Month: December 2021

Imagining Post-Trump America


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Despite the giddy statements of Rachel Maddow on this matter, ding-dong Trump being demonstrably less popular in real terms doesn’t mean jack squat. At least for the time being.

The reason is, Trump really is “too big to fail” for Republicans. Trump is the Republican Party and the Republican Party is Trump. To be Republican is to be MAGA. By definition. If you don’t support Trump (in public at least) in such an absolute extent that you come of as completely bonkers to anyone who doesn’t watch FOX “New” every night, then you’re a RINO or a Democrat.

There is no room for compromise on this issue.

So, to imagine a situation where Trump might be knocked out of his status as Fuhrer is simply unimaginable. Even for me, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where Trump isn’t the nominee and doesn’t become president again — if by hook or by crook — in 2025. We’re no longer a functining democracy and it just doesn’t matter how popular Trump is with the average person.

Trump has the entire edifice of the Republican Party and Bannon’s “administrative coup” will fill the gap if Trump isn’t able to win fair and square. And, at least in my mind, that’s the end of the story.

Fucking Patriot Party.

But, let’s imagine it isn’t. How might it happen? Something would have to happen that punctured Trump’s Der Fuhrer’s air of invincibility like, say, the Battle of Stalingrad did for Hitler.

Or, put another way, something would have to happen whereby Trump faced some accountability, any accountability in a way he has not, to date, faced any. The reason it might happen is there are at least a dozen would-be autocrats chomping at the bit to become extremely powerful and fabulously wealthy being America’s first autocrat. Mike “piece of shit” Pompeo is so cravenly obsessed with wanting to be our first autocrat that he’s losing weigh at an alarming rate.

For Trump to face any accountability, you would have to successfully attack him on a political level. That’s his power — politically he has such absolute power over his base, regardless of how popular he might be otherwise — that any racist, misogynistic dumb thing he says is already baked into the cake.

So, who has the means, motive and opportunity to change that? There’s really only one person.

Mike Pence.

If he pulled a John Dean and turned, on a political basis, state’s evidence against Trump, there is a least a greater-than-zero-sum -chance that people seeing Pence begin to blab about what a piece of shit Trump is might be enough to cause the Justice department to get its head out of its ass and finally, FINALLY charge Trump with something.

But even that is dangerous. Trump is just as likely to use any criminal charges as an opportunity to act like a martyr as he is fold. So, whatever Pence did would have to be pretty dramatic on a political level.

Or, to be even more political about things — someone, somewhere, would have to go out on a political limb to challenge Trump….and not be crushed. The moment is was clear that Trump was no longer The God King Of Republicans, then all hell would break loose because the natural political ambitions of all those other would-be autocrats would kick in an they would suddenly do everything to destroy Trump so it was THEY, not TRUMP would go to murder our democracy at last.

And, what’s more, having said all this, Trump is so bonkers, he always has the failsafe of leaving the Republicans behind and founding The Patriot Party. So, again, Ms. Maddow, I would cool it with any giddy predictions that Trump is going to just fade away and Twitter can go back to people taking pictures of their food.

Future History: The Omega Variant


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

My fear at the moment is we’re not looking at the COVID19 pandemic in the right way. In fact, we need to readjust what we think the endgame may be. What if, in a sense, we’re all lulled into a false sense of security by COVID19 gradually being considered endemic.

And then, a year or two years from now, largely because of people refusing to vaccinated, it’s possible that really, really deadly version of COVID19 — the Omega Variant — might pop out. So, while everyone keeps taking about how “next time” will be a lot worse, it could be the Fire Next Time is nothing more than the Fire This Time rebooted.

So, not only could this be The New Normal, but it’s also possible that all of this is the set up for a far darker situation at some point in the future. And should the Omega Variant happen, it would happen with no notice. We would just wake up one day to news that the number of people dying from COVID has jumped from 2,000 a day to 10,000 (or more) a day.

And away we go.

If we were talking 10,000+ people dying a day in the United States of a COVID19 variant, it would freak everyone out and greatly change the political equation. Now, a lot of this would obviously depend on vaccines and therapeutics not working. If vaccines were really working and it was 10,000+ UNvaccinated people dying a day…oh boy.

Anyway, I suggest we reflect on what’s going on and COVID19 and maybe change our expectations some.

The ‘Alien’ Movie We Deserve


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I was promised an ‘Alien’ movie on Earth at the end of Aliens and I never got one. I know we’ve had Alien Vs. Predator in, like, Antarctica or some shit, but I want one on Earth with buildings.

So, how about this.

Shocking how cool this movie would be.

The movie is set in the same future as Alien and Aliens, but on Earth this time. We learn global climate change has gotten so bad on Earth that Manhattan is now largely underwater and inhabited by seagoing people. The Company has built a research facility on the now half-submerged island and an alien escapes and begins to run rampant in the Manhattan-as-Venice. This freaks the world government out and they somehow use advanced technology to quarantine the island off.

A small group of scientists is sent to the quarantine area with some Marine protectors and the story begins. Not only do you have aliens-on-Earth, but you have a very Escape From New York, but under 10 feet of water vibe to the whole thing.

I really like that one.

[Spoilers] Let’s Fix ‘No Time To Die’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ugh. No Time To Die was a really good film, and, yet, that third act was a huge let down. “Teerrbile,” as my some of the Southerners I know might say. The issue is this — we have this GREAT concept — Bond with a family in danger….and it’s just dropped when Little Bond Daughter bites the finger of the bad guy?

More Phoebe Waller-Bridge in the next Bond!

What the fuck where they thinking?

So, let’s fix it.

Act 1

Inciting Incident: Bond gets called back into service to stop The Bad Guy.

Bond finds out not only does he have a family, but The Bad Guy knows this too and has kidnapped them.
Act 2
His personal life and his mission keep intersecting in ways that force Bond to reflect on his life and all the women he’s banged over the years as well as what he might have had with Vespa. This happens in the context of vintage flashbacks from throughout the last 60 years of Bond that the audience sees in glimpses now and again.

Midpoint: Bond’s baby mamma dies in such a way that it leaves him thinking his daughter is dead, too — has a moment of grief.

He finds out his daughter isn’t dead and this only redoubles his efforts to stop the fiendish plot of The Bad Guy.

Bond manages to get his daughter back, but they’re on the run. The Bad Guys are chasing them through the woods and you lean in as you watch all of this, wondering, are they really going to kill Bond’s daughter? They don’t and the family Bond gets captured.

Bond is forced to have his “Bow, to Lord Zod” moment that is in the real movie. But, hopefully, you would have built out the emotional framework for this scene so when it happens, there is a lot more identification with the audience than what was actually there in the real movie. I found the real scene rather perfunctory.
Act 3
The Bad Guy escapes with Little Girl Bond and the chase is on. But this time, our Little Tyke Bond is far more street smart and makes life hell for The Bad Guy to the point that it’s both amusing like a Roger Moore Bond movie and emotionally compelling.

The climax of the movie is structured such that Bond is forced to work with his daughter for some reason. There’s a massive fight between Bond and The Bad Guy and just as it looks as if The Bad Guy is about to murder her dad, Little Tyke Bond shoves a Glock to her dad and he shoots The Bad Guy dead.

For a moment, all is well.

I would use the new 007 as the person who is babysitting little tyke Bond in the last few scenes as he prepares to kill himself off.

Let’s Rock


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now that I’ve cut the first novel in two, I find myself with an interesting situation on my hand — I can now simply focus on the first book and try to sell it ASAP.

Here’s my thinking — while I’m going to continue to develop the other four books in this massive series, I’m going to work mostly on the first book with an eye to using it as the basis to sell the other books. I’ll try to wrap the first book up — it is an independent story, after all — and I’ll use it as the basis of my attempt to get a literary agent.

So, instead of facing two more years of not having a finished product, I find myself with something in maybe six months? This would be non-exclusive. I could still work on the other books in the series as I was doing all of this.

The looming (enjoyable) issue at the moment is fleshing out character profiles and studies so when I do sit down to work on the first book again I have my canon all figured out.

Finally Doing Some Basic Character Development Is Really Helping These Five Novels


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m finally — finally — going through each of the characters in these five novels and really doing some nitty-gritty character development. The thing that is happening because of this is I am making some basic realizations about the exact chronology of these five novels that I had missed to date.

Now that I have split the first book into two, I don’t have to have such a tight sequence of events. I skip forward a few months and lean into how that changes what is going on around the characters in different ways.

I’m now kind of obsessed with fleshing out the backgrounds and motivations of all these different characters. And I have a hunch that things will move very, very fast now that I have a better sense of how this series starts.

Planet America — An ‘Impossible Scenario’ Storytelling Solution?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Part of what makes the Impossible Scenario impossible is there’s just no way to balance all the needs of all the different types of nations and peoples of the world. And, yet, a story’s plot needs conflict, so there you go — that’s what you need.

One possible solution to the Impossible Scenario is you actually lean into that conflict and say something like this — the aliens from the Galactic Empire who give us this great opportunity say they only want English speakers because they want people with some common link.

So, that’s over 1 billion people.

And, yet, if you limit the people to be saved by the Galactic Empire to only English speakers, it becomes pretty obvious that from a storytelling standpoint, using the USA as the basis of your new “homeland” for humanity is your best bet.

So, in a sense, I think American audiences would really love seeing a Planet America where there were 50 nation states named after the 50 states and, etc. The conflict would be how much people who were NOT American would absolutely loathe this solution.

Or something. I continue to struggle with any solution that makes sense.

The Influence Of ‘Mare Of Easttown’ On This Massive 5 Novel Writing Project


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I struggle to find the energy to blog anymore. Now that I’ve gotten to the point where I can, in the distance, see the Promised Land of potentially selling at least one novel…blogging for about a hundred people doesn’t engender a lot of interest. But, occasionally someone interesting coming from, say, New York City or LA, will read this blog and I have a sudden burst of interest in blogging again just because.

Anyway, as I’ve written a lot before, there are two major creative works that have influenced these five novels I’m working on. One is Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, or, more specifically, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and, second the limited series Mare of Eattown.

When I saw Mare of Easttown, I instantly knew I needed to up my game. The reason is — it was exactly what I wanted in these novels. It was character driven and had a lot of twists and turns. A character driven series, rather than a pulp police procedural is something I can do. I love Larsson’s work and have read The Girl Who Played With Fire over and over again, but when it comes to a police procedural, it’s going to be a real stretch. That type of writing just isn’t in my skillset.

But a character driven mystery based around an older woman, I can do — even though I’m an older man. Wink. The first two novels of these five novels really deal with a Mare Of Easttown-type woman. She’s a little older and has a fractured family situation to deal with. Other than that, however, the two characters could not be more different.

The most important thing is, I have some sense of the motivation of my major characters AND I know the macro elements of these five novels well enough to be able to sprinkle things I’m going to need during the course of the macro story in the first book.

I will remind you, however, that all of these books are their own thing. If I do my job well, you will be able to pick any one up them up, read it to the end and be content without having to read any of the other books.

Things Are Getting Really Good With This Massive Novel Writing Project


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I see these five (3 +2) novels as one huge story cut up into five independent books. I’m in the process of doing a massive reset of the whole thing now that I’ve actually finished something akin to my first draft of a novel in my entire life. I’ve written a few other horrible novel-type things before, but this is the first time that I’ve written something I wasn’t embarrassed by.

I’ll put a move on you.

I’m still having problems getting a crucial type of person to take me seriously, however — manuscript consultants. I’m supposed to have a meeting with one soon, which pleases me a great deal, but it’s been a real struggle to find one willing to ignore what a kook I am and just let me bounce ideas off of them. I can’t help I can come across as an Internet crank if you don’t know me in real life. Ugh.

I am who I am. And I’m too old to give a shit what anyone thinks about me.

Anyway, I’m doing some pretty basic development now. Sketching out character backgrounds and doing something akin to personality profiles. But the point of doing that is consistency. I need to establish what canon is so I don’t confuse readers by bouncing around with the specifics of any particular character’s qualities.

I am still on track to throw myself back into writing in early January. I’m trying to use the last few weeks of the year to just chill out, recharge my creative batteries and do some basic development that I should have done when I started this process.

But my storytelling abilities have improve to the point that I can tell a big, novel length story without embarrassing myself.

The Surreal ‘Stop The Steal’ of 2024


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

All systems continue to be go for a massive, catastrophic clusterfuck in 2024. Before I go any further, however, I will note that on an situational basis, Trump is so popular within the center-Right that he could win the nomination and the 2024 presidential election fair and square.

Don’t let the anemic crowds at his tour with Papa Bear Bill O’Reilly fool you — Trump has Gotterdammerung-levels of power over the Republican Party. He is their Fuhrer in exile at the moment and the sole obstacle to Trump single-handedly turning the United States in to the modern day equivalent of Nazi Germany is he’s an old, poorly focused ding-dong.

So, what will happen is he will win election again in 2024, strangle democracy once and for all and then we all sit around to see who will be America’s Putin. That’s it, that’s our fate. We’re fucking doomed. Get out of the country while you can, or figure out what you believe in so when ICE starts murdering people for political reasons you will know what to do.

But.

There is a chance that when we get to the weakest moment in this dystopian hellscape scenario — the final transition from democracy to autocracy — that Trump self-owns and we have a civil war instead. But this would only happen in the context of Trump somehow not winning outright.

As such, if that did actually happen, then it’s very easy to see the events leading up to a civil war, where it’s Blue States, not Red States that leave the Union, being done under the rubric of “Stop The Steal.” In fact, the only reason why Red States weren’t fat, smug and sassy in the lead up to Certification Day 2021 is how God-awful stupid, lazy and idiotic Trump is an a would-be autocrat.

ANYONE ELSE in Trump’s position in 2020 would have brazenly stolen the election on a political basis. But Trump is so, very, very stupid and lazy that he could not pull it off. So we punted the inevitable choice of autocracy or civil war down the road four years.

And because of how much Traditionalists have come to align themselves with MAGA, when the autocracy comes, the shift in perception from democracy to autocracy could be so subtle that the average Traditionalists will STILL call people like me hysterical even as we begin to check off the qualities of a fascist state one by one.

Not until I get rounded up and shot dead by an ICE agent will the Traditionalist in my family go, “Gee, maybe I should have made common cause with him, after all.”

But, by then, I’ll be a rotting “hysterical” corpse in some unmarked grave.

The other option is, of course, that my family is divided for political reasons. I flee to a Blue State, while they stay in their Red States and, well, I don’t like to think about the rest of that. But that’s the future we’re hurtling towards, one where brother is pit against brother, just like what happened in the first civil war.

And, yet maybe I am being hysterical. Maybe something will happen that will punt this particular problem down the road one more presidential cycle. Or, I dunno, aliens might land? WW3 starts? The pandemic goes all The Stand on us? Whatever it is that prevents the existential choice of autocracy or civil war for America in the 2024 – 2025 timeframe has got be pretty big.

What’s more, it could be pretty much any time between now and 2025 that we have a civil war. Trump unexpectedly dying of natural causes, or him being indicted or whatever — something to do with Trump — could very well be enough for Red States to call up snap secessionist conventions.

Things really are that fucked up in the United States right now. And it’s only going to get worse.