‘Midpoint’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Absolutely no one cares at this point about this novel I’m working on, but I have reached a significant milestone, at least for me: the midpoint of the first draft.

The issue is, the tempo of the novel changes at this point — as it should — so I’m introducing new characters and the story begins to have the elements of a police procedural. Sorta. I’m probably going to revamp the outline I have of this portion of the novel significantly as I go through it.

I’m trying to lean into my strengths with this novel, but when it comes to the second half I’m going to have to get outside my comfort zone even if I don’t really want to.

I have been at the midpoint of this novel several times in the past, only to have everything collapse on me and I have to start over. This time feels different because first I’ve kind of worn myself down to the point that I’m willing to do anything to finish a first draft so I can edit it and second my native storytelling ability has gotten significantly better.

Throw in that I’ve cherry picked the best bits of the original huge story I cam up with in the beginning and I’m feel pretty good about where I am. I’ve given myself a very tight deadline — I want to finish the rest of the novel by no later than June 1st. Then I will pause for a month and throw myself into the second draft around July 4th weekend.

This novel has taken significantly longer than I ever imagined, but it’s been a very fun struggle. I’ve been drifting towards this point in something of a vacuum and hopefully now I can speed up the process a great deal. I refuse to be one of those guys who works on a novel 10 years and STILL doesn’t finish it.

If I had a women in my life, I suspect development of this novel would have gone far faster. But those are the breaks, as they say. I have decided to throw myself back into this novel in a few days.

I need to distract myself some in the meantime. Do some reading. Reflect on what it is I hope to accomplish in the second half. The story in its second half grows far more potentially controversial as it delves into race a lot more. And I also really begin to wallow in some of the tropes of the Trump Era as well.

I’m aware that there’s a real danger that people won’t care about the Trump Era when I try to sell this thing, and, yet, to me, at least, it’s obvious that the problems of the Trump Era haven’t gone anywhere and, as such, a lot of people likely will want some sort of catharsis by reading a novel set during it.

Throw in how by the time I try to sell this thing people will really start thinking about politics again and I think I have at least a greater-than-zero chance of being within shouting distance of selling it.

America As Failed State


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The America I know and love will end very soon, probably in the winter of 2024 after the presidential election. Either we elect an autocrat who successfully strangles our zombie liberal democracy or he bungles that transition and there’s a civil war.

Now, as I’ve written before there are plenty of “known unknowns” that might delay this choice of autocracy or civil war, but there’s no avoiding the choice at some point. There are plenty of reasons why this is, but the chief reason is the rot at the core of the American political system.

Now that Republicans have become a old fashion fascist party, I just don’t see there being any way for us to escape our doom. The only reason why we escaped our fate in 2020 was Donald Trump was too old, too lazy and too unfocused to get the job done. He flirted with the necessary tactics to destroy America, but in the end he choked.

Really, at this point, I would suggest that only a major regional war with, say North Korea — started at just the right moment in the 2024 presidential cycle — would be enough to punt our impending existential crisis down the road one more presidential cycle. Or, if Elon Musk so disrupted the trucking industry that the far Left and the far Right fused together in opposition to job-killing technology.

Otherwise, we’re fucked by no later than late 2024.

In its own tragic way, I would suggest that in a way a second civil war might at least give us some opportunity for redemption like the first Civil War. Though it would be such a horrific tragedy that such a redemption would only happen because both sides would have suffered equally enough that they would be willing to renew the American Covenant.

If we become an autocracy, then, well, there is no hope. Our new autocratic Republican ruling class will simply keep cutting taxes and social benefits, continue to make it harder for women to have sexual agency and continue to keep minorities under the jackboot of systemic racism. In the end, America and Russia will be politically identical and I get pushed out of a window by ICE agents for being too much a of loudmouth.

The Fatal Flaw Of The Star Wars Franchise


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve written about this before, but I thought I would mention it again because it’s on my mind for some reason. I can pinpoint for you the moment the Star Wars franchise was dealt a mortal blow — when Lando Calrissian is introduced as a man in Empire Strikes Back.

That’s the moment when the whole Star Wars universe met its doom.

The reason — it’s natural for characters to pair off as a franchise matures. As such, Leia and Han pair off…leaving Luke Skywalker with nothing (or no one) to do. Just think, if Lando was a woman, you open the first movie of the new trilogy with a brown Ray.

Ta-da, you have a whole new avenue for the Skywalker family to go down.

But, obviously, that can’t happen now.

I honestly don’t know what happens with Star Wars now. I guess they just keep selling toys and blowing up bigger and bigger Deathstars until the sun goes dark or something.

Tik-Tok Keeps Pushing Me ‘Spooky’ Content That Is Inexplicable Unless They’re Reading My Mind


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now, the thing I want to make absolutely clear is I fucking hate conspiracy theories. I think of them as the last refuge of the intellectually dishonest. The only reason why I keep ranting about the possibility that Big Tech like Facebook, Google and Tik-Tok may have the technology to read our minds is I use Tik-Tok and am startled by weird “co-incidences.”

So, there’s a reason for my seemingly bonkers and out of character interest in this particular “conspiracy theory.” It just seems at last possible that something akin to a secret “soft singularity” is taking place. What I mean by this is a number of proto-Singularity technologies are coming to a head without them being promoted by Big Tech. Already, we’re racing towards hard AI via automated cars.

The issue that keeps coming to the forefront of my mind about Tik-Tok specifically is while 99% of the “spooky” things I get pushed can be explained away pretty easily, there is that 1% that simply has no other explanation than maybe, just maybe, they have some way of reading our minds.

But, thankfully, I can make these observations in peace and quiet. I’m a total nobody and I daydream about such things in my little corner of the Internet without anyone caring. Though, I did learn when I was writing a lot about Alexa Chung a few years ago that if you write about anything enough online someone, somewhere will notice. Ugh.

Thankfully, that era in my life is over.

Now I’m obsessed with the novel and writing a breakout hit novel.

I have to admit that I find it very dumb that if there is some sort of “digital telepathy” at work right now that Big Tech won’t tell us about it so they can turn around and sell us $1,2000 “mindcaps” that skip the step of MX (AR / VR) and go directly to having some sort of “mind media” whereby you would see movies in your mind or hear music in your mind using your body’s own “wetware.”

That all sounds very fantastical, but as Arthur C. Clarke would say, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

‘The Fourth Turning’ Predicts A Major Political Crisis ‘Before 2025’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The spooky thing about the book The Fourth Turning is there is a specific prediction that aligns perfectly with my own thoughts on America’s fate — we’re going to have a severe political crisis of some sort in late 2024 after the presidential election.

Or, put another way, we will have a severe political crisis (second civil war) if the would-be autocrat that Republicans nominate isn’t able to cleanly steal the election and turn us into an autocracy that lasts at least 50 or more years. That specific prediction is enough for me to think the guys involved know what they’re talking about.

One key take away from the big so far right now is the cycle of human history is somewhere between 80 to 130 years. I’ve been toying with a similar idea — that we’ve reached an era where the last people to remember WW2 are dying off and, as such, the idea of the United States as the “essential nation” is being lost as the primary driver of American foreign policy.

As such, we see the rise of MAGA and the idea of Fortress America. If you twin that with the idea that the choice in 2024 is between civil war or autocracy, then The Fourth Turning‘s prediction that “before 2025” all hell is going to break loose jibes up pretty well with that.

We have to begin to prepare for a cataclysmic break with the past in the winter of 2024-2025. If we become an autocracy that pulls all out all our troops from around the world, then I could see WW3 happening at any point after 2025. For me, the issue is the next autocrat is probably going to be a lot less incompetent than Trump and, well, should we not have a civil war, our decent into autocracy will be swift and breathtaking.

All my dystopian hellscape nightmares that I imagined for the Trump Era will just happen four years later.

‘Cancel Culture’ & The #Novel I’m #Writing About The #Trump Era


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, I’m just about at the mid-point of the novel I’m working on and my hero is about to be “canceled” for his poor behavior with women while drunk. This is a tricky situation because given the intended audience for this novel, I have to thread the needle of talking about cancel culture without making the reason my hero is being “canceled” so bad that the audience stops wanting to hang out with him.

I think I’ve come to some sort of compromise. I think I’ve figured out how to do that. And I am only at the first draft so even if I haven’t done it as well as I want to, I still have a second draft to make it better.

One thing I’ve come to realize is how hard writing a novel is. It is a lot of fun, too, but I have such high standards for myself that there’s a reason why it’s taken me three years to get to this point. But I’m finally here. I’m finally feeling like the structure of the novel can support my vision for it in its entirety.

The state of the novel right now.

In 2024, The Choice Is A Second American Civil War Or Autocracy


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It definitely seem as thought we’re careening towards “the fourth turning” as explicated in the book The Fourth Turning. The key thing for me is Trump was such a weird person — and so bad at being president — that what should have happened in 2020 didn’t happen.

So, it’s going to happen in 2024.

And, even then, it hasn’t happened yet.

There are any number of different things that could happen that could speed up or slow down the fucked up things happening in America which make either a second American civil war or a slide into autocracy — or both — inevitable by 2024.

But the key take away from both my personal predictions and those found in The Fourth Turning is we’re on the cusp of unpreceded instability both at home and abroad in the coming years. And when it happens, it’s likely to be dramatic and awe-inspiring. The whole world that we’ve taken for granted for the last 80-odd years is going to go tits up at an astonishing speed.

I say this specifically because the Republican Party is now fascist in the old-school meaning of the word. They are filled with rage and it’s only a matter of time before the Proud Boys morph into something a lot closer to the Nazi SS than we’re willing to admit to ourselves. It’s very possible that 2024’s election will be marred by such political violence that that, by definition, causes it not to be free and fair.

We may look back at 2020 as the last free and fair election in our nation’s history.

The other option is we descend into a second American civil war and we bomb — nuke? — the hell out of each other until we finally decide if America is going to remain a liberal democracy or go full throated fascist. The ultimate outcome of such a war is something I just can’t predict four years away from it.

I have some very strong opinions on how the Blue States could win such a civil war, but no one listens to me and, lulz, I’m a nobody and probably always will be. “Normal” people just see me as a deranged Internet crank who is “both stupid and oblivious.”

But anyway. Maybe the novel I’m working on will be a success enough that I can afford to move to, I don’t know, Perth or something.

Psychohistory, My Personal Dystopian Predictions For America & The Book ‘The Fourth Turning’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Apparently, Steve Bannon’s favorite book is The Fourth Turning, so some time ago I bought it to figure out if I could understand what made that motherfucker tick.

What I’ve read of it so far is quite good and — here’s the spooky thing — all the ranting I’ve been doing of late about how we’re fucked in about 2024-2025 is also found in The Fourth Turning. In fact, I keep reading the book and getting chills at how accurate I believe their predictions are relative to what I’ve come to assume to be true about our fate.

They aren’t perfect — the book was written in the 1990s — so they don’t get what’s going on right now perfectly right. I think the thing that happened that they could have have predicted is the election of a black president in 2008. They said that things would get fucked up about 2005. So I guess they weren’t too far off. But I’m a big believer in my own form of “psychohistory” in the sense that I think about macro trends a lot and it’s just that Obama was kind of a Great Man who sped up some problems in the country because his election scared the shit out of racists.

So here we are.

When the United States either buckles into civil war or becomes an autocratic “managed democracy” like they have in Russia it’s not going to be pretty. Either way, the entire world order will grow so destabilized that there might be a number of limited nuclear exchanges. If the United States isn’t there to keep India and Pakistan from blowing themselves up, for instance, that’s maybe 300 million dead right there (at least.) Then there’s China and Taiwan. The list goes on.

And, right now at least, our decent into either civil war or autocracy seems rather implacable. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. We can delay it, like we did in 2020 because of the pandemic and Trump being a complete fucking lazy idiot, but we can’t stop it. What The Fourth Turning does it give people like me some sort of underlining historical explanation for why we think what we think.

But let me be clear — there’s no reveled truth. No fate but what we make, as they say. Yet there are just too many things that are coming to a head for, essentially, WW3 not to happen in about four years. Too many Americans are tired of Empire and want to “bring the boys home” so we can become Fortress America and become a white Christian ethno state.

As I said, the issue is, how peaceful is our transition from liberal democracy into an autocracy? That’s pretty much the crux of our fate at this point from a prediction standpoint. There are specific things I simply can’t game out at this point. A lot will be decided which of the half dozen would-be autocrats wins the Republican nomination in 2024 and how popular they are with people who didn’t vote for Trump in 2020 or 2016.

I have a feeling the next autocrat is going to be a lot smoother and the siren call of autocracy will be far to strong in the end. I keep encountering too many people who are obviously autocrat-friendly who didn’t support Trump personally but obviously want some sort of autocratic rule.

In the end, of course, I’ll just be a minority of one if need be. I will never support any fucking autocracy. That’s never going to change, regardless of the year.

Things Are Moving Fast With The Novel — Now To Do A Lot Of Reading


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

After spending the weekend in Cary, NC and chilling out, the first draft of the novel is now racing forward. I wrote probably five or six scenes today which equal roughly as much as 6,000 words.

That’s the thing that I’ve learned over the last three years — the reason why development is so important to me, personally, is I can write so fast once I know my vision. But the issue is I have to make sure I don’t wear myself out by writing shit I can’t use.

That has happened more than once over the last three years, even with all the struggle with development I’ve had to go through for no other reason than for much of the last three years I’ve had no idea what I was doing and because no one likes me and I have no friends I was doing it all in a vacuum.

More than once, if I had just had a wife or a girlfriend then things would have gone far, far faster. In fact, what I’m doing right now is a cherry picked subset of a far bigger story that I came up with over the course of one weekend.

But I’m trying to get into a groove where I do a lot of writing early in the day then turn around and do a lot of reading in the evening. It’s crucial that I read because right now some of my characters — most of them the villains — are just moods or ideas. I really need to flesh them out big time.

So, that’s the goal for the moment. I’ve got my note book and Sharpie and I’m going to go through a few books and find concepts that work in the context of the story. I’ll likely have a virtual bibliography in the Author’s Note of books I’ve read to punch up the text in this way or that.

Of ‘Slash & Burn’ Editing For A Second Draft


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I saw some writing advice from some grand Harvard poopah on Twitter and most of it I agreed with. It was great advice. But for one bit of it. The advice suggested that you will “always” slash half your word count between your first and second draft.

I call bullshit.

I am very focused on my vision for this novel and I’m giving myself somewhere between 100,000 and as much as 160,000 words. The first draft is probably going to fall around maybe 120,000 words.

But fuck you if you think I’m lashing that to 60,000 words in the second draft.

The reason that’s not going to happen is I’ve worked so hard on this novel and also I see that as much as 160,000 words as my opportunity to rant about the modern world. I’m simply not fucking writing a novel of 60,000 words. Fuck you.

So whatever I have to do to meet my vision when it comes to word count, that’s what I’m going to do. Or, put another way, someone would have to give me some money and with an assurance of being published in the traditional sense for me to cut my word count too far below 100,000. I’m fully prepared to self-publish if need be.