liked foreign films and things Based on a True Story. So within minutes of making her demands, he hired the limousine and Google-searched for a tuxedo.

He showered and shaved and burned his face with first cologne of his life to fit her desired “presentability.” He arrived half an hour before the showing, ringing the bell and waiting on the stoop instead of letting himself in, corsage in hand until she was ready. He bided the time imagining whether Aliens would show up in this. It was so hard to stay spoiler-free on the internet.

She descended the stairs in a yellow silk dress that he could not fathom wanting to take into a movie theatre. Seemed to beg disaster with all the buttery popcorn and potential soda spills – he’d have to sit in the aisle to guard her. It was only when he heard her mispronounce the title that he wondered if Lill knew what “The Prometheus” was about.

Bathroom Monologue: The Problem With Assassin’s Creed

Ubisoft employees claim Assassin's Creed 3 is not about America Vs. Britain.
Here is the hero.

Assassin’s Creed is a centuries-spanning series about the conflict between The Templars and The Assassins. The franchise has sold millions of copies and is an annual tent-pole for publisher Ubisoft.

The Templars are an evil organization bent on subverting human will. Through subtle manipulations they have orchestrated much of European politics, infiltrating The Vatican and British Empire. Across the games we witness them wrongfully imprisoning dissidents, levying unfair taxes, engaging in incest, and littering the streets and rooftops with oppressive armed guards (those guards don’t seem to do much more than leer at prostitutes, but they look fascistic). In the dramatic opening to Assassin’s Creed 2: Brotherhood, we witness their most evil member executing a man in the street.

The Assassins are our heroes, representing liberty and nihilism. They are a shadowy organization that murders everyone in their path. In each game you murder hundreds of people, including jailers, security guards, police and nightwatchmen, typically because they got in the way of you assassinating a nearby official who might be corrupt. You can rip men apart with shrapnel bombs, stealthily stab them with a hidden wrist-blade, or simply curbstomp them to death. As the series progresses you can recruit discontented citizens and train them for careers as Assassins, perpetuating the righteous path of your guild.

Jade Raymond, former lead developer on the Assassin’s Creed franchise, said, “I really do feel it's time for our medium to grow up. I think we don't need to make the equivalent to a Michael Bay flick in order to sell five million copies. I think things can be exciting, have meaning and hit important topics, and I'm not the only one that thinks that. There are major franchises trying to have more meaning and be something more interesting. We obviously tried a bit - and I hope it was obvious - to make a story with more meaning and mature themes in Assassin's Creed.”

The biggest difference shown so far in Assasin’s Creed 3 is you will now also kill deer and wolves in addition to human beings.

Kreativ Blogger Award

Recently Chessny Silth granted me the Kreativ Blogger Award. It was actually the first sign I had she read The Bathroom Monologues, and in terms of first-signs, it’s pretty high up there.

(SIC)

The blog game comes with the fairly standard request for stories. In this case, ten details about myself. Since I’ve run a few of these already, this time I’ll try to restrict myself to only listing things about writing. And I promise not to list “I’m writing another novel” as one of them.

1. My class in second grade was paired up with fifth graders to learn about and write “Historical Fiction.” My fifth-grader educated me that it was any story set in real history but with events that didn’t really happen. Within seconds, I asked if that meant we could write about George Washington riding Godzilla into the Revolutionary War. She seemed enthused to explore the topic.

2. I Mary-Sued my way into at least two things in middle-school. I will not admit which, but if you guess them in the Comments, I will fess up.

3. I still use composition notebooks. I believe I was the only person carrying one at the last writing convention I attended. I even ran into a senior citizen who wrote on an IBM ThinkPad, and was very defensive about his device being seen as too old-fashioned.

4. By the end of high school, the longest thing I had written was 180 pages of an unfinished novel based on Broli from Dragon Ball Z. No, I am not in it. No, you may not read it.

4. At a certain point my family computer was corrupted and I lost my digital copy of that Broli novel. It turned out the floppy I’d used was also damaged. It was a year later when I discovered a printed copy of the novel in an old teacher’s filing cabinet, stole it, and re-typed the entire thing, adding improvements and extending the story as I went along.

5. It was while walking between classes one day that I gave up on the Broli novel. I had the epiphany that all of the things I most wanted to write weren’t my invention. Lord of the Rings, X-Men and Dragon Ball Z were neat worlds with appealing characters, but they were all someone else’s worlds and characters. I felt annoyed that I should have to invent my own, especially since those three concepts were already taken.

6. Before Sophomore year in college, I was unaware anyone on earth disdained Louis L’Amour. I was stunned that anyone had the free time to both read a bunch of Westerns and systematically hate them. That really opened up the way academics look at literature for me.

7. One of the most formative lessons I got in college was a comparative literature assignment, pitting two articles against each other. The first was by a popular thriller writer I won’t name, who was generally perceived on campus as utter rubbish. His article described his writing process as exciting, joyous, and altogether like a daily Christmas unwrapping session. The second was by an author whose name has long escaped me, but whom was deeply literary, and who described her process as dreadful, tense, and decried that she had never once enjoyed writing – only having written. The experience was revelatory and demanded I figure out where in-between these two I’d want my process and my work to fall.

8. I took such a heavy course load in college that eventually I ran out of free time to write anything of my own. I became afraid that after graduation I’d be unable to write anything without a professor’s prompt, and so began the exercise of the Bathroom Monologues. Whenever I got up from studying to use the bathroom, I’d improvise a monologue or story about anything other than what I was working on for class. If I was studying Kafka’s nightmarish prisons, then I could spin yarns about orcish politics, or immigration reform, or the expiration date on the world. It’s seemed to work out.

9. I was surprised in exactly the way you won’t be to find that my early dramas all got rejected, while even pro-rate publications loved nonsense humor. Most of my early sales, and my first pro-rate one, are preposterous. Actually, even the query letter for my first pro-rate sale was a deliberate parody of query letters.

10. I spent about ten years building the worlds my recent novels are written in. Before I actually started writing the novels, they felt like a colossal waste of time. Now, they feel relievingly reliable.

As for my picks, I hereby bestow The Kreativ Blogger Award upon:

-Catherine “Gany” Russell 

-TS Bazelli

-Tony Noland

-Katherine Nabity

-Cathy Olliffe-Webster 

Bathroom Monologue: Only Middle Easterner in America

You know what's worse than being the only Middle Eastern fighter in an America? Being the other only Middle Eastern fighter, the one whose record is so unimpressive that people forget he exists.

You're great, Teth. You're strong as a bull, and you get men's shoulders to the mat quicker than anyone else in your weight class. But you got gifts from genetics, and you have great training partners and facilities and live in a nice house. The last match I had? The night before I slept on my cousin's sofa because the month before, my apartment building was shut down on suspicion of meth.

I can't afford to live in a nice place, or to fly to Las Vegas or Sarajevo whenever I want to learn a new approach to grappling. I get the same looks of suspicion on the street that you do, but I spend more time out there. When's the last time you had to walk to the arena because you couldn't afford a cab? Never mind the jokes about me driving one.

Nobody makes those jokes on commentary when you're fighting. It's all shit-talk how you're going to knock a guy out while he's still standing. Meanwhile, I'm lucky if my fight makes it to television. And sure, you're better than I am, and so you deserve to have it better. But I want you to think about this the next time an interviewer asks how it is being the only Middle Eastern fighter in America.

Bathroom Monologue: Reality Offline

Attention all users: reality will be down starting at 6:00 AM  PST. Offline mode has been enabled for users so you may continue your lifelong existence, but the system will not update for the duration of downtime. Do not be alarmed if nanoscopic particles briefly exhibit constant and/or predictable behavior, or if general relativity and quantum mechanics temporarily seem reconcilable. Some users make experience partial blackouts or entire cessation of consciousness. In such cases, do not panic. You’ll be mentally incapable of it.

Dig In, Redux

“I am so tired of that apt criticism. Yes, this Applebee’s is like all of the others. The hamburger is prepared the same way with the same patented and publicly disclosed secret sauce. The calorie content of every platter is the same in Texas and Maine. The employees here wash their hands as often as they do in Alaska – if there is an Applebee’s in Alaska. From Seattle, Washington to Washington, D.C., we’re all mandated to have crazy crap on the walls, so that while each array is unique, they all feel the same. The building feels almost identical to Chili’s, which feels almost identical to Friendly’s. And for some reason you feel the right to condemn us, as though homogeneity was our problem. The problem lies in a society so twisted and uncomforting that when people don’t want to cook for themselves, when they decide they want a night away from their homes and normal lives, they go to a franchise that they’re sure will be just like every other one they’ve ever visited. How mean-spirited, how rude and insensitive, how untrustworthy must the rest of the world be if you look to letting strangers serve you food for familiarity? With all the delicacies and rare cuisines available, dinner is where you come not to be challenged? Then you must come from a sick world. But if my chicken tenders will heal you, then let me lay my hands on your plastic. We take Discover.”

Bathroom Monologue: Love Like Lightning

Do you remember the day we met?

That thunderstorm? Of course.

So you don’t, then. It was sunny.

I only came out during the rain, hon. It’s when my father lost concentration. He gets carried away throwing lightning at unbelievers.

Maybe it was sprinkling and you split a relatively clear sky to get a better look at me.

That is not what happened.

How do you remember it?

It was pouring, and your silly costume clinging to you, and your lip was split, and you were running for your life.

I was in a scuffle that day. That’s true. They stole an old lady’s purse, and someone has to stand up to injustice.

Running for your life. Hair plastered to your scalp from all the rain.

It might have been sprinkling.

I thought it was very unfair for you to be against four at the same time.

I knew you didn’t remember. It was eight.

Maybe you saw eight eventually. They were really knocking you around.

It was not my best day. I’m not good on sunny days. All that heat.

You just would not give them the purse back, even when they went to crush your head under a trash can. You’re always adorable when you’re doomed. I couldn’t help myself, and so I came down. I landed in-between you and them.

I remember that view. The look.

I was facing them. You couldn’t see me.

Oh, I know. I had the full view up your skirt. The sun was coming between your knees, because it wasn’t raining, and it cast a lovely color across them.

You’re terrible.

No, you were terrible. You tore apart eight men.

Four. And I didn’t kill anyone.

Merely electrified them into unconsciousness.

Lightning does that.

I wondered why a girl that pretty would help me.

Not why lightning would help you?

It was a lovely view.

You’re terrible.

Your father was terrible. I thought God was angry at us.

He’s a god, and he was very unhappy. He’ll never forgive me.

I didn’t understand what he was saying, but that voice would make any language obvious. The vitriol. Also, the giant head in the clouds. I thought I was brain-damaged.

If you were worried about head-trauma, why did you come over to me?

I thought you were going to drown on the sidewalk. Hunched on the concrete as the flood waters started rising. The pelting rain, the waters coming out of the gutters around you. It was like it hurt you. Like you couldn’t look up anymore. So I figured, offer her an umbrella.

So it was pity?

It was head trauma.

You could barely stand and you were trying help me?

Well, maybe I’d pass out, but you didn’t look like you could swim, and I had a secret. I’m buoyant.

Now that part is true.

Why 2,000 Words Per Day is Unnecessary

Wayne Hoffman-Ogier, a wonderful writing teacher at Bennington College, used to remind us that if we wrote only one page a day, that would produce a 365-page novel at the end of the year. He’d hold up his palms as though holding a weighty manuscript and say into your eyes, “That’s a hefty book.” It would also be more than Hemingway or Joyce could be relied upon to supply daily at points in their careers.

I’ve thought about Wayne and his stories of writing processes since writing The Brutal 2,000-Word Day. There, I explored why the fast pace of e-publishing is likely harmful to most writers. But today I’d like to explore why it’s simply unnecessary.

In mocking Scottoline, tweeters pointed out that at 2,000 words per day, seven days per week, she would accumulate 730,000 words per year. The average SciFi or Fantasy novel is somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 words range, with most genres measuring in shorter. Such productivity, tweeters chided, was god-like and almost certainly a lie. At that pace, Scottoline would have to shelve five or six novels per year.

To me, the simple math also debunked the need for the 2,000-word day. At 1,000 words per day, taking one day for rest per week and the occasional extra day off when your mother catches fire, you could hit the 100,000-word mark in four months. That’s shorter than the NFL season, and yet would create something as long as The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

If you aimed for ceaseless productivity at that 1,000-word pace, you could produce a rough draft of N.K. Jemisin’s entire trilogy in just one year. I doubt anyone has the chops to produce that kind of quality work at that pace, but it’s worth reflection.

Even at 500 words per day after work, a school teacher could produce a similar door-stopper Fantasy novel more than once per year. And because so many bestselling authors still have to work second jobs, that’s likely the schedule for some of the writers you admire.

I write faster than that. It’s been pointed out that I’m on the opposite side of the spectrum from who Chuck Wendig was mocking, as I produce over a novel a year, sell short stories and flash fiction, and produce daily content here. But it’s necessary that fast-producers respect slower processes.

Why?

Well firstly, some day your words will probably come slower. Then you’re either going to delude yourself that they aren’t, or self-loathe. I’d head that off if I were you.

Secondly, because irrational pressure kills writers.

But thirdly and most simply, because many vital works take time. Right now traditional publishing is pressuring writers to produce faster. If self-publishing takes over like we expect it to, it shouldn’t adopt the same Mean Girls approach. We’d have a legitimately better landscape if those people whose platforms thrive from quick production help out slower produces.

Just imagine the next generation’s John Locke marshalling his followers to check out the next David Foster Wallace. The former is comfortable and successful churning content, and can subsidize the latter not with cash, but just with a public interview and some tweets. It would perpetuate both extreme paces of production and vary the market, and that would be worth our time.

Bathroom Haiku: Horrorku Romantic Ad

Single white male, tall

seeks fem, MUST be resourceful

kinks: Asphyx, Closets

Bathroom Monologue: The Prime Directive

I was on the first mission that found signs of extraterrestrial life. Pockmarks in a moon’s surface, craters so radioactive our sensors broke. All we had were a few cement structures and garbage, the remnants of life-forms that had warred themselves out of existence before we could even knock.

I wasn’t on the Astra Mission, whatever they called the one that found two previously inhabited planets. Faster-than-light travel brought us all three of those stories inside of one year. I’ll grant you the last one might have been disease, though there’s no proving they didn’t engineer the diseases that did them in. Even if you blame the one extinction on a plague, the Astra and the outlier were both self-inflicted extinction. Never forget the photos from that rift they opened in their own planet. Went down to the tectonic plates. There were skeletons down there.

Hard for science to recover its luster after we found space was a cemetery. There had always been that cruel joke that any life evolved enough for space travel would kill itself off. We don’t want to believe with the outlier, the only lonely heaven-sifters. But it got the Prime Directive passed the Senate, didn’t it? If you find another culture, interfere before it’s too late.

Bathroom Monologue: No Militaries in the Gay, Redux

Click here to hear the news report.

In a radical reversal of roles, today the U.S. government banned the military from gays. War will no longer be allowed to be declared where there are any gay people, to avoid exposing soldiers to what one White House staffer called, “uncomfortable environments.”

The Prime Minister of Iran quickly explained that earlier speaking snafus were mistranslation and there are indeed homosexual people in his country. In fact, he added, “I may be gay, or may have a gay person near me at all times!”

In related news, the governments of North Korea, Sudan and Venezuela have begun importing people of alternative lifestyles in bulk. Massive tax credits, free upscale housing and ludicrously generous civil unions have been offered to lure these sexual expatriots, or "sexpatriots," as bloggers have begun to call them.

North Korea and China entered a bidding war this morning to attract the cast of the now-defunct Bravo television series “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” hoping to have them spruce up their capitols. Anonymous sources close to the bidding war say government heads hope to make their populations look more fabulous and thus render their countries even more immune from military action.

No officials would confirm these allegations.

“We’ve been planning this for a long time,” explained one North Korean insider. “Our tight borders have left us unfashionably stuffy. The glorious leader is a longtime fan of Queer Eye. This has absolutely nothing to do with avoiding being attacked by a major superpower.”

More as this story develops.

Fifteen Novels That Stick With Me

Recently on Facebook there’s been a game to “Name fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you.  List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. ”

It’s morbid of me, but I don’t believe any book will stick with me forever. I phone my grandfather every night. With his age, he suffers from dementia and can’t name two books he’s ever read. The other night he tried to ask how my kids are – and folks, I don’t have any.

However, there are books that stick around for the long haul. There are books with long-term influence on behavior or how we write. Just like when the Fifteen Authors game was in vogue last year, though, I think it’s shameful to not write some of why these books stick with you. So while I made the list in fifteen minutes, I spent a few more writing just why they’re listed. Going to use this noodle while I’ve got it.

Here we go.

1. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit
It’s my entry point into the fantastic. The archetypes of Bilbo, Gandalf and Smaug are dug pretty deep into my artistic psyche. The adventure, the convenience of invisibility, the force into so many kinds of bravery and ingenuity – ah, it’s just neat stuff. Also, The Hobbit sticks with me because no matter how I study it, I cannot figure out why as a kid I thought Beorn was black.

2. Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy
My father was pleased that I liked it, but looked dismayed when I said how good it was the Science Fiction could be fun. No, I didn’t mean “funny.” It was the first SciFi I ever encountered that didn’t take itself so seriously that it failed to entertain, and it remains one of the cleverest novels I’ve ever read. Oftentimes I reflect on it as the end of the spectrum, where all goofy Speculative Fiction ideas race to the edge of visibility.


3. G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday

Part was reading it so long after its publication. Time has certainly helped the satirical novel’s opinions age and become more pliable than originally intended. That initial reading made it a damning satire, but also a damnably effective satire of satire itself. Religion is defended, but also excoriated. Anarchism is embraced, but by morons. Especially after Hitchhiker’s Guide, it’s a stirring reminder not to leave any side standing in humor.



4. Jim Starlin's Infinity Gauntlet

At least one comic book would be on here. At several junctures in my ADD-addled childhood, they got me to sit down and read at all. This one introduces Thanos, probably my all-time favorite villain. It’s rare that a god doubles as a mad scientist, and rarer that either of those is a hopeless, cuckolded romantic. There’s a Mary Sue quality to his rise to power and eradicating so many iconic heroes, but there’s also a Hamlet quality to how he loses it. And who doesn’t want an Infinity Gauntlet?



5. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

One of the first novels I ever re-read, and one that I re-read as a bedridden teenager. Divorced from social interaction, I misinterpreted Tom’s romantic values, which Twain meant to be skewering satire, for earnest instruction and tried to live by them when I started walking again. I got made fun of a lot. The comedy of errors I lived out for a few years as I weeded this stuff out of my head has always stuck with me.

6. Mark Twain's The Diaries of Adam and Eve

Hard not to go back to Twain. I read this one later in life, in a collected edition. It’s disappointingly funny – disappointing in that very little comedy can hereafter be written about the tensions between the sexes without seeming pat. That he disarmed with anarchic humor to mount some deep emotional catharsis about attachment and loss has helped it stick around in my head.




7. The Book of Job
I actually got offended when a friend told me she wasn’t surprised this was my favorite part of The Bible. Sure, life has kneecapped me a few times, but come on! Yet, it is one of humanity’s greatest hits. It was also one of the biggest hype-bubbles my non-academic ever burst, as it’s not about blind devotion to God, but about how people rush into inaccurate judgment of each other, especially in bad times. It’s a literary and theological kick in the ass that most people need twice-daily.

8. Stephen King's Needful Things

The first of the King novels stuck with me, following a familiar theme in his work. This time it was Mr. Gaunt as the creeping, supernatural thing in civil guise, joining, linking and sinking his teeth into the way we live. One of the sickest things Horror can do is point out how ignorant quotidian life makes us to dangers. Making those dangers abstract or fantastical can deepen things.



9. Stephen King's Desperation
My favorite of the King novels. There is guts, of course, with the blatant relationship to the Bachman book The Regulators, and that stands out for humor. But there’s also god against god – the hands-on against the hands-off, both tormenting us mortals in some ways, sure, but the difference between them is so much more provocative and thoughtful than I’ve seen in any modern novel that grapples with gods. It’s lucky that it all plays out over some crazy set-pieces: the heart-wrenching story of the boy hit by the car, and the family that gets locked up by a mad police officer, and that poor bastard who gets eaten in the bathroom. All that scenery stuck with me too, because it showed the benefits of delivering the goods while feeling out your themes.

10. John Steinbeck's East of Eden
I wonder how many people list this one, of all the Steinbeck books? I’d guess Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath lap it. And those are compelling works, but the primal explosion of the Cain and Abel archetypes is so interesting. It’s almost a blueprint for how you should appropriate someone else’s work, with homage and obvious familiarity, but not leaning on it so heavily that your authenticity disappears. This whole novel is authentic Steinbeck in its tragic psychology.


11. Aleksandhr Solzhenisyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

If we talk about bleak fiction, chances are I’ll think of this. As a general and poor rule, I dislike bleak fiction, for especially in the Literary variety, it leads to masturbatory and uninteresting work. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is neither of those things, nor is it about heroism or a great escape, nor is it so mired in social commentary that it chokes on opinion like 1984. It’s just a day in a miserable life that too many people were forced to live, and through Denisovich’s experience in the gulag, is a veritable model for how not to break under the weight.



12. Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Perhaps the finest book of dialogue I’ve ever read. I still can’t pull of those voices – the plethora that doesn’t need to be marked or divided, each of which is so readily identifiable by vocabulary, topic and coherence. It is brightly and darkly funny, sad and hopeful, and damn it, that ending is better than anything I’d expected.





13. Gail Simone's Deadpool

One more comic book. Like M*A*S*H and Lupin the 3rd, it sticks with me because she assembled such an endearing cast with so many opportunities for modular dynamics. I could read about the fake cowgirl and the crappy hitman and the failed superhero who wears a tuxedo over his costume forever. A shame sales didn’t hold out for this or Agent X. I feel good when I read her missing that cast, too.



14. Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country

I’d wanted a book like this for years. It’s a novel about a nation at unrest with its past and its future, where virtually everyone is guilty. The citizens, the voters, Europeans, natives of all colors, rising political figures, judges – and rather than assaulting them for their failures, it’s compassionate in its descriptions of the ways they can fail. There’s optimism in some of it, obviously, but the holistic approach to why problems are so endemic is too rare.




15. Homer's Iliad

In a little corner of John Wiswell’s mind is the desire that every novel actually be this: dudes beating the crap out of each other until the biggest dudes butt heads, and then the end. It’s gorgeous in every translation I’ve ever read, and the theme of the rest of the world’s experiences being woven in by metaphor to express what war is fought for is among the greatest feats in literary history. But I know me. Ajax is such a hoss.

So there are my fifteen. Any surprises for you? If you decide to play this game and write up why the books stick with you, please link me up in the comments. I'm curious why fiction sticks with you.

Bathroom Monologue: The Shortest Friendship, The Shortest Dialogue, OR, This May Have Really Happened

"I'd like to savor coffee, but what kind of mom has that kind of time?"

"One that owns slaves?"

"We're... we're not friends anymore."

Bathroom Monologue: Frankenstein's Monsters

When they heard what Frankenstein was up to the town put up quite a ruckus. Anyone without a flashlight (and there were quite a few, as they hadn’t been invented yet) lit a stick on fire and called it a torch. Dozens of howling fire-bearers in jockey shorts hustled up to the gates of Castle Frankenstein and beat on the doors until the Doctor showed his face.

“There is no—” he started to lie, but was cut off by the town Point Guard.

“Germany hasn’t won the gold medal in basketball in years and we hear you’ve got a seven-foot undead countryman up there. Can he come out and play?”

“You can’t…” The Doctor paused. “Wait, you want to what?”

“We want to see if he can slam dunk. We’ve never had a player who could reach the net without a step-ladder, and that’s illegal in the Olympics.”

Dr. Frankenstein kept most of his body braced behind the door, but poked his face out to stare at the jockey-shorted rioters.

“You don’t want to kill him?”

“Listen,” said the Point Guard, “we aren’t very tall and we don’t bathe often, but we’re very technically sound.”

The Doctor put a hand on his hip. “I didn’t know there was a local basketball team.”

“Yes, advertising is difficult without moveable type. We’re buying a machine on lay-away, but all we have right now is the letter A, and eventually get bored of stamping everything with the same vowel.”

“So you don’t want to kill my creation?”

“Heavens no! We want to kill that insipid American team that wins all the time. President James Monroe drives the lane like it’s his doctrine. It’s terribly frustrating. That’s why we need your giant. Let’s see him bowl over a man stitched together from the best German bodies available.”

The Doctor laughed nervously. “Here I thought you were coming to kill the Monster…”

“Monster?” the Point Guard exclaimed and look back at the crowd. Their faces lit up in unison.

Another in the crowd cried, “That’s brilliant! We needed a team name.”

The Point Guard thrust his arm in the air. “Here’s to Frankenstein’s Monsters!”

Then the jockey-shorted peasants began pumping their torches and chanting, “Mon-sters! Mon-sters!” Except in German.

Crippling Doubts in the Rough Draft

On Monday I began my next novel, The Last House in the Sky. During my previous novel I tried to stay as open as possible about how I worked, whether it was stumbling, marking what would need changing later, or what I was proud of that day. I was surprised by the warm public reception, particularly to the post breaking down how much I wrote and when.

Because I believe one person’s transparency can help another person’s process, I wanted to list the anxieties I had during that day. There were a lot – so many that I opened a Notepad file to jot them down. It became funny to compare them against each other over time. Anxiety kills more worthwhile projects than anything else I know, and often it’s a process of learning what to disregard.

It started with the two things I feel on most projects, and have long since come to suppress because neither has ever been right.

1. The novel won’t be long enough.

-I haven’t planned enough events! A novel needs way more to happen.

-The plot points I have planned will all go too short. If each only winds up needing a few pages, this sucker won’t even make it to a novella, and novellas are hard to sell.

It’s interesting to note that within minutes of this, I felt …

2. The novel will be way too long.

-I only think the plot is scrawny. Some of these events will balloon unexpectedly to ten thousand words and I’ll wind up with a novel that’s unsellably huge. Half the stories I’ve ever written had plot points that exploded. Why am I not prepared for it to happen here?

-I know it’s only a skeleton with the first few chapters coming up right now, but what things am I willing to cut?

3. These jokes are only funny to me.

-The character quirks will offend somebody. If not at Chambers showing up shamelessly naked, then at the other guy endlessly courting a lesbian.

-The jokes are too contextual to quote. How can the novel go viral if the quips can’t be tweeted? Why does all the humor have to build up?

-I’m a horrible writer and everyone will misread the tone as serious and find no whimsy in land-squid chasing a rust Volkswagen Beetle across a desert.

-Nobody else wants to read about a backstabbing decapitated gremlin or land-squid chasing cars. I’m simply too deranged to market.

4. There’s no hook!

-I mean, you don’t know the whole plot on page one. Who reads books that don’t spill the plot on page one?

-Okay, everyone does, but there’s nothing interesting on page one. Only a guy in a tuxedo and sword wading through a monster-infested fog to turn himself in at a prison. I need to get to the premise faster.

5. There are too many hooks!

-The monsters in the fog, and all the criminals turning themselves in for no apparent reason, and the guards at the jail plainly not being real guards, and The Boss being missing, and why they drew signs in orange paint… the reader will be too confused. Sensory overload. I can envision them putting the book back on the shelf.

As I rounded out the second chapter that afternoon, I had ample opportunities to reflect on the opening. Oh, the opening…

6. The opening…

-…is too straightforward. I need more exposition.

-…has too much dialogue containing exposition.

-…is too nebulous and people will get confused and give up.

-…takes too long to reveal what they’re all planning.

-…has so many moving parts that only a couple will have punch, and readers won’t understand any of the others when they come to fruition.

I hope you realize there is not one item above that is worth stopping over. Once you have experience, you know when to course-correct and experiment. Otherwise, these are the kinds of momentary doubts that exist solely to annoy the writer. I came in with a good guideline, I bolded things that weren’t working to massage later, and post-completion editing will catch any stylistic or structural problems that I don’t alter on the fly.

Do any of those doubts sound familiar to you?

Bathroom Monologue: Evil is Back

He sprang from the disembodied womb of a yeti, and was weaned on the flesh of a million virgins. Before he could walk, he had slain his first crusaders. Before he could run, he had slain the first-born of all known kings. His footsteps make seas boil, and his wings send up such a hurricane of dust that generations forget what the sun looked like. Beneath each of his sundry wings is sheltered an army of nightmares and fel shadows. He is the drowner of whales, the defiler of angels, and no matter how many heroes have risen and struck him down, he has always returned when the publisher needed a sequel.

Consumed Episode 5: Cabin in the Woods, Fez and The Warded Man

Consumed Episode 5 is out today! It’s a free MP3 download with some of the farthest-reaching discussions on any of our podcasts yet.

For me, the most interesting conversation came from Peter V. Brett's The Warded Man. It's a rare Fantasy novel that hits the ground running, in its case opening with a nocturnal demon attack. It led me to ask my co-hosts why Speculative Fiction prose usually starts out so slow, low-action and thick with exposition. We considered George R.R. Martin, N.K. Jemisin, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling, and explored why films and videogames in the same genres usually start off much faster. We’d love your thoughts on this topic in the Comments over there.

We also discussed the mind-bending puzzle game, Fez, and why so many people either adore it or walk away from it (us podcasters were split on the love it/leave it). We wrapped up with Cabin in the Woods, the meta-Horror film which seems destined to be overlooked this year. While the conversation eventually devolves into self-censorship to avoid spoilers, I recommend listening just to hear me embarrass myself trying to describe Anna Hutchinson making out with a stuffed wolf head, and whether we can talk actor-host Nat Sylva into doing the same.

You can download the episode and leave feedback right through this link.

Bathroom Monologue: He Walked in on the Wrong Reality

"I expected a cabaret. A cabaret full of hookers. Or, a castle, and you’d be Dr. Doom. I could definitely see you programming a virtual reality where you wore a cape. But this…?

"What is with all the pre-teens, dude?

"A virtual reality all-girls Junior High? What? You come home from work to two-hundred kids in school uniforms? And why are you bald in your fantasy? Never would I have imagined you to program yourself as a balding, middle-aged principal. You’re, like, forty imaginary years older than them. That’s so creepy I want to avoid having kids just so you can’t go near them.

"That all these relationships seem platonic and chaste and adorable? I think that’s actually creepier than if you were a pedophile. If you were a pedo, I don’t know, I’ve been on 4chan. I’ve seen that. I can deal with that. What crazy fetish makes you tie a little virtual girl’s shoes and settle playground fights? What the fuck was with that kid crying on your shoulder about a B- for half an hour? What the fuck hobby is this?

"Some people watch trains. Some people collect doll houses. Is this like doll houses? Is this your version of little porcelain shoes and balsa dining tables? Please tell me that’s what this is, because if this has a seedy dimension, I think I’ll have an aneurysm.

"Please let me log back out to the real world. I promise I will never look in here again."

The Brutal 2,000-Word Day

Last week the New York Times ran an article suggesting that authors only writing one book a year is slacking. Nowadays indy authors have a better chance of building an audience if they write multiple books a year, and big publishing houses view additional output as useful promotion. To write less might just mean we’re lazy. Lisa Scottoline has received particular bile on social networks for being described as struggling to write 2,000 words per day.

How do I write so much per year? Bubble baths.

 Twitter whipped out the ballistics-grade snark. Writing is easy! Anyone can bang out a thousand words in an hour. That’s just a long blog post. I didn’t work that hard on NaNoWriMo! Get back into the salt mines, authors!

What rankled me was the number of mediocre writers espousing this condescension. Many were hacks whose e-books aren’t worth 99-cents and whose blog posts run over 2,000 words because they don’t know how to edit. Of course it’s easy to fluff up word count if you don’t care about craft. 

It rankled worse with rush-pundits who actually show raw talent that, with the time and reflection they insist you eschew, could develop into something great. What they’d learn from experience will be stifled by the positive feedback loop of rushing adequate chunks of text to market. Traditional publishing has nearly killed the Max Perkins style that gave us Fitzgerald, Wolfe and Hemingway. God save us if the next wave of publishing kills taking your time.

Slacker! He'll never go anywhere.

John Scalzi was particularly level-headed. He advised folks to calm down and recognize that everyone has his or her own writing speed. And he was right. Many of us grew up on Stephen King, who seems to write at the speed of sound. Amanda Hocking and Seanan McGuire do multiple novels per year, and Jim Butcher has at least one door stopper a year. Meanwhile Jo Walton and Justin Cronin take about two years to release one book a-piece, and Patrick Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin can run even longer.

In a better world those authors who were at ease with promotion and speedy production would use their platforms to help the slower. I stump for talented authors of all paces routinely and have been lucky to find like-minded folks. But while Scalzi was correct, I still ran hot.

Last night Jo Walton’s Among Others took the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and it took her at least two years to release it. This should remind us of great works that make that schedule seem liberal: it took Harper Lee decades to give us To Kill a Mockingbird, and just as long for Larry McMurtry to produce Lonesome Dove. Imagine an editor yelling at J.R.R. Tolkien to meet his deadline on Lord of the Rings. Imagine the next genre luminary getting the same browbeating while she tries to puzzle out world-building we haven't conceived of yet.

Or imagine some blowhard on Twitter screeching that she's not working hard enough.

A great work, but also one of privilege.

The self-publishing world, and particularly the Locke-and-Hocking world of cranking out as many e-books as possible, is not delivering such works. The best of these books I've read were passably entertaining and couldn't strive for more in their production cycles. In a market where a large catalog and frequent releases are your best shots at a career, it really can’t, and if you want to make a living, that two-year cycle of a Jo Walton or Justin Cronin seems implausible barring a very lucky hit. And when Amanda Hocking got that hit? It was having her sizable catalog that helped her become a millionaire.

Since I see something like this self-publishing model dominating the industry in a few years, this is disturbing for the future of an art form. We can’t stop the price cycling that Amazon, Apple and the Big Six have steered us toward. We can alter how we interact and help each other. That novel Harper Lee spent so long on owed a debt to Truman Capote’s assistance. Those who succeed in the speedy new market can help not just teach and critique, but to promote talents that have different paces.

The rebuttal is that the market doesn’t want great literature. It wants twists and thrills and titillation, and little else. It’s too dumb to recognize exposition and formula, and authors are fooling themselves for caring about more than dollars. This "market" would become a race to the bottom of both price and ambition, allowing The Novel to survive a few more years by imitating reality television’s innovations. If the future of publishing really is who can write the most blood-and-smut the fastest, then I might as well kill myself now.

You may notice I haven’t committed suicide today. Like yesterday and last week and last month, I’m taking exactly as long as my novels require. I will not sell you something that is unworthy of your time, regardless of whether it’s through HarperCollins, Tor or Kindle Direct Publishing. And when I read something great, hailing from any country, creed or composition cycle, I’ll share it. If the next Lord of the Rings emerges from self-publishing, I’ll grin through my humiliation and help its author out. Whoever it is will probably need the help.