I did not finish the movie “The Creator” — I walked out. But I do that all the time, so it’s not that big a deal. But I saw enough of the movie to get some sense of it and why I couldn’t sit through the whole thing.
One issue I didn’t like was what I saw was clearly anti-American. The movie seemed to say, with a wink and a nod, “Look at those ignorant Americans, unwilling to embrace the future that is AI.” I also thought the plot was rather turgid. It seemed like I was watching a B+ TV movie, not “real” Hollywood movie.
But I will say that the premise of the movie was very cool, even if the world building associated with it was piss-poor. They just didn’t give the concept much thought, it seemed to me.
In general, however, “The Creator” hopefully will be “The 13th Floor” to another, much better movie that will be an AI “Matrix.” Or something. Something like that.
The first act of this novel has gone in a rather unexpected direction. I’ve really amped up the “Barry”-like elements of it. But doing so leaves me a little unnerved because the very thing I think could be a really cool marketing hook….is also the very thing that may turn some people off, or cause them to throw the book across the room.
I just don’t know.
I’m doing all of this in a near-vacuum, so it could go either way. If nothing else, the novel is…unique, interesting. One problem I have to fix is the novel isn’t nearly dark enough and I also don’t think the bad guys are clearly defined as people who could potentially hurt our protagonist.
One thing is clear, however, I can’t keep spinning my wheels. I can’t keep tinkering over and over again with the novel’s first few chapters. I really need to buckle down and do whatever I have to do to get into the second act as soon as possible. Given how much I’ve changed the first act, I’m going to have to really re-work the rest of the novel to accommodate the changes.
But I love a challenge and so the key thing remains not allowing myself to just spin my wheels. I have to, have to get into the second act of the novel as soon as possible. I’ve decided to try to give myself until no later than, say March 1st to finish this third draft and the only way I’m ever going to accomplish that goal is to take things a lot more seriously.
And that doesn’t even begin to address any number of things that could happen that might change my rather idyllic situation I find myself in at the moment.
If I don’t start to be more proactive with this novel, it’s going to be a year from now and I’m still, STILL be drifting towards my destination. It could be fall 2024, the United States may be about to descend into fucking political violence and chaos and I STILL will not have begun the querying process for my first novel.
So, I’m going to try — TRY — to be a lot more self-conscious about such things starting today. I may try to set some specific metrics for how many scenes I write so I can get past the first few chapters where I’ve been spinning my wheels for way too long. I hoped to start the third draft on September 1st and here I am October 1st not even in the second act.
I got some feed back on the second draft. He pretty much said he didn’t find the novel very believable. As such, I’ve added some more scenes to an already overstuffed first act in an effort to connect the novel closer to reality. To give the audience some more context as to how this unusual situation might have occurred in such a small town.
But he’s the only person who has mentioned that problem. But he is a “normal” person, so I give his comments a lot more credence to some extent because it gives me some sense of what a casual reader of the mystery-thriller genre might think of the novel.
I have also added a number of scenes to the first act of the novel in hopes of slowly seducing the audience into the world I’ve created while also making them fall in love with the cast of characters I’ve come up with. I believe the additional scenes — and there are a number of them — will really hook the reader so they are willing to finish the novel when The Big Event happens.
The novel is structured — to a certain extent — much like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire. It’s not a one-to-one, but he definitely gave me some guidance as to one way I could plot things out.
My life has been a bit bumpy the last few days. I’ve been feeling out of sorts for a number of different reasons. There is a small chance that I’m slowly getting back to normal and, as such, the fact that I need to buckle down and work on the third draft of my novel is really beginning to loom large in my mind.
All of this is happening as it becomes more and more clear to me that my “hysterical doom shit” about America’s future in 2024 and beyond may not be so far off. Things are growing dark and absolutely no one is going to save us. Even if we “just vote” we aren’t going to save ourselves because there’s a good chance that in an effort to avoid going to prison, Trump may begin to rant that we need a National Divorce and that, unto itself, will spark a civil war.
But I can’t predict the future. I do know, however, that I’m not getting any younger and I’m in full put-up-or-shut-up mode. Things are going really well with this novel, but I need to stop daydreaming so much and buckle down. While I continue to be a somewhat idyllic situation for writing a novel, all good things must come to an end.
At any moment, something could happen that throws my life up in the air and by the time everything is sorted out, I could have lost months of time. Or I could be distracted by new opportunities, what have you. I love this six novel project and I am determined to get the first novel done.
I continue to have a few other novel ideas rolling around in my head, but I’m trying to focus on this mystery-thriller because it’s the one I’m the farthest along with. I keep idly thinking of other stories, but for the time being, I haven’t really given them much effort.
I’ve always been…different. I just have never quite known what I was supposed to do to fit the conventional wisdom. As such, as I continue to work on my Hail Mary Pass of trying to write a breakout hit novel, I find myself contemplating how people who don’t know me might interpret my life to date.
My fear is, of course, that the moment I make it big should I somehow manage to write a popular first novel that I’ll be “canceled” for some drunken thing I did at some point in my life — probably while in South Korea.
On a macro scale, I’ve been pretty innocuous even at my drunken worse, but I also know that everyone on social media has a hair trigger when it comes to destroying people, so, lulz? I’m not perfect. And, what’s more, I’ve pretty much been a drunk nobody loser for way too many years.
If I do manage to do some sort of hattrick and sell a novel that pulls me out of oblivion, I have a hunch that things just aren’t going to work out the way I want them to. Over and above my fears about being “canceled,” I have to contend with the cold, hard reality of ageism.
If I become as successful as I believe I should be, the first thing any interviewer is going to ask me is, “What’s it like being a such a success later in life?” Even though that is an extremely speculative fear on my part, just the prospect of having to deal with that type of questioning requires me to manage my expectations for the consequences of writing a novel that is anywhere near as successful as what Stieg Larsson wrote.
I just have to accept that even if I get what I want, I won’t get what I want. Even if I stick the landing with this novel, I’m probably going to be in my mid-50s before the novel is actually on bookshelves. And that doesn’t even begin to factor in the potential for some sort of political “Fourth Turning” happening just as some sort of technological Singularity makes a human-written novel seem quite quaint.
Other than a general need to have a three act structure, there really aren’t any hard, fast rules about how to write a novel. At least, not in my opinion. But I am of the general opinion that that one should delay putting spicy scenes in your novel until as late as possible.
In my personal opinion, it’s bad form to open a novel with a sex scene. I’m not saying it should never be done, just that in general it’s not my style. I’m of the opinion that spicy scenes should only happen after you’ve given your audience a little bit of time to grow accustomed to the characters and universe that your presenting to them.
Having said all that, I have a spicy scene in my first chapter and much of the second scene has sex in it. Ugh. And, yet, these scenes aren’t gratuitous and do, in fact, serve to further the plot. It’s just I don’t know. It makes me uneasy to have spicy scenes so early in the novel.
But, as I keep saying, I’m doing all of this in a vacuum so, lulz, who knows. It could be that I’m fine and no one will blink an eye that there is so much spicy content so early in the novel. I do have a tendency to overthink things a great deal with this novel.
The only thing that makes me feel better is if someone, say, an editor, asked me why I had this or that spicy scene I can tell them specifically why I felt it was necessary. I have given the nature of these spicy scenes a great deal of thought.
I started working on a novel a number of years ago because of my white hot rage against the rise of Trumplandia. I had all this anger that I needed to do something with so I decided to write a novel that would be an analogy about the problems in the modern America.
That one novel turned into two novels and then when Trump lost, I decided to tell the backstory of how the unique situation in the small town I dreamed up came to be. Soon enough, I had six novels I was working on. The novel I’m currently working on is the first and is set in late 1994, early 1995.
If we do, in fact, turn into an autocracy in 2025, then the whole point of the six novel project will be pretty timely. I may have to write the novels in exile because a weaponized ICE might want to murder me for being a loudmouth crank, but, lulz, at least project will be as popular as I believe it should be.
Of course, it’s possible that we’ll have a civil war (Reds) or a revolution (Blues) starting in late 2024, early 2025 and, well, there you go. I may be too busy being a domestic political refugee to worry about finishing any sort of novel.
It’s definitely interesting how things stay the same for a long time then everything falls apart at the same time. I have a number of mini-crisis taking place in my life at the moment, from a toothache, to computer failing me to my refrigerator’s thermostat malfunctioning.
It makes me wonder if this is some sort of portent about the future. Am I about to enter a transitional phase in my life? And if so, exactly what am I transitioning into? Ugh.
I am definitely feeling my mortality these days. I’m feeling a lot of internal pressure to speed up the pace on this novel. I’m not going to live forever and it would be pretty pathetic if my only legacy was a failed expat magazine and an unfinished novel.
But you have to work with what you got, I suppose. I just have no idea what the future brings me. Things could go a lot of different ways between now and early 2025. It could be that just about the time I begin querying my first novel, the United States collapses into chaos and anarchy.
Though, on the up side, if we just slide peacefully into autocracy, my grand macro plan for this six novel project becomes extremely timely and potentially popular.
But, who knows. No fate but what we make and all that.
I have reimagined and significantly improved — at least in my view — the beginning of my first novel. One thing I’ve notice from my re-reading of Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl Who Played With Fire” is how much time he spends on establishing character, universe and relationships.
The ideal name for my first novel, if I had my wish.
With that in mind, I have given a great deal of thought to how I can pull readers in with engaging characters so when The Big Event happens, they care enough about them enough to finish the rest of the novel. That, at least, is the goal.
But, as I keep saying, I’m doing all of this in a vacuum. I just don’t know. It could be that even though I love what I’m doing with this novel, the audience will be repelled. If nothing else, I have come up with some pretty provocative plot points that will make readers sit up and take notice.
I talk about periods and the specifics of sex from a female point of view. I have a female “consultant” that I talk to about these things so I don’t make a fool out of myself. I’m not a very dark — or serious — person by nature and as such, rather than shocking the audience with explicit violence, I hope to intrigue them discussion things you usually don’t see in novels.
Anyway. I continue to realize that I need to stop making my heroine so fucking passive. She’s suppose to be the prime mover of the novel. She’s suppose to be ornery and have agency and be someone you like and care enough about that you want to spend the time necessary to read roughly 100,000 words about her life.
In the end, I just can’t overthink things. I need to just write and come back and edit things as necessary. There’s a reason why they say all novels are abandoned rather than finished.
My computer is going to kick the bucket at any moment it seems, but in the meantime I’m trying to write as much as I can on the third draft of my first novel. I continue to do all of this in a vacuum so I have no idea if this novel is anywhere near as good as I think it is.
I have come up with a very ‘Barry’-like dichotomy for my heroine. And, yet, I just don’t know. I don’t know if women — who read a lot of novels — will like the surreal situation I’ve come up with or if it will only lead them to throw the book across the room.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of me being a male author frequently writing from a female POV. When I started working on this novel several years ago, I just decided, in general, to do what Stieg Larsson did, not knowing there had been a “woke cancel culture” shift in audience expectations.
Ugh. Sometimes, you just can’t win. I can’t help how old I am. I can’t help that I’m a CIS white male. Not everyone can be a undocumented transgendered woman.
I’m really feeling my mortality these days. I have a limited amount of time to put up or shut up on the novel front. It doesn’t help that I have a growing problem with one of my teeth just as my computer is just about to crash on me. It’s definitely interesting how everything seems to decide to fail at the same time after a long time of nothing changing.
So, we’ll see. It could be that I will spend all this time on my first novel, only to drop dead of a heart attack like Larsson did.
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