There are a series of milestones during the year that mark the progression of the year for me. One of these markers is my high school’s homecoming. That happens this weekend and it causes me to think about a year from now and to wonder what the world will look like in April 2025.
Mood.
It could very well be that all my “hysterical doom shit” will turn out to be just that and we’ll somehow muddle through to the point that a year from now won’t be much different from today.
But there is a greater-than-zero chance that things may be so fucked up the next time my high school has its homecoming that either it doesn’t happen or the context will be so different that I won’t really feel like going. I don’t think we appreciate how crazy things could get starting in late 2024, early 2025.
And the craziness could happen if Trump wins or loses. If he loses, he could demand a National Divorce to stay out of prison and if he wins, by April 2025, the country may be in the middle of a historic uprising against his tyranny.
Or not. I just don’t know.
I am, however, very unnerved by what we have to look forward to in the next year.
I’m not the first to notice that our post-Roe world is a lot like the lead up to the passage of Prohibition about a century ago. The dynamics of the two movements are very similar. In both instances, there is a whole lot of “catching the car” going on.
Now, there is one quirk to this situation. We have to figure out what we’re going to do about Trump and the push towards a MAGA-themed white Christian ethnostate. If we simply become an autocracy, then the issue of abortion will be settled for the duration — it will be illegal as will contraception.
But there is a chance that the country will implode / explode into civil war and or revolution and, as such, it won’t be until we have a winner in that epic struggle that we have some sense of what the state of reproductive rights will be. I only think there’s a *chance* of this far darker scenario because of how big and diverse the country is as well as how stupid and lazy Trump is in general.
Yet the fact remains that we’re going to go through a lot of pain and suffering no matter what over the next decade or so figuring out what is politically acceptable to the most people in the United States when it comes to the issue of abortion. A lot of women are going to suffer — and maybe die — as part of the process, but in the end, we’ll probably be just about where we were when Roe was the law of the land.
Because of fucking social media, the most extreme views on both sides of the political spectrum get amplified to the point that they dominate any discussion. There are a number of pet issues of far Left that just give me a headache to even think about.
Mood.
And, yet, because of how fucked up American politics are, I have to defend them from crazed MAGA Nazis.
I give some of these more extreme issues a lot of thought. Maybe too much thought.
But, in the end, I realize I’m a one issue voter — I want to live in a traditional Western democracy.
I feel as though a lot of the weird, exotic things that the far Left clings so tightly to are not only outliers, but, in the end, they would be sorted out of we just had a functioning democracy.
That’s all I want — a functioning democracy.
But I am really growing alarmed at the extreme radicalization of the MAGA Nazi right. They are so consumed with the “vibes” that they are willing to burn everything to the ground just so they can establish the “moralistic state” where the state dictates peoples moral behavior.
And, of course, the most bonkers element to all of this is MAGA people are at the same time people who rant about how they “just want to be left alone.” But when you mention women’s reproductive rights and how women have a right to be “left alone” suddenly — SUDDENLY — they get mad and say that THAT is different.
Just from talking to my far more conservative relatives — who I love dearly — it is clear to me that the MAGA Right continues to radicalize. Nothing — not even civil war — is off the table now.
Mood. One of the most frustrating things about debating a radical MAGA Right person is they get so bent out of shape about “the crisis at the border” that you want to confront them about what’s really going on — they’re upset about the browning of America. But you just can’t broach the subject without the conversation devolving into name calling.
I mean, what I want to say is, “you’re being a bigot.” But the moment I said such a thing, my MAGA Right interlocutor would freak the fuck out and the whole conversation would collapse. The MAGA Right person I have my conversations with simply do not see themselves as a “bigot” and on a personal basis, they aren’t.
But in the abstract, oh boy. There’s just no way you can be so upset about the type of person flooding the country without a certain level of bigotry being involved.
So, all I can do is THINK “you’re a bigot” and not say what’s on my mind. What’s more, the MAGA Right person you might be talking to would be REALLY UPSET if you called them “a bigot” because they don’t see themselves as one. But what else do you call someone who is freaks out about scary brown people flooding the border?
And, what’s more, things really go haywire when you point out that Biden TRIED to do something about the “border crisis,” only to have ding-dong Trump put the kibosh on it — to the point that he said “you can blame me” for its failure. The MAGA Right person — because they have an extensive permission structure (and don’t like the vibes) — simply ignores this statement because they’re too busy being upset about how they thing “Biden is destroying the country from within.”
So, we’re at an impasse. We collectively continue to careen towards a dark and unknown future.
Because of how “racy” my mystery-thriller is, I’ve finally decided to work on a backup novel. The novel is a scifi novel with a pandemic element to it. As I’ve said before, it’s a pretty obvious way to talk about pandemics — at least in my opinion — so I keep expecting to wake up and read in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter that a movie with the exact same premise has started production.
But I really like the idea and it gives me a sense of insurance against my main novel being too “racy’ to ever get published. I have a few other novel ideas to pivot to if disaster strikes and even the scifi novel I’m working on is somehow co-oped by someone else.
One key thing that I’ve learned working on the mystery-thriller is you have to have a proactive protagonist. Too often in the past, I’ve had very passive protagonists, which has made for a dull story. So, now that I am very aware of how important having a proactive hero is, the scifi novel concept is moving a lot faster.
At the moment, I’m just at the treatment stage for the scifi novel. But things are moving a fairly nice clip. I’m beginning to struggle with the second half of the novel at the moment. And once the treatment is done, I think the next step is to do some rough character studies so I won’t be where I am now with the main novel where I have to reverse engineer character development in a story that is pretty much all plot.
I have developed a hero for the scifi novel that resembles me, which is bad because you’re not supposed to have a “proxy you” in the novel when you write one. And, yet, at the moment the elements that are similar to me work, so, lulz, why bother fixing them.
And I’m still pretty early in the process.
I continue to worry that all of this will be moot because of the looming possibility of a “perfect storm” involving the so-called political Fourth Turning and a technological Petite Singularity.
I am soon going to be finished with the third draft of my first novel. As such, because I want to go the traditional publishing route, I have to begin to take seriously the querying process.
Mood.
Now, the stressful thing about this is I have no idea what to do. I only vaguely know at this point about things like “Query Tracker” and the fact that I have to write a query letter. I have been knee deep in active delusion for all the years it has taken me to write this novel and now, suddenly, the cold, dark waters of reality are beginning to rush in.
At the moment, I would like to hand over the finished third draft to an editor of some sort. It may take me months to save up the money to get someone to edit the novel. Yet that’s just the beginning.
I think I’m going to have to be really careful about this element of the querying process because I’ve already managed to screw up once. I alienated one prospective editor because I think that not only did she think I was freaky weirdo after reading this blog, but she thought I was going to be too emotionally needy.
So I need to give the idea of what I say to any prospective editor some thought. And I have to accept that there is a good chance that any editor worth their salt is going to search for me online and look at this blog and be aghast at what a freaky weirdo I am. And that doesn’t even begin to address what they might think of my Twitter feed.
This very real prospect rattles my cage a great deal. I’m not getting any younger and I would prefer to be a published author before I reach 60. Just my age itself is problematic — not to mention that I really haven’t done shit with my life in a long time. AND I’m bonkers.
And, yet, the only consolation I have is that while there’s life there’s hope. I do have to manage my expectations, though — any success with a spec novel is like winning the literary lottery.
So it’s possible that I could stick the landing and STILL either not find an agent or being in limbo for years. And that doesn’t even address the fact that late 2024, early 2025 could be some of the most momentous months in modern American history.
I don’t know what to tell you. I write because I have to, not because I want to. So I suppose I continue to be delusional, even as the looming transition into the querying process demands I be a lot more honest with myself about my prospects.
I am now lurching towards wrapping up my first novel after years of working on it. I am taken aback by how long it has taken me to get to this point. Reviewing in my mind the journey that got to me to this point I have come up with some observations.
Mood.
One is, I simply had no idea what story I wanted to tell. I spent some time thinking I wanted to write a scifi novel, but that turned out to be just to huge and I shelved it. Then I pivoted to the idea that I wanted to write a mystery-thriller that would allow me to make some political and social commentary about the Trump Era.
But I spent a lot of time just spinning my wheels on that one and I was still spinning my wheels when I realized in early 2021 that because Trump was no longer POTUS that my original intent for the story was no longer as timely. It occurred to me that I had this massive backstory about the novel I was working on at the time and it would be interesting to tell the very beginning of a 25 year tale that would end with the novel I had originally wanted to write about the Trump Era.
Once I got to that point, things began to move a lot quicker, even as the project went from one novel to two, and ultimately six.
I hope to write a novel that is as accessible and popular as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
And then something curious happened. I had planned to begin the third draft of the novel in September, only to spend months just spinning my wheels in the first act. I just could not figure out what I wanted to do with the first act of the novel.
There came a point when I realized that there was a way where I could write a novel that made sense and yet was totally different than what I had originally planned. It would require me to expand what was the first act of the novel into two third of a new novel and using a chunk of what had been the end of the first act and the beginning of the second act of the second draft.
This is the point where things changed dramatically for the story. It occurred to me that it would be very provocative if I leaned into something only alluded to in the second draft of the novel — the idea that the heroine owns a strip club. As such, I decided to have the heroine not only own a strip club but, for the duration of the novel, on occasion strip, too.
Now, clearly, if I had a wife or a girlfriend who was a Reader who could tell me “no” I probably wouldn’t have decided on such a strategic change to the plot of the novel.
But I don’t have that. So, lulz, I’ve come up with a really compelling story that MAY have too much sex in it to ever get published. But I don’t know yet. I’m too obsessed with finishing a novel of some sort that I am going to wait until I finish the third draft of this novel before I make any assessment like that.
And I continue to want to work on a backup scifi novel just in case my fears about the main novel being too “spicy” turn out to be correct. Then there is the issue of me being too bonkers for any literary agent who does due diligence on me so, well, there you go.
There are a number of instances that have occurred during The Age Of Trump that makes one think about the dynamic between Trump the Man and Trump the Idea. It really makes one wonder about the rise of Trump and what that rise means in the context of American political history.
Take, for instance, what happened with Bob Mueller’s investigation. The case could be made that a lot of the pressure to hold Trump accountable was dissipated because all of our hopes and dreams about getting rid of Trump were wrapped up in the idea that Mueller would somehow produce a report that would force Trump out of office.
It’s possible that had Trump not produced the conditions that caused Mueller to be the Special Counsel that his first few years would have been a lot more turbulent. And, what’s more, I think all of us were very oblivious to how potent Trump the Idea was to millions of white Christians who felt disenfranchised for various reasons.
Now Trump is the subject of four different criminal cases. I have a far more conservative relative — whom I love dearly — who has gone totally MAGA now that their choice of Ron DeSantis is no longer a option. Talking to this relative gives me a general sense of what’s bouncing around the far Right podcast echo chamber and it’s clear that the idea that the evil (yet also incompetent?) Biden Administration is using “lawfare” against Trump.
When pressed, my relative says that there is only one case that they think Trump may be guilty off — the secret documents case — and yet because of the extensive permission structure provided them by all those MAGA podcasts they listen to, even that one they think is “lawfare.”
When asked if Trump murdering someone might be enough to dislodge their support for him, I did not get a definitive yes – or -no answer. Yikes!
There are two major take aways from this situation.
One, white Christian (men) are enraged by the “bad vibes” they feel in the United States at the moment. They don’t really know what is making them so upset, but they know there is absolutely nothing that would cause them to put aside their rage at the center-Left to the point that they might believe that saving American democracy is more important that crushing the “woke cancel culture mob.”
And, what’s more, my conservative relative completely dismisses the idea that Trump might go full tyrant if he’s given a second term in office. They point to how Trump was “all talk” during his first administration and believe the same will be the case in a second term.
Oh boy.
All signs point to that NOT being the case. Which makes me wonder what my conservative relative’s reaction will be when Trump gets into office and starts to do all the tyrannical things he clearly wants to do. Given that I could very well find myself in a Trump-branded concentration camp because I refuse to shut up about Trump being a fucking cocksucker, well, lulz.
The other thing to note is all of this bitching and moaning about “lawfare” will be a precursor to Trump going after anyone who opposes him with the Justice Department once he is in power again. And, really, the only reason why I think Trump might not be successful in this consolidation of power is, well, Trump. He is such a ding-dong — and a lazy one at that — that he could very well go full tyrant in such a way that principled Traditionalists — such as my relative — may sit up and take notice.
I continue to believe we are careening towards a very dark and turbulent future staring in late 2024, early 2025.
We have already as a nation collectively accepted that someone can lose the popular vote by millions and still win because they win a few states that are crucial to the Electoral College count. What MAGA wants is to take things to a step further.
MAGA craves an America where we just give up. What I mean by this is MAGA, once they have power again, will fuck with the administration of elections to the point that it’s clear that we’re a Russian-style “managed democracy” and MAGA will run the country for the foreseeable future.
Trump has already told us that he wants paper ballots and no mail-in voting. What’s more, it seems as though should Trump become POTUS again that he will actively use the Justice Department to go after any one he sees as a potential political threat. He will simply say, “the Democrats did it to me, now I’m returning the favor.”
And those possibilities are just the beginning. Under the right circumstances, it definitely seems as though as part of the MAGA consolidation of power, we might face a Constitutional Convention at some point in the not-so-distance future.
Now, there are some problems with this hysterical doom shit on my part.
One is, well, Trump.
Trump is so fucking lazy and stupid that if he becomes president again he will probably thrash around in such a tyrannical fashion that even Traditionalists, who would otherwise be the “Good Germans” of American autocratic life, might sit up and take notice.
It’s one thing to use the Justice Department to go after your political opponents, especially with its gospel on MAGA podcast that “lawfare” has been used against Trump, and it’s quite another to snatch people off the street and throw them into a Trump-branded concentration camp.
Another issue is the United States is a huge, diverse nation and it would take a deft political hand in the best of historical circumstances for someone to successfully transition the United States into what it seems we’re drifting towards at the moment — an autocracy.
So, it seems reasonable to assume that because Trump is so dumb and lazy that he won’t even try for a Constitutional Convention to make it legal for him to run for a third term. He’ll just do it. And he could very well do any number of brazenly illegal things that will be challenged at SCOTUS. Because Trump is so outrageous and brazen in his tyranny, he will lose at SCOTUS. But it won’t matter because Trump will just ignore the decision.
As such, Trump could very well force the country to the breaking point. We will all collectively have to decide if we’re a nation of laws or if we have so given up that Trump can just be a tyrant and it’s all a big lulz. I think THAT is Trump’s ultimate historical purpose — to either destroy America as a Republic based on laws, or to cause us to fight it out in a revolution / civil war until one side or the other gets to run things.
I don’t want a revolution / civil war. That would really suck, as the movie “Civil War” proves. But, on an abstract basis, it definitely seems as though late 2024, early 2025 MAY be *IT*. We, as a nation, will be forced confront a fork in the political woods and I honestly have no idea which path we will pick.
The predicament I find myself in with my first novel is a prime example of what happens when you don’t have anyone around you to tell you “no.” The story I’ve come up with is compelling and intriguing enough — if you give it a chance — that you’ll finish it wanting more.
Mood.
But there are a few problems.
The most obvious one is, well, I’ve realized that it has a lot of “spicy” scenes in it because it deals with a woman who not only owns a strip club, but for the duration of the story, also, on occasion, is depicted stripping. If I had a wife or a girlfriend as a “Reader” there is a good chance she would put the kibosh on that particular element of the story.
It’s just too easy for the mythical “liberal white women” or the “woke cancel culture mob” to blanch at such a storyline, especially one written by a man. If I was an twentysomething undocumented trans woman then that would be a different story. (There you go, I’ve put all three of my running gags into one paragraph to trigger you when you do your due diligence on me.)
There are a few other problems with the nature of my first novel that are structural and existential so, lulz, I just have to accept them going forward. I really love this novel and the characters I’ve come up with and, I suppose, in the end, if nothing else, I’m the audience of the novel and as such am willing to expend the time and energy necessary to finish it.
I am WELL AWARE that if you don’t know me and you read this blog you will probably want nothing to do with me. Ok, I get it. So, in a sense, this blog is like online dating for me — absolutely no one will swipe right on me online, but if I was given the opportunity to use my “rizz” on you in real life, then maybe you might give me a date.
The last few days have been full of self-doubt about this novel. But I’ve concluded that the point of this novel is to prove a point to myself, if no one else. I know I’ve come up with a really good story, despite its obvious flaws, and I’m going to see this project to its completion.
Having said all that, I am still going to pivot — when I have some time — to a backup scifi novel that will be tailored specifically with marketability in mind. I need that type of insurance policy to give me the juice necessary to move forward with the main novel. I don’t like the idea of putting all my creative eggs in one basket.
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