So, I’m just about at the mid-point of the novel I’m working on and my hero is about to be “canceled” for his poor behavior with women while drunk. This is a tricky situation because given the intended audience for this novel, I have to thread the needle of talking about cancel culture without making the reason my hero is being “canceled” so bad that the audience stops wanting to hang out with him.
I think I’ve come to some sort of compromise. I think I’ve figured out how to do that. And I am only at the first draft so even if I haven’t done it as well as I want to, I still have a second draft to make it better.
One thing I’ve come to realize is how hard writing a novel is. It is a lot of fun, too, but I have such high standards for myself that there’s a reason why it’s taken me three years to get to this point. But I’m finally here. I’m finally feeling like the structure of the novel can support my vision for it in its entirety.
It definitely seem as thought we’re careening towards “the fourth turning” as explicated in the book The Fourth Turning. The key thing for me is Trump was such a weird person — and so bad at being president — that what should have happened in 2020 didn’t happen.
So, it’s going to happen in 2024.
And, even then, it hasn’t happened yet.
There are any number of different things that could happen that could speed up or slow down the fucked up things happening in America which make either a second American civil war or a slide into autocracy — or both — inevitable by 2024.
But the key take away from both my personal predictions and those found in The Fourth Turning is we’re on the cusp of unpreceded instability both at home and abroad in the coming years. And when it happens, it’s likely to be dramatic and awe-inspiring. The whole world that we’ve taken for granted for the last 80-odd years is going to go tits up at an astonishing speed.
I say this specifically because the Republican Party is now fascist in the old-school meaning of the word. They are filled with rage and it’s only a matter of time before the Proud Boys morph into something a lot closer to the Nazi SS than we’re willing to admit to ourselves. It’s very possible that 2024’s election will be marred by such political violence that that, by definition, causes it not to be free and fair.
We may look back at 2020 as the last free and fair election in our nation’s history.
The other option is we descend into a second American civil war and we bomb — nuke? — the hell out of each other until we finally decide if America is going to remain a liberal democracy or go full throated fascist. The ultimate outcome of such a war is something I just can’t predict four years away from it.
I have some very strong opinions on how the Blue States could win such a civil war, but no one listens to me and, lulz, I’m a nobody and probably always will be. “Normal” people just see me as a deranged Internet crank who is “both stupid and oblivious.”
But anyway. Maybe the novel I’m working on will be a success enough that I can afford to move to, I don’t know, Perth or something.
Apparently, Steve Bannon’s favorite book is The Fourth Turning, so some time ago I bought it to figure out if I could understand what made that motherfucker tick.
What I’ve read of it so far is quite good and — here’s the spooky thing — all the ranting I’ve been doing of late about how we’re fucked in about 2024-2025 is also found in The Fourth Turning. In fact, I keep reading the book and getting chills at how accurate I believe their predictions are relative to what I’ve come to assume to be true about our fate.
They aren’t perfect — the book was written in the 1990s — so they don’t get what’s going on right now perfectly right. I think the thing that happened that they could have have predicted is the election of a black president in 2008. They said that things would get fucked up about 2005. So I guess they weren’t too far off. But I’m a big believer in my own form of “psychohistory” in the sense that I think about macro trends a lot and it’s just that Obama was kind of a Great Man who sped up some problems in the country because his election scared the shit out of racists.
So here we are.
When the United States either buckles into civil war or becomes an autocratic “managed democracy” like they have in Russia it’s not going to be pretty. Either way, the entire world order will grow so destabilized that there might be a number of limited nuclear exchanges. If the United States isn’t there to keep India and Pakistan from blowing themselves up, for instance, that’s maybe 300 million dead right there (at least.) Then there’s China and Taiwan. The list goes on.
And, right now at least, our decent into either civil war or autocracy seems rather implacable. There’s nothing we can do to stop it. We can delay it, like we did in 2020 because of the pandemic and Trump being a complete fucking lazy idiot, but we can’t stop it. What The Fourth Turning does it give people like me some sort of underlining historical explanation for why we think what we think.
But let me be clear — there’s no reveled truth. No fate but what we make, as they say. Yet there are just too many things that are coming to a head for, essentially, WW3 not to happen in about four years. Too many Americans are tired of Empire and want to “bring the boys home” so we can become Fortress America and become a white Christian ethno state.
As I said, the issue is, how peaceful is our transition from liberal democracy into an autocracy? That’s pretty much the crux of our fate at this point from a prediction standpoint. There are specific things I simply can’t game out at this point. A lot will be decided which of the half dozen would-be autocrats wins the Republican nomination in 2024 and how popular they are with people who didn’t vote for Trump in 2020 or 2016.
I have a feeling the next autocrat is going to be a lot smoother and the siren call of autocracy will be far to strong in the end. I keep encountering too many people who are obviously autocrat-friendly who didn’t support Trump personally but obviously want some sort of autocratic rule.
In the end, of course, I’ll just be a minority of one if need be. I will never support any fucking autocracy. That’s never going to change, regardless of the year.
After spending the weekend in Cary, NC and chilling out, the first draft of the novel is now racing forward. I wrote probably five or six scenes today which equal roughly as much as 6,000 words.
That’s the thing that I’ve learned over the last three years — the reason why development is so important to me, personally, is I can write so fast once I know my vision. But the issue is I have to make sure I don’t wear myself out by writing shit I can’t use.
That has happened more than once over the last three years, even with all the struggle with development I’ve had to go through for no other reason than for much of the last three years I’ve had no idea what I was doing and because no one likes me and I have no friends I was doing it all in a vacuum.
More than once, if I had just had a wife or a girlfriend then things would have gone far, far faster. In fact, what I’m doing right now is a cherry picked subset of a far bigger story that I came up with over the course of one weekend.
But I’m trying to get into a groove where I do a lot of writing early in the day then turn around and do a lot of reading in the evening. It’s crucial that I read because right now some of my characters — most of them the villains — are just moods or ideas. I really need to flesh them out big time.
So, that’s the goal for the moment. I’ve got my note book and Sharpie and I’m going to go through a few books and find concepts that work in the context of the story. I’ll likely have a virtual bibliography in the Author’s Note of books I’ve read to punch up the text in this way or that.
I saw some writing advice from some grand Harvard poopah on Twitter and most of it I agreed with. It was great advice. But for one bit of it. The advice suggested that you will “always” slash half your word count between your first and second draft.
I call bullshit.
I am very focused on my vision for this novel and I’m giving myself somewhere between 100,000 and as much as 160,000 words. The first draft is probably going to fall around maybe 120,000 words.
But fuck you if you think I’m lashing that to 60,000 words in the second draft.
The reason that’s not going to happen is I’ve worked so hard on this novel and also I see that as much as 160,000 words as my opportunity to rant about the modern world. I’m simply not fucking writing a novel of 60,000 words. Fuck you.
So whatever I have to do to meet my vision when it comes to word count, that’s what I’m going to do. Or, put another way, someone would have to give me some money and with an assurance of being published in the traditional sense for me to cut my word count too far below 100,000. I’m fully prepared to self-publish if need be.
Everyone goes about developing and writing a novel in a different way. So, whenever someone seems a little too much of a perfectionist, or gets bent out of shape about something I say about such things, I simply drop the matter.
Some people do it one way, others another.
And I hate it when people tell me I suck, or that I’m “doing it wrong” when it comes to writing a novel, so I’m really in no place to do the same thing to other people. Whatever works — or doesn’t work — for them.
But the point is — to finish something.
It’s the people who work on a novel for ten years and STILL don’t produce anything that really bug the shit out of me. Even that can be excused if the person is working on some sort of high concept novel. But publish or perish is what I think.
I’ve been working on this novel for about three years and I’m damned if I’m going to wait a second longer than need be to wrap this baby up so I can either get it published, or self-publish then move on to the next thing.
This weekend, I paused my writing on the novel to sketch out the scene summaries of the last few chapters of the first half of the novel. Now, however, I have to get back up to speed with the mental “float” of what’s going on with the novel at the moment.
Given how ambitious this novel is, that’s probably the most difficult part of writing it — “canon management.” I guess I could use a spreadsheet to figure out the float, but the float is so abstract and in flux right now that I actually have to finish the first draft before I can do that.
I may — may — break down and access to one of the various software programs available to manage development of your novel. But the system I have figured out with Google Docs is extremely flexible and I’m afraid buying such software would be too constraining for a first draft.
Maybe for the second draft when things are far more set in stone. But for the time being, I think I’m going to keep things in my mind as much as possible then between the first and second drafts do a lot of writing to make canon management of the second draft a lot easier.
The key thing is to just keep going forward and finish a first draft of some sort, any sort, so I can use that as the basis of a much, much better second draft that I will feel comfortable showing other people so they can be beta readers.
I’ve come to the conclusion that, after the murders in Atlanta, that for Breakfast At Tiffany’s to be shown on TV, the Mikey Rooney character should be edited out altogether.
The character does nothing for the plot and it makes the movie significantly better to eliminate that particular weird subplot. It’s not like Song of The South where the problematic elements of the movie are existential — simply clipping the offensive scenes from the movie would be enough.
There’s no need for future generations to know that subplot even existed.
The movie really is The Perfect Movie and by editing it instead of “canceling” it altogether is a way to keep it culturally significant.
After about three years of struggle, I’m finally on my way to finishing a first draft of my scifi spy thriller set in the waning days of the Trump Era just before the pandemic struck.
I haven’t gotten to the midpoint with my writing, but I have every other way. Though, to be honest, I have a massive amount of writing to do to flesh out my characters. That’s going to be tough because I’m going to have to go outside my comfort zone to do it.
But it’s got to be done.
Anyway, in general, I’m quite pleased with where things stand right now. A lot — and I mean A LOT — can still go wrong. But I am grateful for the position I’m in right now where I’m afforded the time and mindspace needed to finish up a first draft pretty quick (in relative terms.)
Once I do that, I will pause for a month, then turn around an re-write the whole novel again so I can have a beta version for people to read. Wish me luck
Something occurred to me recently about the possibility of “digital telepathy.” Once you establish that Big Tech can read or minds (which is still in all honesty a dubious proposition) then you have to contemplate the idea that such technology might not be used just to sell us widgets better but it might be weaponized.
It might be reversed.
It might be a real-life “Inception.”
Why stop at just secretly reading people’s minds when you might do research to figure out how to implant ideas into people’s minds. It would take the usual subluminal ratfucking we all know about in the media to the next level. Actual concepts could be snuck into the audience of Tik-Tok, or Google or Facebook.
If you take this one step further, when fucking Mike Pompeo or Tom Cotton becomes president and we either have a civil war or an autocracy, I could imagine them using such technology to keep the masses docile.
But all that is really too surreal and Black Mirror or Halloween 3 for me.
That definitely seems more like stuff MI6 or the CIA might look into via DARPA. Being able to read people’s minds then use such technology to directly pop ideas into their heads is both deep and dangerous.
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