I don’t know what to say about Chappell Roan, but “WOW!”
Chappell Roan
I’ve seen the future of pop rock and her name is Chappell Roan to paraphrase the old quote about Bruce Springsteen. Roan is so fucking good. She’s a breath of fresh air in her uniqueness and creativity.
The only person I can compare her to is Lady Gaga. She doesn’t have the pipes that Lady Gaga does, but she can sing well and produce a very (raunchy) American Bandstand type of song that I remember from my youth.
Madonna 1984
Come to think of it, maybe it’s not Lady Gaga I should compare Roan to, but Madonna. I say this because Roan is over-the-top sexual and she has a very 1984 Madonna aesthetic to her. And Madonna back the day was more about dancing and lyrics than she was about how well she could actually sing.
So. Yeah. Going forward, I think Roan could blow up to Madonna-levels of success pretty quick.
It’s embarrassing how much obsessed I’ve been on plot over the years to the disservice of character. But, now, I’m playing catch up. I’m going through this rough version of the third draft and trying to beef up characterizations in the novel.
Fleabag is a very well developed character.
While my heroine is pretty well thought out, the other main characters in then novel too often are pretty piss-poor. I’m beginning to get a better sense of them, however, even if it’s going to take time to turn them from just “moods” into real people you want to spend time with.
My heroine sports a sleeve tattoo similar to the one that Meghan Fox now has, even though I thought of the idea first.
I’m really pleased with my heroine, though. She is very different than Lisbeth Salander, but she’s just about as intriguing, I think, if I do say so myself. I have done a good job thinking up a really, really interesting person. I could totally see her being someone people want to hang out with for a few novels, maybe even seven! (I hope.) I still am uneasy, however, about how there are members of the “woke cancel culture mob” who will be mad at me for being a smelly CIS white male writing from a female POV at times in the novel.
Lisbeth Salander is such a great character.
Ugh. I can’t help who I am.
My fear is that I’m going to get so sucked into trying to improve character that I will get really slowed down and miss sight of the fact that I need A Draft Done by April 19th so I can hand a few physical copies to people at an event I have. I like having a deadline so, lulz, I’m probably just going to buckle down and try to do everything in very short amount of time.
My heroine has the same phenotype as Corrie Yee.
The draft doesn’t have to be PERFECT, just EXIST in a form that isn’t too embarrassing. I really hope to zoom through this rough draft. One real problem I have is I continue to get impatient at the end of the novel and don’t put my all into making the copy as good as possible.
Ugh. I need to figure out a way to be in the right headspace when I work on the later scenes in the novel. I need to be a lot more serious and professional on that front.
It definitely seems as though we’re — a last — experiencing something of a vibe shift. There are a number of new musical acts that are actually, well, good. There’s IDLES, So Good, Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo just to name a few who are really interesting and actually make music that serve the audience really well.
Another thing I’ve noticed is a growing number of young people on Tik-Tok doing “fit checks” where they look like a person from between 1968 and 1972. I haven’t seen anyone dressing like this out in the wild, but everything old is new again, so it seems possible that Tik-Tok might cause these isolated instances to spread across the country.
Chappell Roan At the same time, technology is also lurching forward with the rise of AI and the Apple Vision Pro.
Put all these developments together and it definitely seems that we’re on the cusp of leaving the 20-odd year Post-911 era. A lot will depend on, of course, what happens with the election.
If Trump wins, there’s a good chance that there could be a rather amazing, severe break with the past one way or another. Either because we become a full blow MAGA Nazi autocracy, or, oh boy, we depose Trump then have a civil war because Red States get mad and leave the Union in a huff.
But it does seem as though the post-911 era is fading, if nothing else. The confluence of tech change along with cultural changes definitely seems to indicate that this is the case.
Now that I have “a version” done of the third draft, I’m going to go through and read it and pick out scenes that need to be re-written. There aren’t that many scenes at the beginning of the novel, but that number grows significantly the further I get into the text.
I hope to write a novel with a heroine as interesting as Lisbeth Salander.
I’m using AI to help with this by telling it to be a manuscript consultant for me. This only works so well, however, because when it comes to spicy scenes, too often the software just locks up. It balks at even looking at any copy that deals with sex or violence.
But it works well enough that it does speed the process up and it is fun to do something as novel as use AI to help me reach my goal. I still am on track to have something to hand to people at an event I’m set to attend on April 19th. This is very, very arbitrary because the REAL hard deadline is July 22.
And, what’s more, I have a sequel to this first novel that I want to start to work on. But the better this first novel gets, the more I realize I need to think hard about how to improve some of the elements of the second novel. Also, I still have a few scifi novels that I’m brooding on.
I’ve come up with a really interesting First Contact novel, but it’s got so many moving parts — and would require so much research — that it’s more a novel to write once I blow up with my novel money.
What the fuck are we going to do about Trump. He tectonic demographic and political history forces that have put him in the situation he’s in are so powerful, so potent that it definitely seems he’s going to become POTUS again, no matter what.
Then the shit is REALLY going to hit the fan.
A second Trump Administration would be a total, fucking catastrophe in a way not seen since 1865. It would be truly ironic if we found ourselves caused by a civil war that Lincoln wanted to prevent in 1860 and one that Trump wanted to cause in 2024.
It’s really going to be interesting to see how bad things get. Everything is so fucked up and there doesn’t seem to be any ready way to fix things going forward. Trump is so dumb and yet so powerful as an idea to the MAGA fascist New Right that, lulz…virtually ANYTHING could happen between now and early 2025.
I am using AI to help me rework scenes as I go through the methodical process of touching up the alpha release of the third draft in the transition to it becoming I can hand to someone in person.
I have to admit that I’m getting mixed results in doing this. And there are some scenes in the novel where I just can’t use AI at all because it balks and having to deal with spicy shit. I can only get so angry about this, of course, it kind keeps me honest in the scene that I still have to do all the hard work on some scenes without the an of an AI manuscript consultant.
But I do hope to zoom through things at a pretty nice clip. I am still on course to wrapping up A Version of this novel by April 19th. Then the next hard deadline is, of course, July 22.
So, we’ll see. I hope to be really judicious about what scenes I feel like I absolutely HAVE to re-write rather than just edit. Once I reach the second half of the novel, though, I fear I will be slowed down a great deal because of how many placeholder scenes I have there.
Marc Andreessen retweeted the above image from I assume Reddit and I have to say I agree. There does seem to be some bad juju in the air at the moment. It does seem as though Something Bad is about to happen in the near, near future.
Now, obviously, my interpretation of this potential Bad Thing is different than his. He thinks some sort of woke DEI hellscape is about to happen, while I think the exactly opposite — I think there’s a real risk the United States is going to lurch into an autocratic state.
Sigh.
Marc Andreessen is an very interesting guy. He’s obviously been Red Pilled and he’s so rich that should the absolute worst happen — the United States decend into anarchy because of fucking ding-dong Trump, he can just hop on a jet and flee the country.
Now that I have SOMETHING finished that I can use as the basis for the Third Draft of my first novel, I need to contemplate my next move. I think what I’m going to do is sit down and do some long-delayed development. In fact, I’m kind of doing it in a bassackards way because I probably should done character studies and treatments BEFORE I started the novel.
But it’s too late now.
I still have a hard deadlines of first April 19th then July 22. I want to have a draft of the novel done by April 19th that I can physically hand a few copies to people at an event that I am set to go to.
So, now I’m going to allow myself a few days to plot my next move, given the time restraints I face. I think my best bet is to do to, sometime soon, go through what I’ve written and do some sort of triage to figure out what scenes can be salvaged and what scenes have to be totally re-written or significantly fleshed out.
But, in general, I’m feeling pretty stoked. This is a really accessible tale. It’s fun, fast paced and spicy.
Chappell Roan has got to be one of the best new artists I’ve discovered of late. She is so, so good. Her music is in the sweetspot of pop rock music that we just don’t have enough of these days.
Chappell Roan Her stuff definitely “has a beat and you can dance to it” as they used to say.
In fact, I’m surprised she not bigger. She’s just so, so good. Some of her tracks are so easy to dance to in that old fashion pop rock dance way that I really miss. I know if I was still a DJ in Seoul I would play the shit out of some of her songs.
I have to note that some of her songs are a bit….graphic. I don’t know how much of that is I’m just an old man and how much of that is true. And, yet, lulz, all good lyrics are really honest so you can’t really hold it against her too much.
I occasionally muse about what might happen if I went back to South Korea for a visit. I had a lot of “rizz” as the kids say when I was in South Korea and I’m sure there are a few South Koreans who remember me quite well.
I can just see me walking around the street in Seoul if I went back any time soon and some random Korean from my years there who remembered me popping out of the woodwork and saying, “Hey, man, there’s this perfect job for you at Samsung I know about…”
But there are a lot of problems with such a scenario.
It’s not like I’m going back to Seoul anytime soon — if ever. I could be nearly 60 years old — or older — by the time my lot in life changes to the point that I can even think about a return to Asia.
There are some other issues, but lulz, I don’t feel like talking about it.
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