The long-feared deluge of pandemic inspired fiction has yet to come about. There have been a few pandemic themed novels written before the COVID19 pandemic that have gained traction, but nothing written during or after. Though, I guess, “Our Country Friends” is one — but that’s not scifi.
Anyway.
I have two pretty good pandemic related concepts that I keep toying with. One would be more just the part of a broader story while the other would be a full blown novel. And, really, the only reason why I have done anything with either one of these idea is 1) I’m busy working on something else 2) I have a universe but thinking up a plot is a huge amount of work.
But the concepts are really unique and interesting and it’s too bad I probably won’t ever get around to them.
Now, I know enough about the late scifi author Robert Heinlein to know he was probably a huge gun nut, to the point that he probably thought individuals had the right to, I don’t know, carry a nuke around if they felt like it. But there is a plot point from his book, “Job: A Comedy of Justice” that I think could be use for something about gun control.
In the book, there’s a universe where America is a tyrannical theological state run by The Church of Your Choice. Everyone has to go to The Church of Your Choice.
Well, I think it would be amusing to explore the following: what if the state mandated that everyone be packing heat at all times? Everyone over the age of 18 (16?) had to be carrying a gun or whatever — or else. Now, the irony of this is even though everyone has a gun on them, no one does anything about the tyrannical government they live under.
Anyway, I have an idea for a story that would use this plot point. But I’m so wrapped up in working on these five novels that I don’t know when I’ll get around to use it.
Things are going really well with this first novel, to the point that I’m beginning to encounter resistance from people who are resentful about this very thing. I knew this was inevitable, but I didn’t expect it to start even before I finished the novel.
But, here we are.
I was talking to someone I knew at a bar about where development was and the moment it was clear that I was well on my way to finishing the first draft, they rather abruptly changed the subject. It was very jarring and conspicuous.
Anyway, I still don’t know what I’m going to do once I finish the first draft. The logical thing to do would be start a second creative track that was shorter so I could see about using what I’ve learned since I started developing these five thriller novels to write a shorter “calling card” of sorts that might be easier to sell.
But, alas, I’m so wrapped up in these five novels that I don’t know if I have it in me to divert attention from the main project to do such a thing. Only time will tell, I guess.
I’m now at the midpoint of the first draft of the first book in a projected five thriller project. I now find myself struggling with that I’m going to do next. Here are my options.
Keep going and pray. With this option, I just keep moving forward, regardless of how long the novel ultimately becomes. Right now, this thing is careening towards being well past the sweetspot of about 100,000 words. In this scenario, I just write the story and let the chips fall where they may.
Start a second creative track. The next option is to finish the first draft, but while I’m in the process of doing this I start working on a second creative track. There are a number of different stories I could use as part of this second track. Whatever this second track is, it would be a way to have a calling card of sorts for the thriller. If I could pull it off, it would be way to at least prep the way for a novel that might otherwise be too long to sell for a first time, untested novelist. But the problem would be it would be a struggle to divert my attention away from the main project.
Finish the first draft then edit things down. In this scenario, I finish the first draft, give myself about a month to reflect on things and then I write the second draft. The hope in this instance would be that the second draft will be short enough to fit in the sweetspot.
Which of these three options I ultimately do, I don’t know.
I shouldn’t talk about anything to do with this novel project, but I’m 100% extroverted, so here we are. Think of this as just a really long tweet. Anyway, I’m very close to reaching the midpoint of this first novel in a projected five novel project.
There are some problems, however.
One is, I really need to hurry up and get something done. If I don’t wrap this first novel up within, say, about a year, I’m going to be creeping into “Wow, you’re so old” territory. I will no longer be “in the prime of life,” I’m just going to be fucking old.
I think about this all the time.
I wasted so much of my life dwelling on the past and having grief over something I couldn’t fix — the fact that everything wrong with ROKon Magazine was my fault — that I let slip past a number of “prime of life years.”
There’s a risk, of course, that now I’ll have grief over those lost years and be back to where I started. I can’t change how old I am. I have to accept that I’m no longer cute in the same way I used to be and even if I magically win the publishing lottery and sell this first novel that what I want to have happened — to be be young in NYC or LA, just isn’t going to happen.
I’m going to be judged in accordance with my age and people will say, “Wow, you were a loser for much of your life, how does it feel to suddenly be a success when you’re nearly a corpse?” I’ve reached the point where any success I have at this point will be relative to how fucking old I am.
This is something they don’t tell you when you’re growing up. They don’t tell you that there is a sweetspot for success age-wise and if you are past that point, well, too bad for you sucker. You’re an Old.
I’m so old.
All I can say is, what am I supposed to do about it? I can’t help that I’ve always been a late bloomer. All I can do is, should the occasion arise and I have the means to do cool shit in a very public way, I’m going to squeeze every moment out of that brief flicker of time before I get so old and decrepit that I can no longer be seen in public at all.
Anyway. Like I said, I’m just about at the midpoint of the first draft. Once I finish the first draft, I’m going to throw myself into developing the second novel for maybe a month, then turn my attention back to the first novel and rework it as necessary so it’s good enough for Beta Readers to take a look at it. There remains a lot of things — mostly having to do with the police procedural aspect of the story — that I just don’t know anything about.
But you have to keep the faith. You have to believe in yourself and believe that somehow, someway you’ll manage to fix those problems to the point that you can get an agent and then sell the novel.
This is an instance where I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I went into the movie “Everything, Everywhere All At Once” with extremely high hopes. There was white hot buzz about the movie on Tik-Tok and I watched the movie as soon as possible so I could go into it knowing as little as possible about it.
Now that I’ve seen it, I’m very confused.
I won’t say I fucking hated it like I did Booksmart, but I was extremely bored for most of it. It’s not that there wasn’t a lot going on that was interesting — there was — but I didn’t have any emotional attachment to the characters until way, way, way into the movie.
And, even then, it was the elements of the movie that could have been an entire movie until itself. I found the movie very muddled and so peripatetic as to be overwhelming.
There was so much going on that there wasn’t much time to establish characters or to make you — or at least ME — care. There was all this bouncing around going on and just kept rolling my eyes, thinking, “So what?”
Having said all that, I could definitely see how the movie could be very influential and be part of a broader “vibe shift” in American pop culture. But nothing about that movie was so good as to warrant it all the glowing praise on Tik-Tok. Nothing. The movie was not nearly that good.
I’m so annoyed with how bad Tik-Tok is at reviewing movies, I think I’m going to lay off using it for a while. I feel suckered. I struggle to figure out what the Tik-Tok reviewers saw that I didn’t and vis-versa.
There were elements of the third act that were pretty strong. And, like I said, you could have cut those elements out of the movie and made a separate, stronger movie with them. But there was just too much going on with this movie.
Was it a kung-fu movie, a scifi movie, a fantasy movie or a movie about the family bonds of immigrants? If the screenwriter had just picked one or two of those elements, the movie would have been much, much better. There was a great movie lurking somewhere in EEAAO, but what I saw wasn’t it.
It was long and irritating.
But I guess I could see how someone younger than me, who had different expectations, might like it a lot. I guess?
I like to think of myself as a friendly, interesting person who has a very Larry King type of personality. I’m 100% extroverted and I generally believe everyone has a story to tell.
The late Annie Shapiro and me back when I was cute and putting a “dent in the universe” with her in Seoul.
Then something happens that causes me a great deal of self-doubt. I start to wonder if the way I perceive myself is not at all how others perceive me.
Over the course of this multi-year novel writing project, I’ve on occasion bought some time with manuscript consultants to varying degrees of success. Some of the people I’ve spoken to were unserious charlatans, while others were really, really good.
I’ve noticed something alarming about the better manuscript consultants I’ve worked with — they don’t think much of me. They either snub me outright, or they have a session or two with me then ghost me.
It all makes me question myself a great deal. What am I doing that turns these professionals off so much? I really struggle to figure out what’s going on. Maybe some of it is basic culture clash because I don’t really have the traditional novelist personality? Is that what it is?
I did notice how cold and distant these better consultants were, as if they wanted to make absolutely sure our relationship was strictly professional. Is there some sort of general fear among such people that the aspiring novelists they consult will want to date them?
It’s all very strange to me.
Anyway. “Normal” people have a tendency to underestimate me. I have five solid novels in me, I know. But I have a limited amount of time to prove this to the haters and naysayers who think I’m just a bonkers Internet crank. I still think there’s a possibility that if I ever find myself in LA, people might be significantly more receptive to my personality quirks.
I still want to have a second creative track of some sort, maybe a novel that’s a little shorter so I can use it as a calling card. But I gotta put up or shut up very soon.
The “multiverse” is having a moment, it seems. I’ve toyed with multiverse concepts my entire life and, as such, I think now that audiences have been exposed to what it all means you could do a lot with it in storytelling.
The chief place to start is a revamping of the time traveler trope. The novel that really got me interested in the multiverse was James Hogan’s “The Prometheus Operation.” It’s all about the butterfly effect, the multiverse and time travel. (It would, come to think of it, make a good movie.)
Anyway, here’s what I’m talking about. To date, almost all time travel stories have a fatal flaw — the basic paradox associated with it all. A few movies, like the Back To The Future sequels actually use the multiverse concept well…but the overall application was kind of meh.
What I would do is make a drama about a man (or woman) who finds themselves sent back in time Back To The Future style, but it’s a different timeline in the multiverse so none of the paradoxes apply. It’s not campy like what we saw in the Back To Future franchise, but far more like Arrival or The Martian. We get a serious depiction of what happens when you have knowledge of the future without having to worry about the paradox.
The movie I want to see goes something like this — somehow, a man gets zapped back in time to, say, VJ Day 1945. We see how he changes history over the course of the decades. The story is something of a mystery and ends with a DNA test that proves the impossible — the man who was our time traveler’s assistant all those years was his father.
Or something like that.
That’s the type of time traveler story I want to see.
Another multiverse and timetravel concept would be “Star Wars meets timetravel.” Instead of your heroes zooming around space, they zoom around time. So, you have all these different eras smash into each other in interesting ways. Or, if you wanted to be a little less complex, there would be no timetravel, just multiverse.
We learn that there is a “multiverse empire” and a band of “rebels” who bounce around different alternative universes looking for booty.
Anyway, no one listens to me and no one cares. But I find the multiverse endlessly entertaining.
There are some pretty significant things about life that they just don’t tell you about. You often hear that “age ain’t nothing but a number,” but this is complete bullshit. Age is a very real element of life. In fact, I’m generally of the opinion that the sweet spot for becoming a success is somewhere between your late 20s and early 30s.
If you aren’t successful by that point, you can wake up and any success you do have will be attached to the angle of, “How does it feel to become a success later in life?”
I’m quickly slipping past the point where people think “prime of life” and into the point where they just roll their eyes and think “old.” So, I have something of a window of opportunity that is quickly closing.
Stieg Larsson.
So, even if I manage to follow in my hero Stieg Larsson’s footsteps and sell a novel (or novels) around the same age (hopefully without the whole dropping dead of a heart attack part) people won’t shut up about how old I am. I’ve always been a late bloomer and if, somehow, I win the publishing lottery and sell these novels I’m working on, the fact that I will have ostensibly “come out of nowhere” will probably generate a huge amount of resentment from fellow Olds who will wonder how the hell that happened.
I probably have, at best maybe 5 years to put up or shut up. If I don’t do something notable with my life by that point, it’s over. Even if I get the success I believe I capable of, it will all be muted by my age.
But I have sworn to myself that if I magically, miraculously manage to achieve the level of success I want, that I’m going to squeeze everything possible out of it. I learned a lot about myself in Seoul and I know I have an array of different talents that I can exploit if I can just figure out how to get the opportunity.
The late Annie Shapiro and me back when I was cute.
At the moment, it’s not looking so great.
There are two possibilities at the moment. One, I somehow manage to sell my first novel and it’s a instant success. The other option, which is far, far darker, is the United States has a civil war and I get caught up in the chaos in such a way that I make a name for myself.
The latter option isn’t exactly all that great — it would be a high risk, high reward possibility — but I did thrive in the daily chaos of being an expat in Seoul. I often struggle with if that’s just my usual delusional nature coming into play or if I’m actually on to something.
I’m now in the hardest part of this first novel’s plot — the part where the investigation into the murder takes place. I honestly have no idea how any of this would happen.
For the moment, I’m going to simply play it by ear.
But within a few days, I’m going to talk to a few people who might have some sense of how things might play out. I don’t want to embarrass myself by laying out a sequence of events that have no connection to reality.
The key thing is I have to keep going and to push myself outside of my comfort zone.
You must be logged in to post a comment.