Be The Power
by Shelt Garner
@shetgarner
I have finished a “private beta” of my first novel.
Now to pause the process for a few days so I can collect my thoughts, do a lot reading and watch at lof shit on NetFlix and Amazon Prime that I should have watched some time before.
I hope to start things up again this weekend, probably in afternoon of May 20th-ish. I am still on track to wrap up a public beta of my novel as early as summer solstice or as late as July 4th.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m now into the third act of the “private beta” of my first novel. I continue to feel pressure internally to just shut the fuck up. I have a strong compulsion to just go dark and wrap up this novel without saying a peep about it.
But, alas, I’m 100% extroverted.
I just can’t help myself. I love to gab and talk about whatever’s on my mind and at the moment — as it has been for some time — writing my first novel is at the forefront of my mind so I talk, and write, about it.
It’s character flaw…I guess?
It’s just not my nature to not talk — and write — at great length about something like writing a novel. In fact, if I manage to blow up with my novel money I’m probably going to be a public eccentric in the style of Andy Warhol or Thom Wolfe. I’m going to be someone that anyone with any taste knows and I’m going to be one of those people who humble brag about how bad the Red Eye between NYC and LA is.
I’m not joking — the moment I have the means to do that, I’m going to do it.
Now, obviously, this is all happening in the context of a potential Second American Civil War. I don’t think there’s going to be one — at least, I hope there isn’t — but there is definitely a greater-than-zero chance that one might happen.
Anyway, I’m very pleased with what I’ve managed to come up with at the moment when it comes to this novel. It’s an easy read, very accessible. And if you’ve read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, you will definitely see this novel as something of an Old Brown Shoe, even though it’s very much not only it’s own thing but an American Story, as opposed to Swedish. It’s very American in that it’s not just a bunch of white people talking to each other.
I hope to wrap up this private beta by the end of the week.
Wish me luck.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m kind of playing fast and lose with the quality of this “Private Beta,” but I’m hoping that if I don’t worry about quality so much at this point that I will preserve momentum. The goal is to wrap up the Private Beta of the novel so quick that I may have roughly a month to go through and fix everything necessary for it to be a really strong Public Beta.
I have to admit that occasionally I find myself remembering how long post-production of this novel could be should I stick the landing and have a relatively short querying process. It could be as long as a year! Or More! A lot — A LOT — can go wrong in that amount of time.
But I’ve decided that I want to go the traditional route when it comes to getting this thing published, so, lulz. Sometimes, it seems like absolutely no one shares my vision for this novel but me. Of course, if it turns out this novel is good enough to get traditionally published, THEN everyone will suddenly act like they were there for me, every step of the way.
Anyway. There’s a reason why successful artists are often bitter as fuck.
The next move is to wrap up the third act. I think, I hope, that I can do that fairly quickly — maybe about a week? If I’m lucky?
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I talked to my conservative relative — who I love dearly — about the fact that Democrats, after being out of power for 12 years, were able to return in 1992 because they changed their policies. I said this in the context of suggesting to my conservative relative that rather than supporting fascist policies and hating democracy, that maybe Republicans could change their policy agenda.
“You mean you want us to turn into Democrats?” was their response.
It’s this type of thinking on the part of stalwart Republicans that I find very troubling in the context of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the moment, at least, it seems as though the 2024 election will be existential to our democracy. It’s going to be a total shitshow one way or another.
The only question in my mind at the moment is if we have a civil war or turn into an autocracy. I definitely think that because it’s most likely that the onus will be on Blues to leave the Union because Reds are politically ascendant that we NOT going to have a civil war, but rather simply slide peacefully into a MAGA Nazi themed autocracy.
About 1 million smug Twitter liberals will leave the country starting Election Day 2024 and that will be that. America will leave NATO and soon enough there will be a MAGA-run Constitutional Convention that will slap some sort of MAGA Enabling Acts onto the Constitution.
At the moment, here in 2023, that particular nightmare scenario seems a foregone conclusion.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Well, things continue to go well with this novel. So well, in fact, that I find myself idly thinking about what happens if I actually sell the thing. Now, some context — it could be a loooooong time between when I start to query and when I get any sort of book deal. And, what’s more, from the point that I get a book deal, it could be 18 months before the novel is actually on bookshelves.
As such, for all my “hysterical doom shit” about there potentially being a Second American Civil War, on a personal basis, I’m definitely acting as if that isn’t going to happen. There wouldn’t be much of a market for a novel such as mine if we’re all too busy dodging explosions to go to the bookstore.
At least if we slip peacefully into autocracy the general gist of the series, which is all about how much I fucking hate MAGA Nazis and extremism in general — will grow very, very relevant.
So, there’s that, I guess.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
MAGA Nazis are such fucking crybabies. They are equal to some of the more extreme elements of the Trans movement when it comes to being willing to destroy everything in the name of “vibes.” Take, for instance, their reaction to the prospective new CEO of Twitter.
MAGA has some sort of vague sense of ideological purity that if they don’t get they freak the fuck out. They also love to gaslight when it comes to the issue of “free speech.” They want the absolute right to spread hate to the point that if you even bring up the idea of some of guardrails, they freak the fuck out. They see “free speech” as nothing more than an means to and end when it comes to establishing a fascist MAGA Nazi state.
The tragedy of the commons and all that.
The whole thing is completely fucking bonkers. It proves a point I’ve been making for some time — MAGA Nazis are politically ascendant and it could be that if we have a “National Divorce,” it will be Blues, not Reds who decide to serve papers.
I will note in passing that I’m worried about the next Republican president establishing an autocratic state using hard power, at the same time my conservative relatives — who I love dearly — are freaking out about “woke” corporations ruining their lives.
Everything is so dumb.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’ve long been a big fan of Janelle Monae. I really liked the beginning of her career. She was really creative and had a very unique, clear creative vision. She was tight with Big Boi and Prince and she seemed like follow in Prince’s footsteps.
And I’ve been pleased with some of her crazy antics of late. She’s got a Baracking body and I’m always game for some T&A.
But.
And this is a huge but — I’m growing to hate her music.
Gone are all the kooky, weird shit that made her great. Her actual music these days seems to very mainstream and, like, trying too hard. It’s very strange. I don’t get it. I don’t understand what is going on.
Could have been that Prince was something of a mentor to her and when he died, she lost her way? I dunno. It’s all very curious.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I started writing a novel several years ago because I was enraged over the rise of Trumplandia. After a lot of fits and starts and I finally figured what I wanted to do, only for ding-dong Trump to be so lazy and so stupid that he couldn’t even do something as basic as steal the 2020 election.
As such, I realized I needed to rethink things.
What I came up with was to tell the genesis of the universe I planned to use for a two book story that would serve as something of an allegory for our fucked up, modern Trumplandia world. As such, I’ve been working on a story that takes place in late 1994, early 1995. What’s more, given what I’ve come up with, I now have not one, not two, but SIX novels in this project that I want to write. The last novel will be open-ended so I could theoretically just keep writing novels with a particular heroine for the foreseeable future.
This has come to the forefront of my mind of late because I’m on the cusp of entering the beta reader process and, as such, I’m going to need to a new novel to work on as all of that progresses. So, it seems logical that once I finish this first novel that I can start to seriously work on the SECOND novel in the projected six novel project.
Anyway, my first novel is actually more of an homage to Mare of Easttown than it is to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series. It’s not an exact one-to-one, but it’s sort of a journalistic Mare of Easttown. Sorta. Kinda.
If nothing else, the novel is very accessible. It’s a fast easy read that you could probably read in one sitting if you had the time. It might take you most of the day, but you could do it.
Actually selling this novel is going to involve a huge amount of fucking luck. I’m not changing who I am and, as such, it’s very possible that my drunk crank persona on social media may be a huge obstacle to seeing my dream of being a published novelist coming true.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While I love them dearly, talking to my conservative relatives can be frustrating at times. Take, for instance, global climate change. They tell me on one hand that, in the end, technology may solve the crisis and, yet, when the free market comes up with things like ESG to facilitate that very thing — they get really, really angry.
So, it seems as though the only acceptable solution to global climate change for conservatives is, much like the gun violence crisis — no solution.
The only thing that most modern conservatives care about at the moment is “owning the libs.” That’s it. Over 200 children could die in a mass casualty event involving an AR-15 and conservatives would shrug, say “thought and prayers” and then piviot to this or that thing that they felt the libs had screwed up.
The earth could grow so hot that it was obvious that life on earth would soon be extinguished and conservatives would pivot to talking about the border crisis or the excesses of the Trans movement.
It’s shit like this that I find very troubling. It definitely seems that the absolute need to “own the libs” could very well force the existential choice of autocracy or civil war in late 2024, early 2025. That definitely seems to be the endgame for that particular urge on the part of Republicans.
I don’t have a ready answer for you. It just seems like we’re fucked.
by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
One reason why I doubt “prompt engineer” will last very long as a job is soon enough YOU will be prompted by an AI. Think of this as the “Her” future in the sense that you’ll have a human-like digital assistant you will have casual conversation with.
Which this leads to the idea that potentially instead of a knowledge economy, we’ll have a conversation economy. What’s more, if you hook up AI to all these Terminators that companies like Boston Dynamics are building the looming prospect of almost all economic activity being a function of non-human actors becomes very real.
I’m talking about macro trends that seem to be all headed towards the same endgame. So, knowledge workers will be replaced by natural-language conversations and blue collar workers will be replaced by what are essentially androids.
And all of this could happen a lot sooner than you might realize. It’s kind of astonishing that all of this is happening in broad daylight and none of us are thinking about all the Hollywood movies that talk about the down side of this very future.
This, of course, raises the prospect of the need for a Universal Basic Income. The only way I can think such a thing might actually happen is to “bribe” elites by replacing all taxes with a 30% VAT. So, plutocrats will get away scot free when it comes to taxes, but we Poors will get one thing we need — a UBI — in exchange for significantly higher consumption prices.
I just don’t think we’re ready for the Conversation Economy. If AI is good enough that we not only can banter with it, develop an emotional connection with, then the very nature of work as we currently imagine it will be transformed.
So, instead of 12,000 professional writers in Hollywood, you will have a fraction of that — if any. People will shrug when they can talk to their digital assistant that will create a movie or TV show out of whole cloth on the fly. Your phone or TV will scan your face to see what mood you’re in and in a split second will generate you entertainment that is specifically designed to not just you, but your specific mood at that specific moment.
Mass media, a shared reality, will no longer exist.
Now, it seems to me that the end game of that specific situation is live theatre will see a real resurgence. That will be the delineator in pop culture — most run-of-the-mill recorded entertainment will be completely AI generated but if you want a “human touch” to your entertainment you will go to the theatre or a live music show.
Regardless, we’re just not ready for what’s about to happen. It will be interesting to see if we’re going to see the rise of a neo-Luddite movement, probably in the context of the next generation of MAGA.
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