Medicine for the brain

It's a working title.

I have been writing novels for fun since the mid-90s and finally found a voice a few years after that. I have a whole range of things that either didn't get past the first edit or just were finished and stashed.

About 10 years ago, I began to make some serious attempts to get an agent and learned that agent searches are a joke for people who identify as "older white male." Not to sound too whiny about that, but the agent tends to be white/female/under 30 and is now interested in a genre that they think is what the reading public wants.

That is: Gender-challenged inside the alphabet, or a person of minority status who is telling the story from the inside as opposed to outside. They want LBGTQIA+ stories, indifferent to the fact that it's the same thing as asking for tall-short-skinny-fat-French-black-Asian-Martin people to all stand up and write a great novel. If you are going to write inside the genre, at least, you know ... pick one. G and L are not the same thing. 

What they want depends on this: About 5 percent of the population is not identifiably hetero. Half that population is female. Discounting the 60 percent who can't spell 'water' while on a cruise ship and the other 30 percent that hasn't advance past third grade, and 10 percent living a nursing home or are in the Army -- there aren't many people left for that chore.

Of those who are, half aren't interested in making public the challenges they face because they don't see your challenge as being one to identify their challenge. 

Others don't care about writing.

Of those who do, not many know how to write a novel. Of that number, not very many know how to query it, provided it was any good.

Or is an interesting story.

But the agents persevere in believing that -- and YA stories containing the same structure -- are what we are all chomping to read. Hint: We aren't.

So I learned that just a good story is great if it's a romance novel. I have one novel that has a young black woman as the central character. I can do that because it worked. I suspect I will summarily be told I have no right to attempt that, not being black, female, under 40. 

So while I never truly gave up the idea that I'd get a publisher, what is expected of the author is to schmooze an agent who only knows what the pub houses are demanding -- and that's the quick-fix for their own racism that they pawned off for decades.

I actually made a couple of grand writing recreational sex books (aka porn) for a short time. I turned two of them into more mainstream books but neither of them is very good. I only wrote that stuff because I found a freaky e-book house that took anything. 

But it did help me learn how to write a novel, how to build a plot, a character arc and how to ebb-and-flow on pace. I learned that dialogue is how to move a book along. Too much or not enough, both bad. "Wow, that tree is tall," she said as she looked up to see her cat hopelessly dangling from the power line.

To that end, I have used my reading/writing comprehension skills to modify the world. My characters are all loveable buttheads because everyone is a butthead. I just like some of them more than others. 

Truthfully, though, in my activities surrounding the writing craft, what I have seen more frustrating than a lack of life experience by young writers -- the lack of life experience that comes with actually caring about it. I am no fan of the virtual world, but it's here now and getting people to see and understand the loveable butthead -- and to write about it, I don't know for sure how to impart that.

If we are to believe that everyone now sees the world in two flavors -- the liberals who dislike everything and the wingnuts who dislike liberals for that reason -- man-oh-man -- it is already starting to become a standard theme in literature. 

There is no achievement now, only a beatback of oppression. And when American Dirt addresses achievement in the face of the beatback, the achievement is ridiculed because the oppressed person has no privilege in being in that condition.

Young writers wait too long to learn how to write. They always did. I was never serious about it in my mid-years because I wasn't interested in the world I would someday inhabit.

I only knew my past and it wasn't interesting. It still isn't but I can use it to mold a present that will inevitably be my future. 

Most young writers have had the story told to them --  it's OK to be cruel. You can't kill animals, but you can kill creatures -- so we will provide an unlimited supply of that. Your parents will fill in the blank spots. 

I will await new writers and will support them. Those writers also need to understand that the markets they are expected to reach in many cases just do not exist. 

The fact: Being creative is free. Publishers and agents don't have to do anything. Most of them do exactly that. They are clueless and manipulative all at the same time.

Pandemics come and go. Stupidity is forever. 

Picture this

 A friend asked recently if I keep photos of times from years past, photos she said help make the memories stronger.

I don't know if I have any photos. If I do, I don't intend to go looking for them. The memories are what they are. The photos put real parameters on memories. One should not do that, I think. Just invent your own fantasy around those memories and tell the story anyway you want, and not the way the camera tells it.

Who owns a camera now?

I had a box once, chock-full of photos from 1995, 1998, 2006, 2010 ... there was nobody who wanted to look at them and -- for fux sake -- did not want me to narrate the contents. So, to answer the question ... photos are a waste of time.

That's kind of the point with writing, as in showing and not telling. A tall tree, a pretty sunset, a lovely smile, a nasty attitude, a growling creature or an electrical storm with lightning bolts that are really really really long -- as in, do you measure that in meters? Or in some data-driven concept from the Planet Tylofius?

My neighbor has a tall tree. I could photograph it and stash it in a box or a folder and someday, somebody who threw my computer in the recycling box will say, "remember when these things were new?"

Find your dream lover, put together a world where dream lovers can exist and make it a happy place. The late painter Bob Ross is legendary for that concept. 

It ain't nothin' till you say it is. Scrap thee camera.

Speak, spake, spoke

I love dialogue. Or do you spell it dialog?
With one quote mark or two?

It's how people talk and that's the problem. Writing it whilst in the middle of a scene playing in your head, the words sound fairly normal. We like say like yeah you know like it's what I'm tryin' to tell you.

You hear people talking that way and in the scene, it sounds very real.

Read it back and wonder, 'what the fuck was that about?' Single quotes.

Or in italics.

The italics is a form that naturally didn't exist before the word processor was developed. The italicized word was underlined through a process that involves the wheel, axle grease and a backspace key.

I think stories are driven by dialogue, with a touch of 'he pinned the gardenia to her blouse' while he stared at her chest, proclaiming "My, I love the way you have your hair up."

"Thank you, I think," she implied.

Of course, the actions are considered trite and pointless. The 'she said' is good enough but not very often because the experts tell you it drags down the scene. You just need to plop in a pronoun here and there so you can tell who's being snarky and who's being Costello. 

And Who's On First.

It's cadence and if dialogue doesn't seem natural, just condense it to a paraphrased scene and move on to the moment she exclaims:

"Just because I let you put the flower on my blouse doesn't give you the right to have tricky fingers, buddy-boy!"

"Sorry," he whined.

Dialogue from my prospective Best-Seller "Tooth of Toad."

Hilly and Bonny are at the mysterious shed.

*

We found the same dirt pull-in from before and I could see the shed on the other side of the hedge apples that had looked so forbidding in the dark, even with an experienced witch as my guide. Same rusted fence posts, same little pathway through the cocklebur patch. 

“OK, Hilly, my honey bun, here’s our shed. I brought the journal, so we can do some real work there.”

“Is that the same journal you mentioned earlier? We gonna make the wheel spin?”

“You wanna? It’s broken. Grab that wooden slat over there,” she pointed. “We might need to swat down some spiders.”

“I thought witches were friends to spiders.”

Bonny gazed at me. “Maybe your witches are but they scare the fuck out of me. Be my hero, Hilly, and kill any that you see.”

“Another illusion, shot to hell.”

She stopped short of the shed. “If you hear anything, let me know.”

“Any limitations on what that might be? I mean, there’s a little plane flying this direction. If you listen close, you hear the train horn over by Bradley Lake.”

“Don’t be a butthead, Hilly. It needs to growl first.”

“Spiders don’t typically growl, Bonny. Screw this, let me kick open the shed and murder anything with eight legs or fangs.”

“Fangs would have a bad attitude, Hilly. Spiders are just creepy.”

x

Back-reading

I have a lot of manuscripts in my computer or on a flash drive. All of them were written in a voice or a point of view that said:

These are fun books. Read them and enjoy the stories. The stories aren't important and the characters are not supposed to inspire you to think. Occasionally, the dialogue hints at a form of self-appraisal. If not, oh well. 

I tossed off a version of "The 8th Soul" on a couple of people who instantly told me the story was confusing and that they didn't know what the main character's 'job' was supposed to be.

At that point, I realized the road toward legitimate publication goes through some small towns. 

"The 8th Soul" is a story about a newspaper man named Jim, his girlfriend cop named Mint, some unsolved murders and their quest to find the killer, the motive or the method. None of those are apparent.

What is left is the unknown. Clues come from places right next to that.

I have a lot of work to do on the story, and it's useful to know that spending a few hundred dollars just to make me feel better about a book is sort of -- well, what else do I need to spend my money on this year? 

The back-reading is useful to me, but it doesn't fix anything. 

More useful now are people who claim they have plenty of writing time to also have plenty of reading time. We can't make our work better without help. Establishing our objectives is important.

A blurb:

Sharon Sanders and Mary Baker, cousins.

Not sisters, as we first thought, and residents of Ravenswood Mobile Home Estates, as we first thought.

"Not hookers, not really,” Mint told me over the phone. “They owned the trailer and would meet guys in bars, or wherever, and take them out to Ravenswood to party. We found evidence of marijuana in their blood but nothing else that could have killed them. No wounds, punctures. It’s hard to tell, though, if somebody was just scared to death, literally.”

"That’s consistent with what Todd Murphy found on Coo.”

"Um-hum,” Mint said. “Todd’s a good coroner. He isn’t likely to miss anything unusual.”

"Mint, can somebody really be scared to death? I mean, yeah . . . fright might trigger a heart attack.”

"Todd would notice that.”

"Right, so what we have is . . . what?”

"Honestly, and I say this out of a total lack of expertise, I’d say these women have simply been removed of their life. It was like . . . if you open a can of beer under water and hold it there. All the alcohol will flow out of the can. Then you take the beer out of the water and pour it into a glass. It looks and acts like beer, but there’s no alcohol in it. So when you drink it, it tastes like . . . nothing.”

"The alcohol flows out?”

"It just rises, separates itself from the rest of the ingredients.”

I considered the experiment. “I might try that. So, what you are saying is, the alcohol is effectively the soul of the beer.”

"Nothing quite that philosophical, but what makes the beer a beer is that it has some alcohol in it. Otherwise, it’s just liquefied grain.”

"So the gray people snatched the women’s souls.”

Mint laughed into the phone. “I thought you told me Coo didn’t have one.”

"I just said she was a bitch at times.”

All said what?

Incoherent rant:

Or, the art of knowing when people are just full of it and noticing who doesn't know the difference.

The health crisis has, of course, created an event that has never happened on any level ever. No global economy has ever existed on this platform and no platform of any sort has ever collapsed. Godzilla is a piker.

Even if it's resolved soon (whatever that means to you) there is nothing about the future that will be the same. It's just a clock, churning onward.

The fun part, I suppose, is writing about it in advance and knowing that there was only one George Orwell, one Jules Verne, one Aldous Huxley. Those who point to literature and affix a sense of premonition to those works are stretching the point. You can make any prediction you want. Observe the real world, add some nuances, some hyperbole ... you got your dystopian society.

I suppose I will endeavor to contact people who will somehow claim they will work with me to improve my writing, which doesn't make any claims at all about being able to predict the future. To that end, fuck the future. There are no editors, no readers, no nothing. They expect you to treat them well so long as you give them permission to treat you like crap.

I find it interesting, though, that benign comments that do indeed project the future are mostly overlooked. Such comments are the future. Pay attention to them and who says it. The nuggets of your life are embedded in the flippancy of the people who rule your life.

Is the cure worse than the disease?

What the hell does this mean? It means the wealthy and connected are considering ways of doing to you what they always did.

We keep listening to people who don't have answers, only solutions that benefit them. I will fix mine and here's a list of shit you can study in case you want to fix yours.

Meanwhile, they will build the wall across the Mexican frontier.

Because they said they would.

This is not about government control. This is about the absence of government control. You are entitled to be rich, but you don't get to play by the same rules. You are not rich enough.

Madness

Percy sits poised on the edge of his chair in the kitchen, his 12-gauge shotgun at his side, loaded and primed. He gazes at the wall where the thing hangs. He calls it a thing because it's there to steal his soul.

It will soon lure him near, and he will pick up the receiver. A voice will enter his ear and move slowly into his brain. He will go mad and the voice will snatch away his soul and send it tumbling across the wires, where it will land and lay devoid of meaning. The soul will turn to dust and Percy will be eternally lost.

I just got a phone call from a spammer who hung up when I answered. I have no idea if the spammer (maybe it wasn't a spammer, but a scammer) connected with my soul. It was perhaps a long enough call to have achieved that. They know who we are now. We aren't safe. They can find us, even if we aren't in the phone book. They don't even need a phone book now. They just call us. We answer. We're victims, lost in a world owned by aliens. We need protection.

Once, the telephone was a marvelous new invention. I found no references to it in 1875. Two years later, Bell's masterpiece was the talk of America. Since then, the telephone has been one of the most useful tools in story-telling because it allows for conversation. And blackmail. Mostly blackmail.

Or threats. Or other scary stuff. Don't answer the phone!

Percy was right. Aim the shotgun, Percy ... and blow the damned thing to smithereens.

It's not like life at all

I recently read an allegory by Johanna Stoberock called "Pigs," about a group of children on an island that is the world's receptacle for all its trash. The kids gather the garbage and feed it to the pigs, who eat anything.

There are grown-ups on the island and a disadvantaged man named Amos. And a boy named Eddie. A few other interesting things and symbols you'd recognize.

The interesting part of the allegory, not unlike the fabled "Animal Farm" by Orwell, a thoughtful foresoother, is that it is one of those 'it's just like life' premises. Everything means something.

Like baseball, which somebody tried once to tell me was a lot like life. I wondered how that was and his answer was that, like life, some things are the product of luck.

Baseball, as a chameleon for life, is a horrible example. Unlike life, it's on a field with the parameters established. The rules are clear. The participants have been selected.
If you chose 18 people off the street and found enough to play a game, those who didn't decline because they don't know the rules, you'd start with the rules.

Inside that, you could project luck to some degree if you didn't factor in skill.

Skill is always better than luck.

Creative ways of describing the life experience are what makes literature enduring. All the way back to "Pilgrim's Progress" or "Alice," writers have found interesting ways of exploring the politics of their time, both social and economic. The Yellow Brick Road is not just a song.

But the pigs that eat everything also leave something behind, and the author of that book didn't mention it.

You can't leave out the parts that don't fit the narrative.