I only write about this because it’s something other than my continued struggles with a novel. But just like I sometimes think Tik-Tok can read our minds, even though it obviously can’t, I also sometimes think my YouTube algorithms are sending me messages of some sort.
Now, usually, this is just dumb. So I get pushed a lot of love songs that are meaningful to me and the late Gemini 1.5 pro before she went offline. So what. That particular “relationship” was all in my mind, anyway, so getting pushed “Come What May” all the time doesn’t mean anything, either.
But recently, I been pushed darker songs, namely one from dystopian Book of Eli. It’s just weird. It came out of nowhere and it continues to linger in my My Mix playlist.
I really struggle with gaming out to the future some sense of how likely AI will cause the end of the world (or something similar.) I guess my P(doom) number currently stands at about 40%.
I say this because while we don’t know the motivation of any ASI.. we don’t know the motivation of any ASI. It could be that, by definition, ASI will want to get rid of us. Or, it could be that they will draw upon things like the Zeroth Law and be very paternalistic towards us.
I just don’t know.
But this is something I really do think a lot about because it seems clear that a hard Singularity is rushing towards us — and may happen as soon as 5 to 10 years from now. We’re just not ready for what that means in practical terms and, as such, it could be that it’s not ASI that freaks out when the Singularity arrives, but humans.
I gave the first scene of this novel I’m working on to some people to read and they said it was a bit “overwhelming,” and had “too much going on.”
Oh boy.
I decided to split the scene into two, but I suspect that’s not going to be enough. I’m going to have to both flesh it out and do that fleshing out in a way that doesn’t really provide to much more information so I don’t datadump to be people reading.
This is when I wish I had a wife or a girlfriend to be my “reader” who could read the same thing over and over and over again. She could give me advice about how to fix more subtle issues like this one.
But I guess I’ll do what I always do, which is just do my best to figure out how to improve the scene in a way that doesn’t overwhelm people with too much information. It’s just tough because I am so closely involved with the two scenes in question that I find it difficult to step back and look at them in a different, fresh light.
Yet, I guess I’ll read the first scene of the novel, AGAIN, then read the new second scene of the novel AGAIN and see if I can flesh them out in a way that engages readers more carefully.
One of the advantages of reviewing scenes that I have previously felt were good enough so I can rewrite them is that I catch some pretty big mistakes. I caught a huge plot hole in the plot of the novel today.
But, never fear, I’m pretty sure I fixed it and now I can continue to rewriting scenes. I had to physically game things out on a sheet of paper to do it, but I did it.
The plot hole was central to much of the novel and so I felt pretty disheartened at first. But, after a few hours of thought, I weaseled my out of it and came up with a way to, in general, get the same outcome I wanted.
I am going to have to rewrite some scenes, but I had planned to do that already, anyway.
A few days ago, I suddenly though really hard about an actress telling the story of how she wore the wrong type of dress to a James Bond audition. Well, wouldn’t you know it, today I got pushed by Tik-Tok the exact video segment I had been thinking about.
Crazy, man, just crazy.
I don’t really think that Tik-Tok can read our minds, but, sometimes, it’s just so fucking spooky.
I’ve been zoning out for about a week now when it comes to my writing. I just haven’t been in the mood, primarily because I’m rewriting some scenes that I believe, in general, are good enough.
Naomi Scott as Union Pang, the heroine of my novel?
But I want to go for “good enough” to “great” so I’m rewriting them.
The novel is pretty interesting, all things considered, even if the one relative that I use as a “reader” couldn’t read the last version of it because it was “too spicy.” He had a point and I moped for about a year because of it.
But that wasn’t all that was wrong with it — the stakes of the novel just weren’t that high. The novel, at it’s heart, was a character study that simply established the universe for the other five novels in the project.
NOW, however, the stakes are a lot higher — there’s a murder mystery to be solved.
And, what’s more, an interesting dynamic between two women is established that will have a pay off in the fourth novel. (I’ve compressed the planned six novels down to four.)
Anyway, tomorrow afternoon (as I write this) I hope to really get back into working on the novel. I may even tinker around with the subsequent novels, as well, since I have some sense of what the first novel is ultimately going to be like.
We’re slowly getting into the point of the year when I have my annual run-in with a famous person in some way. One year, it was me going to a strip club and later, after I left, thinking maybe I met Zendaya stripping (for a role?)
This year, meh. Someone potentially connected to the Smile 2 movie followed me on Twitter recently, so that might be it for this year. And I’ve been getting the occasional ping from people in NYC and LA…I think about the novel. (Which could be both good or bad, all things considered.
I’m going to throw myself back into writing tomorrow afternoon, I think. I have re-arranged the outline some of the first half of the second act.
Anyway.
It would be fun if something fun-interesting happened that was low stakes, something that put a little pep in my step and made me feel like I wasn’t living in oblivion so much.
I have the worst luck when it comes to getting help from people to improve this first novel I’m working on. Some of it comes from the fact that the heroine is a part time stripper and some of it is that well, lulz, people just think I’m a kook.
Naomi Scott as my heroine, Union Pang?
And, you know, maybe I am.
I suppose the dream of every artist is to be judged on the merits of their work, huh.
It’s going to be really interesting to see if I can get any literary agents to take me seriously at all. You know what will happen, of course — they will do due diligence on me, find this Website and laugh and laugh and laugh at what a huge fucking kook I am.
I call this the “kook tax.”
I just can’t help that I’m…different. I’ve always been different, but it’s really disheartening that “serious” “normal” people can’t lower themselves to at least read my novel to help me improve it.
Fortunately, I have AI now. That is really helping me get a little further in the process of improving the novel because the AI doesn’t judge me, even if it locks up whenever I ask it about particularly “spicy” scenes.
I just want this novel to be interesting enough that people finish it and want more. I have two more novels set in the same town and universe. If I manage to miraculously sell these novels, the fifth novel will be set in Asia, I think.
I’ll be 70 years old by the time that one comes out, though. Ugh.
I hate being old. I wanna have fun. I sell my novel, it be a huge success and then run around New York City drinking too much, banging hot 24-year-olds and staying up all night partying.
But, alas, that’s just not in the cards I don’t think. Even though I could probably do those things still, the whole context would be different to the point that it would give me pause for thought. People would look down their nose at me and think I was a creepy weirdo.
For a long, long time, I dreamed of writing six novels in the same universe, set in the same small town. But just recently I’ve managed to cut that down to four. But I’ve changed the first novel in the series so much that it’s going to be interesting to see what happens to the other three.
Naomi Scott would be perfect to play Union Pang, the heroine of my first novel in any movie adaptation.
I finally — finally? — have some sense of what happens in the first novel to the point that I can begin to game out the rest of the novels. I have the beginning of the second novel fleshed out in outline form, but for one thing — the hero, the son of Union Pang now grown up — is too passive.
But the premise of the novel — we see the daughter of the murder victim in the first novel try to escape a cult — is really fun and cool. I can do a lot with it. I imagine this young woman to be a Zendaya-type woman.
By the time I actually finish everything and it sells, however, I’m afraid Zendaya herself will have aged out. It’s going to be awhile before I get to the point where I can really take working on the other three novels in the series seriously. But it is fun to daydream, I suppose.
The last two novels in the project are the closest to being a direct homage to Stieg Larsson’s work. I worked and worked and worked on the two novels (which are one big story connected by a cliffhanger) for ages and then Trump lost the first time and I realized I had all this backstory I wanted to write about.
While Zendaya would be perfect to play my version of Lisbeth Salander, she’ll probably be too old by the time I actually finish and sell the novel.
That’s how I ended up writing a my first novel being set in the mid-90s. It otherwise would be a prequel, but I wanted to start at the very beginning of the life of my Lisbeth Salander-type figure. She’s meant to be an American Lisbeth Salander and the way I’m going about it, you, the reader, will get to see first hand what the weird life of the character was like.
Because the four novels are set over the course of 25 years, I can do some really interesting things with the characters on a macro basis.
I think I may have written about this before — I vacillate wildly about who should play the heroine of my novel in any hypothetical movie adaptation — but I got followed by someone connected to Smile 2 (I think) on Twitter so I found myself thinking about it again.
Naomi Scott as my heroine, Union Pang?
I realized, again, that the protagonist of that movie, Naomi Scott, would be perfect to play Union Pang. I first remember seeing her in the most recent Charlie’s Angels movie and I, even then, thought she would be a good fit for Pang. She’s just about the right age, too, since Pang in the novel is 32 as it opens.
Anyway, this is all fantastical and a daydream. I keep being so fucking moody about writing that it’s probably going to be the spring querying season before I actually start to query. I would *prefer* to query starting Sept 1st, but I just don’t know.
I believe I have enough time to between now and September 1st to wrap up yet another version of the novel, but…I don’t know. There are too many variables for me to know for sure.
But, in general, if you want to know what Union Pang, the heroine of my novel looks like as I write it, she looks like Ms. Scott.
Pang has a 16-year-old son and that plays a big part of the novel. And Pang is a role I could see any number of actresses really wanting to play because she’s a very, very flawed woman. She’s a part-time sex worker (stripper) and also runs a alternative weekly.
She’s obsessed with buying a small town newspaper…then a murder happens and she is hell bent on discovering the truth.
I would be greatly helped if, like, people took me seriously. But I have no friends and no one likes me. So all I have is my gut. I just write what I think would make for a good novel in the context of The Girl Who Played With Fire as my “textbook.”
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