Month: June 2021

Why Developing And Writing Four Novels Simultaneously Is Going So Well


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve been hard at work on a two novels, one story situation for a few years now. But it wasn’t until recently when it hit met that I had two prequels I could also develop and write within the same universe. After some deep thought, I realized I would rather go for broke and write all (now) four novels at the same time than write two novels then go back and write two prequels if there was enough interest.

So, in a sense, it’s as if George Lucas had balls of steel in the 70s and wrote and produced two prequals to Star Wars (along with the Empire Strikes Back.) It’s not a perfect comparison for obvious reasons, but it’s similar. The key to what’s going on is this now such a massive creative project that if I grow frustrated with one aspect of it, I can just go somewhere else and do some work there and still be in the same universe.

A lot of this comes from I now know how *I* write and develop a novel, so some of this happening really fast because I have something of a template in my mind about how to write a novel, any novel. In fact, the idea for two prequels really came rushing into the front of my mind when pretty much got the third book in the series figured out. It was then I was like, “ah ha!”

Being able to root around in the backstory of the last two books has also changed the story some because while previous I had two major events in my head, now they have characters and a plot.

I also think maybe making this creative enterprise double in size now really gives me incentive to go a lot faster and work a lot harder.

From my point of view all of this now feels extremely self-indulgent because, well, I’m drawing so deeply from my personal history now to tell this story that I’m a little nervous people are going to know a little too much about me once they finish all four books.

But, of course, they won’t know the context.

Anyway, wish me luck.

Why Does MAGA Want A Second American Civil War So Bad?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Much like the lead up to WW1, MAGA has glorified political violence to the point where they think all their fucking problems will be solved if we just have a civil war and settle the “liberal problem” once and for all.

Besides the obvious — war is hell, is never pretty and never goes the way you plan it — there’s the issue of MAGA not being nearly in the pole position to win any civil war once they finally get what they’re lusting after so badly right now. They would be much better off just being patient and letting the existing drift of macro political history forces give them the autocracy they want peacefully.

But they’re idiots who can’t understand that — so they want a civil war.

And, yet, why?

I struggle with this a lot these days. One idea is MAGA sees “civil war” as a kind of short hand, much like the “Insurrection Act” was around January 6th. They’re sitting on the back porch of the cabin with their buddies smoking pot and drinking Miller Lite and they start talking about how dem dar lib’rals “won’t leave them alone.” Then get all riled up and start taking their anger to its logical extreme — a civil war.

But the vast majority of these fucking cocksuckers haven’t gamed this idea out in any practical fashion. All they know is the hate liberals and in some sort of vague manner think if only the United States was more like modern Russia that they wouldn’t have to worry about “cancel culture” or their children being forced to learn Critical Race Theory. There’s no logic to any of what they believe. They just have a general sense that “things ain’t right” and, as such, Something Bad should happen to liberals. But I doubt they really have any concrete ideas about a civil war other than that’s the worst thing they can think of.

So, in a sense, MAGA’s political stance is completely recursive — they believe what they believe because they believe it, and fuck you lib. But this is a very dangerous dynamic because it gives a general historical determinism to a general drift towards SOMETHING bad, be it a civil war, or something else.

I have no idea what is going to happen, but I am growing aggravated with how wrapped up in the idea of a civil war MAGA has become. If nothing else, it means the United States is growing far more politically unstable than one might otherwise think.

But as I keep saying, it wouldn’t just magically happen. Just as MAGA thought Trump invoking the Insurrection Act was magic pixie dust that would solve all their liberal problems, so, too, has “civil war” become some sort of abstract cure-all.

What any of this means in practical terms, I still don’t know. Only time will tell, I guess.

Second American Civil War Flashpoints


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Let’s get some things out of the way. One is, while the MAGA far Right has crossed the abstract Rubicon when it comes to a Second American Civil War, it wouldn’t just magically happen.

You would have to have some sort of secession crisis caused by something like Cyber Ninjas “proving” Trump “won” Arizona or a some sort of nullification crisis in the 2024-2025 time frame. Even then, there is plenty of reason to believe that instead of a civil war, America will chose the other option: autocracy.

Someone like Ron DeSantis will become president — potentially fair and square — then purge the media and weaponize the ICE infrastructure so loudmouths like me either get pushed out a window or end up in a camp somewhere.

But let’s say, just like in 1861, we aren’t able to take any of the peaceful off ramps and we actually have a Second American Civil War, where can we expect the most bloodshed?

The first area that comes to mind is somewhere like Ohio and Indiana. These are smaller states with high population concentrations that would likely be the center of significant fighting between Red and Blue. Red, on a political level, controls both of the states, but they have big Blue neighbors and there are enough Blue people in the states that there could be some very heavy fighting. It would be a lot like the type of fighting we saw in Europe during WW2.

Another place I would imagine there would be a lot of fighting would be Texas. This state has a huge, diverse population and once we no longer see things in terms of politics but rather the dynamic of war, then the state is likely to implode and have an intra-state civil war. So much so, that its ability to help Trumplandia in any broader war would be significantly hampered.

The rest of the South west of the Texas would also pretty much just go tits up the moment Americans took up arms against each other. The old CSA South would be were the most atrocities would likely take place because of race, race, race. It’s easy to imagine historic race-war-like crimes against humanity taking place there — the type of stuff people would eventually get hung for if the “Good Guys” (at least in my view) won.

It just seems like the rest of the country would stabilize a lot quicker for various reasons. If California could get its act together, it would control a huge swath of the country east and north of it, while the Northeast would be firmly in the Blue camp. But it’s places where Blue and Red states neighbor each other — or there are sizable minority populations — where the highest number of deaths would occur.

Hopefully, I’m wrong one way or another. I hate violence. Though, as I have mentioned before, in an abstract way, the idea of civil war at least would give us the possibility that we could end the MAGA threat once and for all. But, lulz, who knows what is going to happen. I hope we just keep punting this problem down the road for the foreseeable future.

Novel Development Odds & Ends


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Some things I keep thinking about these days as I develop the first book in a four book (at least) series.

  1. Motivation & Writing Female Characters
    The better my storytelling ability gets, the more I find myself dwelling on motivation and how to construct interesting characters — usually female. I find developing female characters a lot more interesting than male characters because it’s so much more of a challenge to believably reverse engineer the personality and motivation of a female character (as male author.) And anyone who tells you to “just write a male character and flip the gender pronouns later” is full of shit. That’s a trite, pat, way of encouraging skittish male authors to write more female characters when, in fact, writing a female character as a male author is hard as shit.
  2. Gender & Hero Politics
    To write an effective Hero (Protagonist) for a story, they need to move the plot along. So, at the moment, I have my Heroine being rather passive at the climax of the story. I have come up with a way to make her far more active, but something occurred to me — there’s a reason why you see a lot of mom’s saving kids stories, but not a lot — if any of — of children saving mom stories. The implication is if a young man saves the metaphorical princess that they marry and live happily ever after. So, it’s weird to think that a son might save a mom from the dragon. But a mom saving a child (son) from danger fits the idea of a mother’s love.
  3. Writing An Interesting Female Character Is Tough
    I love to think up really interesting female protagonists, but given where all these stories are set, I really need to explain how is that all these out-there female characters could reside essentially in the same place when in real life you don’t often run into a woman as interesting as I’ve thought up. It’s not like there are all these Lisbeth Salanders running around Sweden. I have come up with a reason why these three women I need to exist would do so near each other, but I really need to think about the consequences of them being such iconoclasts. Men are socialized to be the Hero, while women — at least up until fairly recently — have been socialized to be the Princess who needs to be saved. For a real life woman to buck this very potent social construct would come with some significant downside for her on a personal level.

What’s With All The (MAGA?) Burner Accounts Following Me On Twitter?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

When you live a life that is anonymous as mine is at the moment, it doesn’t take much for you to get all tingly when something even remotely interesting happens.

In just the last few months, a number of obvious burner accounts have followed me on Twitter. You can tell they’re burner accounts because they’re very small accounts that obviously aren’t just Russian bots or trolls. And they follow a very narrow group of people.

Now, this would be, I guess?, flattering but for one thing — recently these burner accounts have been MAGA. I know I can sometimes kind of flip out on Twitter in my pointed anti-MAGA hatred, so it makes me wonder if these burner accounts are name brand MAGA “thought leaders” who want to hate-follow me so they can use my hysterical anti-MAGA tweets to be fascists. Or something like that.

Or maybe all of this is just another instance of me pulling something out of my butt out of whole cloth. That has been known to happen.

Tik-Tok’s ‘Algorithms’ Continue To Be Spooky


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Not a day goes by now that Tik-Tok doesn’t serve me content that is so narrow, so specific to me personally that it makes me sit up and take notice. Of course, I guess that’s the point. One of the most recent instances of this involved me looking at a model’s video on Instagram where she told people to follow her on Tik-Tok. I thought hard about this for a moment, then was ultimately not interested enough to write her Tik-Tok username down. I did not think anything more about it until that very model popped up in my Tik-Tok feed right on cue. I continue to have a lingering suspicions that it’s at least possible that one of three things is happening.

  1. Tik-Tok is far more intrusive than we imagine.
    If this explains how I saw that Instagram model’s Tik-Tok account after thinking really hard about her, then that’s something that, while aggravating, at least fits within the established computing paradigm. That’s something I can accept. Somehow, Tik-Tok is so intrusive that it was able to monitor my Instagram usage and noticed me pause on the Instagram model’s video telling me to follow her on Tik-Tok. All that’s probably a national security threat, but it’s still not that weird.
  2. Tik-Tok is using hard AI to figure me out.
    All this does is take the first option and supercharge it. This takes Tik-Tok’s words about the power of its “algorithms” at face value. All I’m noticing is Tik-Tok’s “algorithms” are so advanced that somehow they are able to infer from my online activity that I would like to follow that Instagram model on Tik-Tok. Again, this is severely troubling from a national security point of view, but it at least doesn’t sound nuts when you tell people about it at a bar.
  3. Tik-Tok is reading my mind in some way
    This, of course, is the most bonkers of all the options. But hear me out. What if the reason I go that model’s Tik-Tok account pushed to me so soon after seeing her Instagram post is I thought really hard about it. As such, when I thought hard for a moment about finding a pen to write down her account name, Tik-Tok’s Singularity technology, it’s “digital telepathy” picked up the concept and waited for me to use the service again so it could push me her account. This is, by far, the most dangerous of the three because that would mean the government of China, through Tik-Tok is able to monitor the minds of millions of Americans — many of them children. This also at least, in an abstract way, raises the prospect of an “inception” scenario where the Chinese government could not just monitor our minds, but implant information into them.

    Ok, that last bit was pretty insane, even for me. But it felt good to write it. Anyway, which one to I think is the right answer? It’s probably some sort of fuzzy area between 1 and 2. There’s no “soft Singularity” involved, it’s just that existing technology has reach the point where it’s really good at figuring out what’s going on in our minds via available information that we provide without thinking about it. At least, that’s what I hope is going on. If Big Tech really can read our minds, then, well, we’re kind of fucked.

Waiting For The Muse


by Slhelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, I’m now working on a four book series at the moment and there are gaps in the outline of the first book. I know how to fill these holes in the plot will come to me, but it’s going to be a little bit. I’m giving myself until the July 4th weekend to brood on this issue.

The more I think about it, the more the characters in this first book are improving. This first book — what was once a prequel — is going to be a tad shorter and more character based than maybe some of the other books may ultimately be. Things are still sorting themselves out on that front.

For the time being, I’m doing a lot of staring up at the ceiling struggling deep in thought about how to make at least three very unique — yet not identical — female characters who are extremely important to four books that span several decades. (Deep breath.)

All of this a huge amount of fun, but also a huge amount of work. I’m going to have to confront some fears. When I decided to reboot this project, I was just on the cusp of having the first book in a two book series figured out. Then, out of the blue, it occurred to me that I had the blueprint to two books set in the past relative to the story I was working on. And, well, now here we are.

Things are both moving fast and are kind of held up with this new first book. They’re going fast in that I know the overall plot of the story, but are held up because the more I think about the story, the more I realize I really need to dig deep for to figure out some of these characters that have been — to date — more just moods created as part of a huge backstory I had come up with for two books set in the modern era.

I have to admit that occasionally, I’m struck with a serious case of self-doubt. And, yet, the two additional novels I’ve come up with are compelling stories in their own right. So, I keep going.

I Need To Study ‘Mare Of Easttown’ & ‘Ladybird’ As I Move Forward With This Thriller Series I’m Working On


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about this new first book in the thriller series I’m working on is while it’s firmly set in the existing universe I’ve come up with, the dynamic of the story is dramatically different.

As such, there are two stories I need to study — Mare of Easttown and Ladybird. The former because the nature of the novel I’m working on fits it and the latter because of when it’s set — the early-to-mid 90s.

The only reason why I feel I can pull this new, expanded universe off is the fictional events of the series hone so close to my own autobiography that really all I have to do is put the work in — the road map to success is right in front of me. It would help, of course, if I had, say, a wife or a girlfriend to egg me on, but lulz.

I have watched some of the first episode of Mare of Easttown and really like it — though I worry that portions of Pennsylvania are apparently some sort of dystopian hellscape. The (new) first book in this series I’m working on is a lot or more character driven than the final two books — which is a good thing. And, it may be a bit shorter than the other books, which is another good thing.

All of this has solved an existential issue with what I’m working on — I’d been working on the original two books in the series that I was feeling a bit worn down. Now, I can do something fresh and interesting while staying in-universe and building a really solid backstory infrastructure for the other three books in the series.

Anyway, I really need to stop writing about writing and start to read, develop and write.

Well, If Nothing Else, I’ve Created A Massive Creative Universe For The Novel Series I’m Developing


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I started the process of writing a novel several years ago. I had a general idea that I wanted to write a scifi novel. Things went well until my natural creative ambition and huge ego got the best of me: that attempt at a novel collapsed when I realized what I wanted to do was going to take me a decade and would encompass six or seven books — at least.

Flashforward a few years and I, again, realize I have not one book I’m working on, but four. But there is a big difference between what happened a few years ago and now. One, the universe I’m working on is pretty much a very gauzy, garbled autobiography. My writing and storytelling ability has gotten significantly better, as well, so when I took a hard right turn and decided to add two books to what had been a two books one story situation, it’s not like I was going beyond my ability.

In fact, things are going pretty well with these two books set some time before the events of the modern thriller I’ve been working on for years. But I have extremely high expectations for myself and so if I’m going to every finish any of this, I’m going to have to throw myself into a lot of reading.

I also need to recalibrate things. As I understand it, the late Stieg Larsson sold three books at one time — then promptly died of a heart attack — so I just need to accept that I have a lot — A LOT — more work ahead of me than I ever imagined.

But I’ve managed to come up with a cogent four books set in the same place and I’m still really excited to lay them out to an audience. I just have to finish sometime sooner rather than later. I want to at least be close to being a publish author by the time I hit 50 and that birthday is a lot closer than I day think about.

I’m doing all of this alone and in a vacuum, but I’ve made great strides in my storytelling ability, to the point where I can actually pull this rabbit out of my hat.

I just have to believe.

A Modest Proposal: End The Superhero & Woke Hollywood Movie Era


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Movies are a reflection of our collective fears and hopes. As such, the last 20 years — a whole generation — of movies has been dominated by the superhero trope. The general consensus, it seems, is the rise of superhero movies is a response to the tragic events of 9/11: as part of the grieving process we all want to believe that 9/11 could have been prevented if superheroes were real.

But it’s been 20 years, guys, give it a rest.

It’s time for us to move on. We need to stop having two options when we go to the movie theatre: a big budget superhero movie or a “woke” movie that preaches to us.

We need to start thinking about telling human stories like we did between say, Midnight Cowboy to about The Shawshank Redemption. We need to turn the page on superhero movies and start telling stories that don’t involve people running around in capes.

Now, it’s possible this is just not possible anymore because of issues with the marketplace and not the audience — all the types of stories I want to see are now on a streamer. Or, more ominously, it could be that just like rock and pop music are no longer one and the same, audience tastes have changed for whatever reason and this is The New Normal.

We’re never going to have another God Father, or Dear Hunter or Deliverance or whatever. From here on out, we’re stuck with Woke Hollywood that alienates audiences with strained efforts to cram a liberal-progressive agenda down our throats.

It could be possible that audiences from here on out will be subjected to movies like Book Smart where unattractive people screech about lesbian sex positions and that will be that. Once traditional Hollywood stars like Tom Cruise shuffle off this mortal coil, we’ll just have Woke Hollywood producing preachy movies that only serve to alienate us into Blue and Red echo chambers.

Do I have any hope that I’m wrong? Nope. Rock is dead and, so, too, it could be that, in a sense, Hollywood is dead too.