It Looks Like Rain Lyrics by @sheltgarner please give credit if you produce or perform
you can tell me the truth I swear I won’t bite the clouds are dark I’m afraid soon enough if I’m right that it looks like rain
it looks like rain it looks like rain it looks like rain baby
the darkness on the horizon raises my fears that our love is about to fade what is our fate I want to know is it going to rain or is that just my fears becoming a little too dear ’cause it looks like rain
it looks like rain it looks like rain it looks like rain baby
(bridge) it’s dry as dirt my mouth is parched no sign of rain from the sight of my domain but maybe I’m wrong and a flood is on its way
it looks like rain it looks like rain it looks like rain baby
Love Never Ends lyrics by @sheltgarner please give credit if you produce or perform
don’t know what to say much to my dismay lay down next to me give me a taste of your sigh as a caress your thigh
love never ends when you’re into sin love never ends when you’re into sin love never ends when you’re into sin into sin into sin into sin
lovers come and go and sometimes they blow but give me a bow and I’ll let you know what it’s all about no one can compare when you give me a bedroom stare
love never ends when you’re into sin love never ends when you’re into sin love never ends when you’re into sin into sin into sin into sin
(bridge) I’ll be a saint sweet as can be if that will make you cling keep your distance if you must ’cause we need to keep our lust in the dust
love never ends when you’re into sin love never ends when you’re into sin love never ends when you’re into sin into sin into sin into sin
I really hate the modern Web sometimes. I hate how boring it is. I hate that I have to use a browser — or an app. What I want is to have the Web replaced by a bunch of LLM that talk to each other.
Or, I don’t know, it would be cool if I had a LLM that knew every quirk of my personality to the point that it could “pre-emptively” answer my questions before I even asked them. Or something like that.
Of course, the dark side to this is everyone would fall in love with their LLM, like in the movie Her. But ignoring that problem, I want to information to come to me via LLM, rather than me have to search it out.
It makes you think about how maybe the major national newspapers might need to invest in LLM. Because it definitely seems as though everything on the Web is about to change in a rather abrupt manner. Almost overnight, it could be that the very notion of using a “browser” will seem quaint.
This will only accelerate as LLMs become a commodity. That seems to be inevitable.
I’m a storytelling snob. So much so, that it’s now nearly impossible for me to consume anyone else’s story. But, at last, I believe I may — may — have at last stumble upon a beginning to my novel that actually pleases even me.
Now, remember, I’m not nearly as dark as my hero Stieg Larsson. And it can be a real struggle for me to play it straight — I like to plop in some humor every now and again. I just can’t help myself.
Anyway. It is at least possible that things will zoom along at a pretty fast clip now. I’ve had to grit my teeth and break or bend some of the dumb arbitrary rules I’ve been using to write this novel simply so I can actually finish something, anything.
I am embarrassed by how long it’s taken me to get to this point. I now hope to finish the third draft in the February – March timeframe. Then I will have to figure out how to pay a manuscript consultant to help me take the thing to the next level.
The case could be made that my heroine looks kind of like Pom Klementieff.
What’s more all of this will be happening in the context of the United States careening towards autocracy or civil war / revolution starting in late 2024, early 2025 — just as I plan on querying the novel!
But I have hope. I hope that if I can sell this first novel, I will somehow be given the opportunity to not only write the other five planned novels, but also a few scifi novels I want to write. And maybe, if I’m EXTREMELY LUCKY, a few screenplays too.
I can still remember way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth when a very giddy young woman came up to me DJing at the bar Nori in Seoul and asked for me to play Nellie Furtado’s new track “Maneater.”
“It’s huge in Bangkok right now,” she said.
It’s a great song. In fact, the entire album that Maneater comes off of is kind of the sweetspot of the type of music I love. I love music that has a beat and you can dance to it. As such, when I heard the latest cut from Dua Lipa, “Houdini,” my listening ears perked up.
The track is…really good?
It’s got that same Loose vibe to it. It’s not…quite…there…but it’s so close as to be no big deal. I would have the song go a little harder as a dance track, but beggars can’t be choosers. Houdini is a solid dance pop rock song. It’s not disco and yet is sure to get punk ass Zennials on the dance floor.
Anyway. I hope the rest of the album is as good as this one song.
I will note there is an amusing element to the song’s video. Lipa yet again gives us a little T&A…without actually showing anything. She loves to do shit like that. You go girl.
As I understand it, The Girl On The Train is about 140,000 words. I’m not suggesting I’m nearly as good a writer as the author of that novel, but at least that gives me hope that the ~100,000 word “sweetspot” for a first time author isn’t an absolute.
I say that because this novel is getting REALLY GOOD, but the first act is a bit long at 50 scenes. Each scene, as a rule of thumb, is on average 1,000 words so that’s about 50,000 words before The Event happens that sparks the rest of the story. But, remember Stieg Larsson did something similar with The Girl Who Played With Fire.
I’m — hoping — that all the spicy scenes in the first 50 scenes involving us seeing our intrepid heroine balancing her life as the owner of a strip club with that of owning an alternative weekly will give the story enough juice that audience will be willing to humor me for 50,000 words. I mean, who doesn’t like imagining T&A in their mind, am I right? Wink.
I find myself needing to actually consume media for once. I’ve grown into such a fucking storytelling snob that it is very, very difficult for me to read or otherwise consume anyone else’s story. But as my own story gets better, I realize maybe I need to be willing to expose myself to other voices.
Today is has been a good day for the novel. The beginning is a lot stronger than it has been since I started this third draft. It is becoming more and more clear that this novel is very, very ambitious relative to my actual storytelling ability. There was just too much going on at first.
But now I’ve fixed that problem by staggering major developments in the story to the point that things slowly come to a boil at the end of the first act. I’m very pleased. I’ve also realized that I can’t just keep using my ad hoc, arbitrary rules derived from attempting to reverse engineer Stieg Larsson. I have to be willing to do what serves the purposes of telling a good story.
So, things are going pretty well. The story still has some pretty risky elements to it, given that I’m a smelly CIS white male who some people within the “woke cancel culture mob” believe doesn’t have the right to tell any story, much less a story about a “sex worker who solves a mystery.”
But, you know, lulz, slings and arrows and all that.
I hope to methodically write a few thousand words during the course of the day. I can’t keep spinning my wheels forever. Once I establish the first few chapters, things should move really, really, fast.
It is a little known fact that the right of revolution is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. I’m a man of peace and of ideas. I hate violence of any sort. And yet these are times that try men’s souls, as Thomas Paine would tell us. It is clear that concentrations camps will be to Trump’s vengeful second term what “the wall” was to his first.
This is of personal interest to me because the same infrastructure used to put “millions” of undocumented people in concentration camps could be used against “vermin” like…me. The thing that gives me a growing sense of frustration is how oblivious the usual suspect nattering nabobs of negativism are to the fact that maybe there are *no* institutions that will step up to save us.
We will have to save ourselves.
The problem we face is there is a certain political momentum to the MAGA Nazi movement that is difficult to defeat using traditional methods. It’s like we’ve all just collectively given up, much like the Roman Empire did in its last few decades. Or, to put a more modern spin on things — freedom loving people are going to appease themselves into a corner.
“What is to be done,” was the question Lenin asked in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. And I ask that question now, “What is to be done?” I just don’t have a ready answer for you because it seems — as of late 2023 — that it is a historical inevitability that Trump will win a second term and we’re just going to have to sort things out after that.
My fear is that Trump will attempt to use the legal magic pixie dust of the Insurrection Act to knock heads and the U.S. Military will balk at playing the part of some sort of later day SA. There is some sort of “Glorious Revolution” that deposes malignant ding-dong Trump, which, in turn provokes a Secession Crisis as Red States — who want a MAGA Nazi state — get upset and demand a National Divorce.
Before you know it, not only are WMD being used by both sides on U.S. soil, but fucking WW3 has broken out and about 1 billion people die as a number of nuclear-tipped regional conflicts turn hot. If we’re lucky, after a lot of tragic, needless death and destruction “the Good Guys” — people who believe in liberal democracy — win and we have some sort of Second Reconstruction in the context of a complete realignment of the global order — a New World Order, if you will.
But all of that is extremely speculative.
Remember, major historical events are value free while you’re living through them. There is no narrative. I mean, in 1942, your average American had no idea how WW2 was going to end. And, really, all things considered, WW2 ended in a very clean cut way — for the most part — such that The Good Guys won and the Bad Guys lost.
So, predicting what will happen starting in late 2024, early 2025 is impossible. We could very well just punt our problems down the road another four years and all my “hysterical doom shit” will be just that — hysterical doom shit. But I do think we need to think seriously about what the fuck we’re going to do when Trump makes good on his pledge to mass deport people.
And that doesn’t even begin to address what we’re going to do if Trump goes full tyrant and attempts to establish an actual military dictatorship. AND, Trump is fucking old, so it might not even be him who ultimately transitions us from an anocracy into a full Russian-style autocracy.
While the idea that I might be getting a few views from people somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hollywood industrial complex is flattering, it’s also a bit unnerving. It’s unnerving because I don’t know why they would keep tabs on this novel that I’m still a year from querying.
My fear, of course, is they maybe aren’t going to “steal” the idea so much as steal a march on me by using all my ranting about this novel to write a screenplay with the same basic elements. And, yet, I’m so generally vague about the specifics of the novel that I have only so much to worry about.
This novel is shaping up to be really good — if risky and controversial. But its the “Barry”-like element of the story that both appeals to me and makes me very, very nervous. So nervous that I yet again feel like maybe I need a “second creative track” as a back up in case when I try to query this novel people find the premise so out there that they won’t even give me a chance.
And given the success of Barry, it seems inevitable that someone, somewhere will think up a similar story, even if the everything is different but the crux of the weird part of the story. Don’t quite know what I’m going to do if that happens. Depends on how close their plot is to mine.
The thing I’m beginning to worry about is what are we going to do if Trump goes full tyrant? Anything? If Trump opens concentration camps for “illegal immigrants” it’s easy to imagine him flipping a switch and deciding to put people like ME in a camp.
Once you have that infrastructure built out, you can do anything with it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.