Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

Day 18: Getting Better All The Time

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

While I continue to not know what I’m doing, I am getting a general sense that maybe things are beginning to get better — a lot better. As things get better, I find myself dwelling on all the things that could go wrong to make all my hard work moot.

The next novel in the project is about a missing baby.

And, yet, no one can predict the future, least of all me. So, you just have to wing it. We all have to wing it. But I am concerned that I could endup writing the fucking Bible and because I’m a drunk crank…I don’t get published. Or a civil war breaks out and we’re all too busy trying to avoid bombs that no one has time to read a novel — much less mine.

So, I don’t know what to tell you.

All you can do is just believe, you know? Keep the faith and all that. You just never know what might happen if you just keep plugging along. I’m growing really pleased with what I’ve managed to come up with. There are stakes and motivations. All the things necessary for a good to great story.

I’m so pleased with what I’ve come up with, that I’m growing more and more interested in diving into the second novel in this project. But, I dunno. I think I should probably work on the two scifi novels I have rolling around in my mind before I do that.

Day 17: Working My Way Through The First Act Of The Second Draft

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I finally have pretty stable first act. I’m now going through what I have and am correcting things as necessary to make it a cohesive whole. The only problem is, of course, is this whole process continues to take a lot longer than necessary. It’s looking like if I’m lucky, that I’ll have something akin to a complete first act within about a week.

My only hope is that once I get into the rest of the novel that things might move a bit faster because I will have the foundation of the novel figured out. And, in general, the rest of the novel is a lot stronger already. I don’t think I’m going to have to rework things as much as I have had to in the first act.

That’s the hope, at least.

Anyway, I continue to need to be willing to force myself to go outside my comfort zone by working harder — even when I’m not really in the mood. I can’t keep just drifting towards my goal. I have to accept that if I’m going to get this done, I need to take it more seriously.

I still think I can pull this off. I still think I can finish the second draft by July 1st. That’s the dream, at least. One issue that is kind of rough is once I finish the second draft, things are going to kind of be out of my hands. I’m going to have to figure out a way to get someone, anyone, to be a beta reader for me, willing to read the whole thing so I can improve it.

And, at the same time, I’m going to hopefully be able to save up for some sort of professional editor to stress-test the story in some capacity. That’s the only way I’m going to make this story better.

I have to admit, of course, that as I find myself growing closer and closer to finishing this first novel in a projected six novel project, that I have a growing desire to start work on the next novel in the project. I pretty much know how this first novel goes to the point that I can start to work seriously on the next novel.

And, yet, what I should be working on, of course, is one of the scifi novels I have rolling around in my mind. But, who knows. Things are both getting more exciting and getting more scary because there will come a point soon enough when I can no longer be as completely delusional as I have been.

Liberals Really Need To Stop Thinking Their Outrage Over Rightwing Hypocrisy Means Jack Shit

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The die has been cast — the conditions now exist for either autocracy or a civil war starting in late 2024, early 2025. I suppose there is a minor chance that somehow we punt our problems down the road one more election cycle, but I’m not feeling too confident.

I say this because no matter who wins in 2024, one side or the other could very well feel compelled to leave the Union at the state level. And it really all depends on a combination of Trump and how bad things have gotten on a systemic basis within the Republican Party.

If Trump somehow magically manages NOT to steal / win the 2024 election, it’s easy to imagine him ranting about secession, even if it’s obliquely. That, unto itself, could be enough for Red states to begin the process of secession, probably starting with Texas. Though, of course, Texas might defer to South Carolina out of a sense of history. (Anything is possible.)

Meanwhile, if Trump wins in 2024 — which he could very well do, given that pretty much 40,000 swing voters in five states decide everything — his incoming agenda could be so God awful radical that Blue states are faced with the choice of bending a knee to autocracy or leaving the Union. If that choice did occur, my bet is that Blues will ultimately bend a knee because it’s too easy for all the smug Twitter liberals who would otherwise be the leadership of Blue America to simply decamp to the four corners of the world.

There is the chance that a Not Trump Republican wins the nomination and the 2024 election and such an outcome would grease the wheels of our transition into autocracy such that, lulz, we wake up in 20 years to the US invading Canada free it of the “woke cancel culture mob.”

I wish I was kidding.

Anyway, the key thing for me of late is liberas on Twitter continue to think fascist MAGA Nazis care one lick about hypocrisy. For instance, Clarence Thomas could have eaten someone as a kid, Yellowjackets style, and there would not be a peep from the Right about him needing to resign. MAGA Nazis are so craven, so power hungry, that they’re willing to accept any crime, any hypocrisy….ANYTHING…from someone on their side if it furthers their MAGA Nazi agenda.

So, lulz. That’s all I got, folks. Get ready.

Day 16: Yet Another Revamp

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The first act is getting a lot better, and, yet, as I go through what I’ve already written or plan to write, I continue to tinker with the specific lineup of scenes. This causes a great deal of delay because I sometimes have to think up entirely new scenes out of whole cloth.

And, what’s worse, my scene count continues to creep up. I was fell really stoked when I had the first act scene count down to ~30 scenes. But now it’s up to 36. This is really important because the longer the novel grows, the more likely I’m going to have to write a SECOND novel to pitch as my first because I just can’t sell a first novel that blows past 100,000 words.

It’s all very concerning and annoying.

And, yet the story I’m fleshing out for the second draft is really, really good. I’m really pleased and I really have an understand about the characters that I haven’t had before. This, unto itself, is enough to speed the process of writing up because even if it have to think up an entirely new scene, I know the characters and story well enough at this point that things go really fast.

But here I am, 16 days in and I’m not even out of the first act yet. I really need to speed up. I can’t just keep drifting towards my goal. I need to buckle down and actually do some hard work — even when maybe I’m not all that motivated to do it.

The issue is — if I don’t speed things up, it will be the fall before I finish this second draft and then that pushes everything else down the road. I really want to start querying early next year and, as such, I need to wrap this second draft up no later than, say, July 1st.

I also want to read — and watch movies and TV — a lot more than I have in the past. I have found that if I actually lower myself to consume someone else’s media that I’m far more productive with my own creation. It’s I’m so used to producing rather than consuming content that I really struggle with switching gears like that.

Anyway.

I really have to focus. I’m really excited about what’s going on with this novel, but there is going to come a point where if I don’t finish something, anything, I’ll be so old that it’ll all be moot. I have to stop treading water and actually be willing to move forward, even if I feel the draft is less-than-perfect.

Day 15: The First Act Is Shaping Up

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

After much revision, I have nailed down my structural vision for the first act of the second draft of my first novel. The next step is to go through and revise and write what I’ve laid out.

The other option would be, of course, to plow ahead without looking back then at the end of the process go through and rework the entire completed draft so it’s worth reading. But, for the time being, I’ve decided to do it this way, which is to make sure the first draft is done and complete before moving into the second act.

As such, I have a lot of hard work ahead of me. I have a number of scenes I have to actually write still — I just have scene summaries for them as place holders at the moment. But my aim is to slowly and methodically go through what I have and make everything make sense. I want the first act to be “readable” for Beta Readers before I plunge into the first part of the second act.

I don’t know how long that will take me, but hopefully — hopefully — I will wrap things up on that front by, say, next weekend. If I can pull that off, then I’m still on track to finishing the second draft by July 1st.

THEN, of course, I have to start contemplating the Beta Reader process and saving up for an manuscript editor to look over what I’ve written. Once all THAT is done, THEN I can start the querying process. I believe I will be at that point by early next year.

Of course, that would put me in line to be trying to get an agent just as the potential “Fourth Turning” is careening towards America in late 2024, early 2025 at an alarming rate. It’s going to be pretty ironic if I spend all this time working on a really good novel, only to have the United States to buckle and collapse into civil war and potentially revolution.

If we just slide peacefully into a MAGA-themed autocracy — which what I believe will happen — then the latter novels in this project will be very, very timely. So much so, I might get arrested.

AI & Our Coming ‘Mindfulness’ Overlords

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve given it some thought and, really, there is only one thing that humans can do that AI can’t do — use judgement. In fact, given how from a capitalists point of view, it is the very brutal nature of AI and chatbots that make them so attractive so it is inevitable that as the revolution progresses that we’re all going to realize that judgement is valuable.

I could see it happening this way — soon enough, because humans are lazy, we defer 99% of our decisions, economy, culture and politics to AI. But the one thing that we couldn’t defer to an AI would be good judgement. In short, “mindfulness” might suddenly become a very lucrative profession.

I don’t know exactly how this would all play out, but if there comes a point when almost all human activity is done through a blackbox AI, then the time of someone with good judgement to help manage and guide that AI would be very valuable.

Here’s where we come to something really intriguing — is it possible that if we create the “Other” via AI, that some attempt to unite Humanity might arise in an effort to unify our response to AI. At the moment, it’s difficult for the US to do anything about AI because if we do, then some other country, maybe Estonia, will swoop in and do all the kinky AI stuff we blanch at doing and we’ll fall behind.

But if there was some sort of global response to AI, then we would all be on the same page as to who would be the people we used to use AI in a “mindful” manner.

Could Twitter Morph Into A Chatbot Service?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve given it some reflection and it definitely seems as though Space Karen could surprise us all and do something pretty amazing with Twitter. At its heart, Twitter is a text-based system with a prompt. It seems obvious that you could somehow rig up a chatbot natively and organically to the service’s existing UX and do something astonishing.

I’m not smart enough to figure out the specifics just yet — like, how you would make money . But imagine you sit down in front of Twitter 2.0 and instead of turning to Google to answer a question, you ask a Twitter LLM whatever it is you want. Just a back-of-the-envelope imagining of this concept suggests that the possibilities are endless.

If you could make a Twitter LLM compelling enough, people might even be willing to pay for it. Or something. I still am very dubious about the idea that you’ll be able to turn LLMs into subscription services. That seems like a daydream of the elite who don’t want to have to put up with something as pedestrian as ads.

But if you could fuse the existing Twitter userbase with a LLM, it’s a very intriguing idea. For no other reason than Twitter would be adding to its existing service, rather than having to eat its own, like, say Google. All of this is fast moving target, so it could all go a lot of different ways.

Apparently, Space Karen has already incorporated an AI company, so as such there might be some ready synergy between it and Twitter a lot sooner than one might otherwise think.

‘Maude:’ Pop Culture in The Post-Dobbs Era

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Gradually, since there was an abortion storyline on the primetime TV show “Maude,” the issue of abortion became extremely taboo in pop culture. Even when, all things considered, it made a lot of sense for a story to broach the subject, TV and movies did everything in their power to dodge the issue.

So, when the Amazon Prime TV show Daisy Jones & The Six prominently featured abortion, I started to wonder if things have changed because of the Dobbs ruling. Is it possible that now that abortion is again a political football that it’s ok to address the issue?

If this is true, it would be very paradoxical. You would think that while abortion was legal that it would be ok to talk about it frankly in pop culture. Nope. In the years since Maude — and Roe V. Wade — it became nearly absolutely impossible for fiction — especially TV and movies — to even so much as get anywhere near the topic.

And, yet, here we are in an new era where abortion rights are receding and you have a mainstream work of pop culture like Daisy Jones & The Six talk about in a very direct manner.

Maybe I’m overthinking things. It could be that lulz, nothing matters and nothing has changed. But I do think the long-term effects of the Dobbs decision on pop culture aren’t known yet.

Day 14: A Hot Take On ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve decide to make today a reading day, rather than a development and / or writing day, so I’ve just finished Daisy Jones & The Six. And I have opinions to articulate.

First, the novel is an extremely easy read. It’s well written and structured and, yet, most of the time I felt like an interloper in a story whereby a woman is telling other women a story. As a dude,I struggled to understand some basic elements of the story.

First and foremost, I felt the “subverting of expectations” when it came to the relationship between Daisy Jones and Billy Dunn, EXTREMELY IRRITATING. I get that the whole point of the novel, in a sense, is it sees the real-life drama surrounding the production of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” album as a stepping off point.

Ok, I get it.

And I get that, as such, the author decided to invert what the audience would otherwise expect. Rather than Billy Dunn and Daisy Jones fucking like rabbits, they hate each other because they can’t have each other. Ok, ok, I understand.

But.

Maybe because I’m a smelly boi who doesn’t understand what modern white liberal women want to read, I felt cheated. I felt cheated on a number of different levels.

The use of the “oral history” technique for the story was annoying because it would have been more compelling to, say, open each chapter with a little bit of that and then show the audience what REALLY happened.

I was taken aback by how little sex there was in the novel. Despite a story about sex, drugs and rock n roll, it was very light and breezy and never really challenged or confronted the audience. I don’t know how much that is I’m a smelly boi who wants nasty things to happen to characters and how much of that is that’s just the story the author wanted to tell.

There were long stretches of time during my reading of the novel when I wondered when something was going to happen. I just didn’t feel invested in the characters and everything was written in such a Lifetime Channel manner that I only kept reading because the Amazon Prime show based on the novel WAS that good.

Anyway, I could rant a lot, lot more, but I probably would get canceled.

Well, They Have A Point

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m a big fan of the New York Times Pitchbot Twitter account, so when I saw the following, I felt a bit sheepish.

He made a point of referencing his tweet above, then pointing out this real hot take, below.

I feel rather sheepish because, lulz, I’ve made a similar point on the blog of late. I usually mention this when I get annoyed not so much at the Trans movement, but the meta element of it all — they are so touchy about people conforming to their media narrative orthodoxy that they really do drive a lot of well meaning Traditionalists into the arms of fucking MAGA fascists.

I find the complaint of the otherwise stellar New York Times Pitchbot a bit murky. The issue of overzealous liberal-progressives is a real problem (at least with the Traditionalists in my life) so I don’t quite know how to address his complaint.

Anyway. What do I know.