There was a moment, many moons ago, when I would have watched the movie Saltburn with my now-ex girlfriend and then moved on to the next thing. But now, as an middle-aged man, I find it very difficult to watch this “icky” movie. But whenever I balk internally at watching the movie, I remember that I watched Pulp Fiction long after everyone else did and I love it.
Ugh.
This is all part of a broader issue — I need to consume other people’s content. I can’t just consume my own content forever. This is especially the case as I lurch towards the querying process for my novel when I’m going to have to “comp” my novel to books more modern than Stieg Larsson’s work from 20 years ago.
I don’t know. I just don’t know. It’s all kind of bonkers that I would have such a dumb hang up in the first place. There are two things about the movie of note relative to my own life.
One, is the soundtrack which is very similar to the type of music I was using the DJ back in the day in Seoul. It’s not quite the same, but it’s reminiscent.
Second, as I’ve written before, the issue of the movie being so out there reminds me a great deal of all the fucked up shit that happened to me and the late Annie Shapiro back in the day in Seoul.
Since I first started writing a novel, I’ve pretty much been doing it all in a creative vacuum. All I’ve had is my gut and a well-used copy of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire as my guide.
The gold standard.
Living in a delusional state as I did this has helped me a great deal. But soon I’m going to find out what people with careers and money –specifically literary agents — think of all my writing. I really need to pay a manuscript consultant to read the novel once I have a final third draft done –but I’m very, very poor.
As such, I may just say screw it and submit that I have and see what happens. The story is getting a lot better and it will be interesting to see what severe existential mistakes I made because I haven’t had a wife or a girlfriend to be my Reader on this project.
But I have to summon up some courage. I have to accept that it will really be like winning the writing lottery to actually sell this novel, even if I otherwise stick the landing. That’s why I continue to dwell on back up stories to use should it become clear that this novel just isn’t going to sell anytime soon. A lot of selling a novel comes from luck and hitting the zeitgeist just right.
It would also definitely help if I was, I dunno, an undocumented transgender woman. But, I’m just me, a smelly CIS white male who can be something of a kook at times.
I really need to start using my time in a more structured way. I really need to accept that things might get a little bit…bumpy…once I actually start to query. And I really want to query my first novel as early as fall 2024. Hopefully the country won’t be descending into chaos just as I finally reach the point where I can query.
I’ve vowed to sooner rather than later to take the querying process for my first novel a lot more seriously. At the moment, I’m on track to wrap up the novel around — hopefully — April. Then the plan is to begin querying no later than, say, September.
But it’s always possible that that deadline may slip and it won’t be the fall 2024 querying season that I take the plunge, but, rather the Spring 2025 season. And all of this is happening in the context of not only me Not Getting Any Younger, but knowing damn well that any literary agent who does due diligence on me might just throw up their hands with dismay at all the kooky things I’ve written about and done videos about over the years.
And I am the first to admit that if you don’t know me personally, I can come across as a drunk crank. Ok, I get it. But what am I going to do about it at this point? I am who I am and I have some quirks and sharp edges that might turn some (liberal white women) people off.
My heroine kind of looks like this in my mind as I write her.
I really need to stop stewing about querying and begin to take it concrete steps to be ready to go when the moment comes. But I also want to start to work seriously on some backup stories. I have at least three solid scifi novels rolling around in my head and all the hard work I’ve put into my first novel should speed the process of development up for these “back up stories” a great deal.
While disaster could strike at any moment, for the time being, I’m feeling pretty good about the state of the third draft of my first novel. I’m going to focus on having a “alpha release” done as soon as possible. Once I get to that point, then I might start to do some fleshing out of the canon and characters so the beta release will be good enough to show other people.
I’m getting soooooo close to being in a position where I have to take the process of querying seriously. The idea of pitching my long-term delusion to people with money and careers is really going to rattle my cage. But it’s something I’ve been expecting for years now.
The story is pretty strong and it is provocative enough that I could see — if I sell the novel and it is huge success — that Hollywood will be interested. Even though the story isn’t nearly as dark and twisted as Stieg Larsson’s work, I feel confident that anyone who has read his work find my novel to be something of an old brown shoe without it being a hackneyed copy.
This novel is its own thing, it’s just I used Larsson’s “The Girl Who Played With Fire” as my “textbook” and, as such, it’s something of a homage. I hope people don’t think it’s some sort of fanfic, because it’s not. It’s very much my own personal interpretation of the general concepts that Larsson wrote about.
I have done everything in my power to make work as original as possible, even as I use some basic techniques that Larsson used in his work — for better or for worse.
I hope to zoom through the rest of the third draft of the novel now. But, like I said, so much can go wrong. But, I try to be hopeful.
I am really beginning to grow annoyed with how often AI pretty much lies, or hallucinates when I ask it basic factual questions. And, yet, the case could be made that it is those very hallucinations that are the biggest threat to “human” Hollywood at the moment.
I say this because what is creativity, but simply managed hallucinations? As such, it’s easy to imagine a scenario whereby programmers lean into that specific element of AI to the point that it can hallucinate full movies, books, songs and TV shows.
Or not. I’m no expert. But it is something to think about. I just think maybe we need to rethink how serious a threat to Hollywood AI will be. I think it’s at least possible that Hollywood will be the first industry to be massively “disrupted” by AI to the point that, well, it may not even exist in its current form.
It could be that live theatre and entertainment will be the focus of human generated art in the future.
The Alison Brie vehicle “Somebody I Used To Know” once was just the type of movie that I would really love. It’s the type of movie that would have been a Blockbuster staple. It’s got one of my favorite actresses in it and, apparently, enough T&A to placate my inner horndog. (I only say that because I’ve just begun to struggle to watch the movie and don’t know much about what actually goes on.)
Several things are at play.
One is, I’m older and my standards have gone up to the point that I struggle, I STRUGGLE to watch ANY movie all the way through. I did manage to watch Barbie and Oppenheimer all the way through, but that is the exception to the rule.
Also, as someone who has been fixated on storytelling for much of my life and especially now after years of developing and writing a novel….I just grow restless at a movie that obviously was produced by Brie and as, such, she is willing to be a bit more provocative to try to draw in viewers.
This is the same dynamic as Jennifer Lawrence in No Hard Feelings. Both of these movies would have been HUGE in the 1980s or 1990s. People are so dumb and horny that just the idea of either one of these babes showing some skin would have been enough to get people renting. They wouldn’t know, of course, that as producers of these movies, both women had some skin in the game — no pun intended — to make sure that happened by doing some gratuitous T&A.
It is a testament to how The World Really Works that the older women get in Hollywood, the more likely they are to become producers and, as such, whatever concerns they may have had about showing skin in the past seem rather quaint.
Of course there are some women, like Jessica Alba, who remain too modest to show ANY skin to the point that they would rather use a body double or have their clothes digitally removed. Sigh. Ugh. Maybe I’m a dirty old man, but I find something about them being so coy on that front a bit grating. Hollywood is a biz-ness and “double dees, double dees” as the old SNL skit says.
But, whatever, I’m just a lowly middle age man. I don’t have any right to have any qualms on that front.
Anyway. Back to smoking hot Alison Brie. At the moment, I’ve not even gotten to the inciting incident of the movie yet and I pretty much know everything that is going to happen. The thing about Brie is she is so funny in how she toys with the audience in the roles that she takes. One moment she’s a demure yet coquettish community school student, the next she’s a 60s housewife.
I’ve vowed that I’m going to read more and watch more in 2024. As such, I hope to watch Somebody I Used To Know all the
Because I just can’t game out what will happen with Election 2024 at the moment, I will tell you my Big Prediction for 2024 — an AI generated movie better looking than Toy Story will be development by some wildcat technology firm.
It might not come out until 2025, but it will begin production in 2024. And as technology advances, within a few years the whole process will be so sped up that AI digital personal assistants will be able to create personalized versions of movies — or stories in general — simply by you, the user, asking for it.
All of this means that ALL human creativity will get nuked by AI to the point that human created art will begin to have a lot of cultural value because…it was created by humans.
I’d like to think that I will be able to get at least one of my planned novels published before the Petite Singularity, but only time will tell.
One of my favorite movies growing up was Outland, which, as I understand it, is High Noon set in space. After about 20 years of contemplating a particular scenario, I realize that one way to give it a plot would be to have something akin to a scifi Western in the sense that it would have a lot of the elements of a traditional Western, but it would also lean heavily into scifi.
‘Outland’ I might look into this a little bit sometime soon. I was thinking of looking up “how do you write a Western?” then use the modified tropes of a Western in this scifi story.
But I dunno. I may just keep focused on the mystery-thriller I’ve been working on for so long. I’m beginning to get a little nervous about what I’m going to do when I finally start the very-serious process of querying.
Months after I started working on the first act of the third draft of my first novel, I am at last about to enter the second act. This is important because I know this part of the story far, far better.
Though there are some structural elements to the novel I’ve had to change in the rest of the novel, things SHOULD move very, very fast now. I should be able to come out with an Alpha Release of the third draft no later than April. Then I will go through and do an edit of it so the Beta Release is actually coherent enough that I can maybe find some professional to read it and help me take it to the next level.
And, yet, I am very, very poor, so…I don’t know. Don’t know how exactly that will work out — if it will work out at all. I might just query what I have in early fall 2024 and see what happens.
Of course, now I have to take a deep breath and think seriously about querying. But I think I may punt that particular issue down the road a little bit more. I want to have a complete third draft done — even if it’s an Alpha Release — before I get too worked up about querying.
And, of course, all of this is happening in the context of the fucking Petite Singularity / Fourth Turning happening at just about the moment I want to query.
Now I’m worried that deep in the bowels of the Internet aether I’ve annoyed the liberal white women that make up most of the literary agent class, even before I’ve begun to query my first novel. All I can say is — I mean well. And I’m generally a fan of liberal white women. (Even if I do sometimes use them as a class as something of a comic foil in some of my drunk political rants.)
But what I’m NOT a fan of is being attacked for being a smelly CIS white male writing from a female POV. Or being forced to debate how many of my characters can dance on the head of the Bechdel Test pin. And I am who I am. Come what may.
I don’t MEAN to annoy anyone, but I’m not going to fake who I am. And, in general, I think literary agents will find me endearing, thoughtful and interesting — if they’re willing to give me a chance.
And, yet, who knows. I still have a few more months before I finish a stable third draft of the novel. Then there will be the struggle to find — and afford — a manuscript consultant to take the novel to the next level. And all of this will be happening in the context of a Petite Singularity / Fourth Turning in late 2024, early 2025.
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