The silliness of naming characters

The amusement over what to name characters in the trendy fantasmal worlds of "other galaxies" and "other times" is enough to make me want to ROTGDMFFALMAO.

Why use ordinary English to describe everything that's going on in the story, including dialogue, and resort to naming the characters Deslaharma or Zeanderlal ... and of course, all of them in the Land of Frothinotina. Having a world with consecutive 'a' sounds is always fun, as in Miaamiaa or Flaaridaa.

Cheesh, why not just call them Saam and Ellaa?

If you intend to invent a world, invent a world. Don't just use the same one from your video game and invent some new names. If you can't invent a language, why bother? If you invent a language that has no grammar rules, no conjugations and no continuity,



Maybe just stop fucking around with it?

When the Devil comes calling ...

To the blathering majority of pre-something writers who would rather invent some dystopian empire in another galaxy and pretend their all-powerful teen-aged heroes and heroines can save everyone:

There has never been a more terrifying month in world history than the one that began sometime early on March 24, 1913.

There
Just
Isn't.

That day, which was officially Easter that year, something peculiar occurred. An El Nino weather pattern concocted a form of evil that can only be described in books.

So why write about some cockeyed amateurish "world building" story that has no impact on anything?

Here are some headlines from the first four days of the week of March 24, 1913:

The tornado that hit Omaha was the beginning of the terror. The storms moved on into Illinois and eventually killed 30 people in Terre Haute, knocking out the telephones to the rest of the world, which had no idea

What

Was

Happening.

Then it began to rain. 

And rain.

And the flooding that resulted killed many, tore out bridges, swamped entire towns, washed away railroads, broke levees and sent nearly a third of America into shock.

If this isn't more interesting than some robotic manufactured creep from the planet Archinoxia, well ... shit! 

If you plan to be a writer, look around. These are real events that only your form of Hell could create. 

In places where they could in 1913, they prayed for salvation.

It didn't come in a can. Loosen up and go to the library. Nobody gives a damn about your video-game fantasy novel. And neither do you.

My old home town

I have a separate blog and a sustained website that covers the history (as we perceive it) of the erstwhile town of Fairfield, which was in a nice cozy corner of the Whitewater Valley (East Fork) in Franklin County, which is in Indiana, not far from Ohio and not even close to the city of Franklin, which is in Johnson County, not far from where Jacob Whetzel put his stake in the ground in around 1808.

That data dump will bring you quickly to the present, which has disappeared as swiftly as your click on another URL.

To the degree any of this is important connects to my willingness to go looking for the fun stuff that happened a million-million years ago. The newspapers of the time have provided eyebrow-listing experiences.

And a lot of laughs and OMG moments.

To the point: Fairfield's history has been recorded by many former residents who were shoved into the Dumpster of progress between 1964 and 1970, when the US Army Corps of Engineers engineered the dam just north of Brookville.

By 1975, the valley was a lake and we gathered our love for home and stashed it. As years went by, we collected it all and put it back into a readable form. There's a lot we've recorded. In 2015, we'd have celebrated our town's bicentennial. (No I wasn't there for all of it.)

The other small towns around the area expressed some astonishment that Fairfield could care enough to achieve that. Most of those towns are weed-infested junk yards -- like they were in 1959.

By collecting that history, I came across people I knew, places I remembered and many events I had no idea about.

Spending a year gathering information and producing a blog -- the highlight of my writing career. The blog mattered to me.

If you're sure what to write, just wait. Do the blog. Get a sense of yourself and your own place in time.

The book will follow.

THE FAIRFIELD I REMEMBER 

THE BLOG FOR OUR 200TH ANNIVERSARY 

What to read

I picked up a random book at the library one day, tucked in with the other 2-for-a-buck paperbacks in the Friends room. Second floor, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The title was Dust, by an author named Charles Pelligrino. The thing was amazing. In his story, the dust mites have decided to take over the world, which wasn't the first time they'd done this. The dinosaurs, Pelligrino claimed, were the first victims. That annoying asteroid was just salt in their wounds.

The story seemed marginally palatable on a lot of levels, especially since 10 percent of America thinks the government is lying about global climate change for reasons they haven't fully explained.

Either way, it was an amazing sci-fi trip.

Beyond that, I have found a lot of interesting books, and I tend to pick up stragglers, things that were written 10 or 15 years ago. It's funny seeing how writers tackle the technology that changed before the book was published.

No need to do that now. You can fix 'er on a fly with some self-pub options. I've decided to dabble in that. I will explain it more when it's clear to me what I've done.

The $1.56 so far in royalties has me highly optimistic.

One operation that seems curiously interesting is Fresh.ink.com. Check it out. You download an app and do beta reading for us authors who can't get an agent interested in anything that doesn't include Misty and Brandon and their quest to take over the Robotics factory on the planet Zenophonia.

PLEASE BUY MY BOOK!

I've been all over the lot looking at the process for getting my work out of my head and into yours. So far, it's a lot of this, some of that and ... really, a whole bunch of nothing.

Which isn't the end of the world, or even a cause for consternation.

Con-stur-na-shun ... you get some pills for that. I will explain later.

I self-published Deenie's Hotel a year or so ago and I've sold one copy, which gives me 64 cents in royalties. I priced the thing at $2.50 for an ebook, which is OK. I don't really need the money.

I mean, I used to need the money. Now I just don't give a rat's badonkis about it. Just buy it, read it, tell me what you think. If you don't read it, that will be a problem for me.

Con-stur-na-shun. iT'S ALL ABOUT THE LIVER.


DEENIE LOVES YOU

Genre spelled backwards is Erneg

I try sometimes to come up with creative ways of telling people what I write about.

The best one so far has been 'porn.' Women mostly go 'saaaaaa!' which is their way of telling their friends they'd never EVER read that since it's demeaning to women.

I don't disagree, but who cares? It's a friggin' book. I mean, there are lots of books about weird stuff that are demeaning to somebody or other. That of course is a false equivalency.

It does matter.

Lately, I've written everything from a flirting ghost to a saboteur in the time travel booth, and a group of people lost on a dying planet. I think somewhere in there, I wrote about a woman who was digging turnips on a cold October morning.

You know, the standard erneg material.

My latest work is a pretty nifty concoction of mystery, crime, romance, paranormal creatures and overall slothful behavior.

I think I might turn it into a series.

The first book is tentatively titled Tooth of Toad. I have some other ideas for the rest of this boxed set.

No, it ain't a damned sequel!

Here's the cover I designed. It's a cool cover, almost as cool as the book. Please ask me about the book, not the cover. Thank you. Bonny and Jonny will be most happy.

'Write what you know'

The old standby about writing about things, places, people that you recognize or understand is similar to 'feed a fever, starve a cold' or ... my favorite, 'there's more than one way to skin a cat.'

What's important here is that the bullshit that continues to run downstream is never evaluated for anything. It's either accepted or dismissed as unstated fact.

Unproven.

Why do you even need to skin a cat?

Why do you write?

If you write, you ought to have enough gumption to at least ask why a fever needs to be fed. If you aren't inclined to even ask that question, then why are you even in the fucking room?

Somebody needs to question all this.

Writing what you know ought to include having enough brains to listen to what's being said, why and when it even mattered.

Margaret Mitchell did not appear in real life during the Siege of Atlanta. She wrote a novel about it because she was intelligent enough to read about it. Therefore, she wrote about what she knew.

She got educated.

The current trend is to promote writing about the 'marginalized' groups, which is a convenient way of saying, we expect you to fail because you didn't even bother to ask about why cats needed to be skinned.

Or how much fun is in a barrel of monkeys. Why are monkeys in a barrel?

Seems like marginalized people are the ones who don't know enough to write about anything. If you were never outside the Earth's atmosphere, how can you write about space travel? What is space travel and why do we even bother with it? There isn't anything out there, at least anything that's truly useful.

Did you bother to think that through?

Margaret Mitchell did just that.

You need to know about life, not just pitter down the cliches that allow us to actually accept that God works in mysterious ways, because if it ain't on Facebook, it's a lie.

Write what you know. Your fever will be happier that way.

The cold? Not so much.

Pretending people of the alphabet marginalization throng needs to have literature written for them, about them, sympathetic to their voice ... what about this did you miss in the conversation?

If pandering to your own beliefs is your way of writing what you know, it's that you know what somebody else wants and you are by-God gonna deliver.

The part about writing what you know is way more complex than that. It's telling you something.

Pay attention.

Historical friction

The idea that almost everything is the product of some other event strikes me as so obvious as to make me wonder: Who doesn't know that?

Still, you'd think we would learn from it.

Somewhere around 1900, give or take, an amazing product called the Electropoise was invented. It sold for $25 and was supposed to cure everything but a bad temper. Before the thing hit the market, even the quakiest doctor said the Electropoise was a fraud.

It kept selling. In those days, the best form of punishment was tar followed by feathers.

Then in the 1920s, a Kansas duck named J.B. Brinkley managed to get rich convincing millions of people that a goat's gland extract would cure all their ailments.

Brinkley eventually lost his radio license over the lie and continued to pawn off his remedy from a radio station based in Mexico.

The curiosities here are the stuff of writing. These were real people, not the movie version of the Rainmaker. They also keep happening. It's called aloe vera treatments now, or some kind of shining-armor tea from the western side of Everest.

We all want to live forever.

As writers, the lure of historical fiction is often too great to pass up. The parts of historical fiction that make the genre amazing are the ones that include real freaks, real liars, real events.

The big picture isn't always what it seems.

People took the first train to California in 1850 and they found what they deserved to find. They also keep voting for promises because promises is what made the Electropoise the most amazing product since electricity.

Shocking.

America didn't have much faith in doctors in the 1880s and the newspapers are littered with ads that promote healing through the gentle but effective purging of the kidneys and bowels. The belief that the germs should be flushed ... shit rolls downhill.

There's plenty there for the creative writer. The ads were written by men and the women were told what was wrong with them and what they needed to do to be right with the world.

Rosy cheeks.

Send a dollar and we will fix you right up.

Piggly Wiggly, PO Box 123, New York