Now that I have SOMETHING finished that I can use as the basis for the Third Draft of my first novel, I need to contemplate my next move. I think what I’m going to do is sit down and do some long-delayed development. In fact, I’m kind of doing it in a bassackards way because I probably should done character studies and treatments BEFORE I started the novel.
But it’s too late now.
I still have a hard deadlines of first April 19th then July 22. I want to have a draft of the novel done by April 19th that I can physically hand a few copies to people at an event that I am set to go to.
So, now I’m going to allow myself a few days to plot my next move, given the time restraints I face. I think my best bet is to do to, sometime soon, go through what I’ve written and do some sort of triage to figure out what scenes can be salvaged and what scenes have to be totally re-written or significantly fleshed out.
But, in general, I’m feeling pretty stoked. This is a really accessible tale. It’s fun, fast paced and spicy.
Chappell Roan has got to be one of the best new artists I’ve discovered of late. She is so, so good. Her music is in the sweetspot of pop rock music that we just don’t have enough of these days.
Chappell Roan Her stuff definitely “has a beat and you can dance to it” as they used to say.
In fact, I’m surprised she not bigger. She’s just so, so good. Some of her tracks are so easy to dance to in that old fashion pop rock dance way that I really miss. I know if I was still a DJ in Seoul I would play the shit out of some of her songs.
I have to note that some of her songs are a bit….graphic. I don’t know how much of that is I’m just an old man and how much of that is true. And, yet, lulz, all good lyrics are really honest so you can’t really hold it against her too much.
I occasionally muse about what might happen if I went back to South Korea for a visit. I had a lot of “rizz” as the kids say when I was in South Korea and I’m sure there are a few South Koreans who remember me quite well.
I can just see me walking around the street in Seoul if I went back any time soon and some random Korean from my years there who remembered me popping out of the woodwork and saying, “Hey, man, there’s this perfect job for you at Samsung I know about…”
But there are a lot of problems with such a scenario.
It’s not like I’m going back to Seoul anytime soon — if ever. I could be nearly 60 years old — or older — by the time my lot in life changes to the point that I can even think about a return to Asia.
There are some other issues, but lulz, I don’t feel like talking about it.
Trump, besides being a malignant ding-dong, is something of a political terrorist. And he get his power from how people conflate his political power with actual power as a person. Politically, because he is an avatar for some pretty messed up shit in our political system, he is something of a God King.
But as an actual human being, he’s just a lazy, dumb piece of shit.
The point is — if he becomes president again, it will say more about us as a nation than him as a political leader.
He’s not a Great Man. He doesn’t warp history to his personal needs, he just rides its trends. And, at the moment, there is a macro trend towards the United States become a white Christian ethnostate — or being forced to decide if it wants to become one — and, as such, Trump could very well become POTUS again.
This, despite what a fucking idiot he is.
So, I dunno. It really could go either way this fall. And if Trump becomes POTUS again, we will have only ourselves to blame.
Now that I have a complete draft done — even if it’s shit — I can collect my thoughts and think about what happens next.
I need to sit down and write out canon for all of the major characters. I also need to figure out what I’m going to do about the second half of the novel in a very fast amount of time.
I only have until April 19th to make a pretty shitty second half of the novel worth reading.
Now, obviously, all of this is EXTREMELY arbitrary because, lulz, I just want to be able to hand a “finished” draft to some people. I want to be able to say, “Hey, here’s the third draft of my novel,” even though I know personally that I’m going to keep working on it because the REAL deadline is July 22.
I have finally finished SOMETHING that could be considered a very rough Alpha Release of the third draft of my first novel.
It’s very, very rough.
But it had to be done so I could do the next thing — sit down and flesh out canon and character. So, that’s my next task, to sit down and get a lot better sense of canon and character for this novel.
I am very much on track to finishing a draft by April 19th that is just good enough to physically hand to someone with a big grin on my face, filled with pride.
Not sense I was working on the original ROKon Magazine with the late Annie Shapiro back in the day has something so consumed my mental faculties as this novel has. It’s warped my perception of the world to the point that it is very, very difficult for me to consume anyone else’s media.
I have become a storytelling snob in the extreme and only very few stories are “good enough” for my time. I can’t help but pick apart the editorial choices made in any content I consume. In fact, I know I may get hooked with some TV or movie if that is NOT act the forefront of my mind.
Most of the time, I just roll my eyes at how dumb a story is — even if everyone else thinks it’s great.
The last time I saw a TV show that I really liked was Fleabag. It’s perfect when it comes to character creation. All the characters — especially Fleabag — are very, very well crafted and understood by their creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge. (Whom I still think should play in a series of movies about Dr. Susan Calvin, robot psychologist.)
Anyway. It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out going forward. I hope to be a professional — and successful — creative type the rest of my life, starting with selling my first novel in the next few years.
Marc Andreessen changed my life. And, but for the hard wiring of my synapsis, could have made me a billionaire. “I was there,” as the song goes, in the early days of the Web when the first web browser Mosaic, that he designed, was released. I was in college and I immediately realized the potential of this new technology.
If I had a different type brain, I probably would have become a programmer and made my billions in some Web startup as part of the general dotcom boom of the mid-to-late-90s. But, alas, I’m a big old doofus and just know how to write and take pictures.
So.
Why do I bring all of this up?
Well, Andreessen implied tonight on Twitter that the “woke cancel culture mob” is analogous to the excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. There is so much to unpack there.
First, it’s clear that Andreesen has turned into one of those Red Pilled fascist tech bros who would are obsessed with the culture wars to the point that they would give up their American birthright of democracy in exchange for low-to-no-taxes.
Ugh.
Having said that, let’s look close at what he suggests — does he have a point?
Hmmm. This is an interesting question. The issue is, social media has made the weaponization of shaming on a mass scale for the stupidest shit really easy. And, yet, Andreesen is being an asshole to suggest that the “woke cancel culture mob” can be equated with the weird, fucked up shit of the Cultural Revolution.
The two are just not the same.
Oh no, something woke!
The worst that happens to someone who is “canceled” for having views that don’t fit the media narrative is…they become a talking head on Fox News as a martyr to the cause? And sometimes, they face NO accountability other than they don’t get to go to the cool cocktail parties at Martha’s Vineyard anymore. It’s not like the “woke cancel culture mob” is killing people in public.
Now, this is the point where I say I am WELL AWARE of how suspectable I, personally, am to be “canceled” should, for some reason, I blow up with my novel money and become any sort of prominent public cultural figure. I have done plenty — PLENTY — of things over the years in my drunken dissipation that might get me canceled.
And, what’s more, I’m writing a novel that may never get published because I write about things in a way that the “woke cancel culture mob” may blanch at.
So…lulz?
But I still think Andreessen is being a dick. He wants to score culture war points by muddling and conflating things that might SEEM similar, but upon any sort of nuanced reflection definitely aren’t.
As I zoom through what will form the basis of the April 19th Release of this novel, I realize I have something of a crutch when it comes to spicy scenes. I too often have people talk in bed when I could very well have them communicate the same information in a different way.
But that’s kind of the point of going through the novel in such a fast way — I need to see what problems pop up so I can fix them once I finish the entire thing, hopefully soon enough before April 19th that I will have some time to do clean up work.
The goal is to have something “finished” well enough by April 19th that when I physically hand out a few copies at the event I am going to on that day, I won’t embarrass myself.
As such, I feel ok writing a lot of scenes really quickly. Once I finish “a draft” of the novel, then I can turn around and work on the copy I’ve completed and polish it so when I actually do want to hand physical copies to be people I can do with so with pride.
All of this is very arbitrary, of course. But I need a deadline if I’m going to ever finish this fucking thing and to set such a tight deadline for “a version” that is complete in one way or another works well with my personality.
So, I sprint. Once the April 19th Version is done, THEN I can spend some time reworking it and rewriting scenes as necessary to either start to query or to save up the cash necessary to pay and editor.
Oh boy. This is an instance where being a smelly CIS white male isn’t exactly the most helpful. I have come up with a really interesting plot point for this novel — a woman who doesn’t see herself as gay having a torrid relationship with a young woman who is a free spirit — and every once in a while I do a gut check and worry the “woke cancel culture mob” will freak the fuck out that I’ve done such a thing.
I hope to write a novel as interesting as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
This particular element of the story is fun and provides a lot of comic relief to the story and also keeps the story going at a fast clip. And, yet, I’m not a 20something undocumented transgender woman writing about such things, but a smelly middle-aged MAN.
But, lulz, I never what I’m supposed to do and this is where the Muse has taken me for this novel and I guess I’m stuck with it.
At least I’m really, really self-conscious about what I’ve gotten myself into. I understand why me writing about lesbian stuff from a female POV as a smelly CIS white male might be….a problem. The way some young women talk on Tik-Tok, I have no right to exist as a human being, much less as an aspiring male author who occasionally writes from a female POV.
I wish I had a wife or a girlfriend to be my Reader. Then, at least, I would have woman to tell me when maybe I have taken things too far, even if you give me the benefit of the doubt. And, yet, Stieg Larsson wrote some pretty crazy shit in his novels and they were a success.
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