I’m just being silly, but I find it interesting how people are spooging their pants over Emerald Fennell’s “transgressive” movie Saltburn when I lived a real life story that is just as fucked up (in its own way.)
Emerald Fennell I have not seen Saltburn, but from what I’ve read of its plot — oh boy. But it *does* remind me of how totally fucked up the story of ROKon Magazine is. There are so many twists and turns — and it’s all so character driven — that there are only two people I can think of who could write and produce a movie that properly conveyed what a fucked up situation all that was: Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Emerald Fennell.
Even though I hate to admit it, the only way to tell the story of ROKon Magazine is to use a framing device like that found in Daisy Jones & The Six. And, really, *I* should be the one to tell the ROKon Magazine story, given how important it is to me and my very specific vision.
The closest I’m coming to doing that at the moment is writing six novels that draw heavily upon my experiences in Seoul, what I know to be true from first hand experience at that point in my life.
My heroine, in my mind, looks a lot like Corrie Yee. There are a lot — A LOT — of lingering known unknowns when it comes to the third draft of my novel. But I’m still pretty confident that I should be able to write much, much faster now. I know the general relationships of the characters and so now I have to root around in the specifics as I move forward through the story to write a solid alpha release of the third draft.
I hope to do that by around April 1st. But it’s going to be a real struggle. Sometimes, I feel like my life is falling apart and everything will be thrown up in the air at any moment in a way or ways that I just can’t predict.
I wish some of these people who read this blog on occasion from unexpected, exotic locales had some connection to the Hollywood industrial complex and would be interested in getting the novel published. It’s shaping up to be really good. With my luck, of course, they’ll just steal the idea and I’ll be forced to watch other people have some success from all my hard work.
My heroine has the general phenotype of Corrie Yee. I’m giving myself about a day to kind of chill out before throwing myself back into the novel. I do this every once in a while. In the past, when I had more money, I would go to NYC for a little Writer’s Retreat.
Alas, I now live in abject poverty.
Anyway, here are a revised first few scenes of the third draft. I’m well on my way to revising them, but this will give you some sense of where things stand.
It’s time. I have got to start to push myself when it comes to wrapping up this third draft. I have a fairly stable first two chapters of the third draft, now is time to zoom through the first act. Once I hit the second act, things SHOULD move even faster.
My heroine looks a lot like Corrie Yee in my mind. I have written and re-written so much of this novel, that once I get the new beginning of the novel done, then, zoom, I hope to wrap up the third draft no later than maybe April. I know full well that if I don’t keep and eye on the calendar, it could be fall 2024 before I finish the third draft and the whole world could be being coming apart at the seams.
Anyway. It’s officially put up or shut up time. I have got to finish this third draft ASAP so I can piviot to the next step in the process – querying.
So, here we are, again, with me mulling my favorite scenario. The scenario is — a Galactic Empire comes to humanity and says, “We’ll zap a few billion of you to three lush, habitable planets in a new solar system, but there’s a catch — you have to bootstrap yourself. No help from us.”
One day, President of Hollywood, one day.
Ok. After nearly 20 years of thinking, here’s what I’ve come up with. There is only one solution to this particular problem that makes any sense — you seed the three planets with Americans, selected by a diverse, large group of global “stakeholders.”
I keep vacillating between thinking you would need just a few people in each various settlements on each planet — maybe 100? — to thinking you could get away with maybe 60,000 each planet divided to settlements of 10,000. It only works if you use Americans, though.
This would ENRAGE everyone else in the world, but it’s the only solution because America is a nation of laws, immigrants and a huge, well educated population. But I think if you had a large group of global stakeholders actually PICK the Americans who would be the first inhabitants of each of these three planets, then it works.
Now, the fun part — the gist of any novel or screenplay — would be all the fucking drama about the specifics of how all of this was done. That’s why this scenario is soooooo addictive. I think I keep discovering different elements of game theory over and over again as I try to think of different ways the different groups would fight over exactly who would do what.
Anyway. Maybe I can write this novel or screenplay when I finally sell my novel.
We are zooming towards a new, uncharted future when it comes to Hollywood-quality AI generated movies. It definitely SEEMS like within 18 months some scrappy startup will use AI to generate a “Toy Story” like movie that is created without the hand of man involved other than simply pressing a button or two.
So, it could be that in three years there won’t be any writers, or actors, or directors or below the line people involved in the production of movies — period. And that will just be the beginning.
It could be that by 2030, Hollywood as we currently know it will no longer exist. There will be two types of people left in Hollywood — Suits and Programmers. That’s it. There will be a small sliver of people producing “artisanal” movies, but most human stars will have gravitated to Broadway.
It’s even possible that places like the Catskills might make a comeback. Hell, even some sort of vaudeville might return. But the fact remains — the clock MAY be ticking on “Human” Hollywood. And I say this from the POV of someone who is hard at work on my first novel. It could be just as I finish it and begin to query it…all forms of marketable (human generated) entertainment will just be so much dust in the wind.
Now that I have pretty much built the cornerstone of the third draft by having a stable first chapter, I can get down to business. There is the issue of a ‘canon.’ To date, I have kept canon up to date in my mind by simply reading and re-reading what I’ve already written.
Heroine of my first novel looks like Corrie Yee, phenotype wise. But that has led me to grow very unhappy with what I’ve written and, as such, rewrite everything. This has obviously slowed me down a great deal. But I took a look at the new version of the first chapter today and realized my heart wasn’t in it. This is a good sign — I can now throw myself into finishing the rest of the first act.
And what SHOULD happen once I finish the first act is things go very, very fast. That would put me on track to finishing the third draft of the novel no later than, say, around April 1st. That’s the hope, at least.
President of Hollywood, are you out there in the aether, reading? Then I would have all summer to figure out how to afford a professional manuscript consultant to look at the novel before I query in in the fall — just as my world — and everyone else’s — is thrown up in the air because of a potential “perfect storm” of the Fourth Turning and a some sort of Petite Singularity.
Or we might actually punt our problems down the road such that I can try to enter the querying process in peace and quiet. If I legitimately thought someone in some way connected to the Hollywood industrial complex was interested in this novel I MIGHT post the stable first chapter of the novel just to give them a taste of what I have.
But I am well aware that by saying that outloud that some asshole will use a proxy to make it SEEM like someone with Hollywood connections was lurking out there in the aether reading this blog.
So, lulz, not going to do that.
But the first chapter is shaping up to be really, really good. I rewrite a lot of it recently because I used AI to give a sense if it was any good and it told me “not enough tension.” So, I reworked it to make the things a bit more tense and give the thing a bit more of a flow.
I am well aware that many, many other people are doing the same damn thing I’m doing and they’re not drunk cranks. I know anyone doing due diligence on me would probably conclude I was too much of a freaky weirdo to give a old drunk crank like me a chance.
The moment I think I have a stable first little bit of this third draft of the novel, everything collapses. So, I dunno. I guess I have a stable first chapter? Maybe? It’s possible? I really like what I’ve come up with, regardless.
Yes, President of Hollywood, I’m working as fast as I can. I’ve reworked the first scene YET AGAIN, this time so it has more tension in it and is more focused. But the changes I’ve made in the story have now forced me to rewrite everything that comes after it. This. Happens. All. The. Time. I think that’s a sign that my storytelling ability is getting a lot — A LOT — better.
I hope.
Anyway, I continue to fall apart on a physical basis. I have some real concerns about the state of my teeth. I don’t know what I’m going to do about that in the near to middle term. I have a fear things are going to get really, really bumpy, only to sort themselves out in a way I can live with.
It’s just going to suck in the near term. Ugh!
I hope I can sprint between now and Christmas when my next de facto deadline is. Christmas is when some relatives will return who I will feel compelled to show at least the first scene to. They were quite pleased with the last version I showed them, then I asked ChatGPT about what I had written and it said, in effect, “This sucks — no tension.”
So I went back to the drawing board and gave the first scene more focus and more tension. I’ve learned a lot of my problems come from simply having too fucking much going on in a scene. Just by cutting long, meandering scenes into shorter, more focused scenes, I fix a lot of problems.
I have also realized I have to hurry up. I can’t keep screwing around. I have a limited amount of time — I’m NOT going to live forever. I’m already in my 50s and not only may AI make all my hard work moot, the prospect of a significant political crisis in the United States starting in late 2024, early 2025, is a “not great, Bob” type situation.
I love Hollywood and the movies. I love everything about them. I love the pomp and energy of a bunch of creative people getting together to entertain people. I listen to the Little Gold Men podcast a lot and really enjoy it.
Because I’m a delusional, ambitious crank, I often find myself daydreaming about who might play this or that character in any hypothetical Hollywood adaptation of these six novels I hope to one day write. Now, take all of this with a grain of salt — actually selling my first novel, much less SIX would be like winning the fucking creative lottery.
But I’m delusional and feel like gaming out some of the characters seen throughout the series. As I’ve said before, I think the heroine of first novel is first introduced to us looking a lot like this:
Corrie Yee
Meanwhile, one of my two male romantic leads looks — in my mind — like a young Jarvis Cocker.
Jarvis Cocker as a young man.
But all of this is very dumb. I’m just daydreaming. I have no reason to believe at the moment that any of this is anymore than mental masturbation. That doesn’t stop me from struggling to think of a character in this series that might be played by Jennifer Lawrence.
I suppose she would be perfect for the FBI agent later on in the series that causes our Hero no end of grief. She would need to dye her hair read, though. 🙂
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