There are very few things in life I can recommend more than not writing. You get to experience your actual, real, singular human life in the first person and be present in every moment you share with your loved ones. You get to interact with other people as real, jagged, surprising entities separate from yourself and not as characters approximating real, jagged surprising entities separate from yourself. You get to go out and find profitable work and devote your full attention to the job in front of you without also having to dedicate precious system resources to fake worlds that don’t exist. Also, strangers don’t know you but also not know you at the same time.
Not writing allows all kinds of existential questions to be just totally avoided.
However, if you catch the writing bug because something bad happened to you when you were a kid, or whatever, and nobody in your family was very nice so you just sort of start writing things in the very narrow space behind the freezer in the laundry room —because the worlds you can make in your heads were the only peaceful worlds you had ever known, and because no one will bother you there— you’ve got a duty to make the best of the situation. Some people have AIDS. Some people are homicidal maniacs. Some people contextualize all their thoughts and experiences into fictional narratives that can only be communicated via a dying art form that is less and less likely to be profitable with each and every year. Also now if someone doesn’t like it, they will also try to get you fired from your job.
Just don’t be a loser about it.
I like to think of writing like having irritable bowel syndrome or maybe being a vampire. You start thinking about something and oh no, can assholes sweat? If assholes can sweat, do you even have nerves down there to feel them sweat? Is blood delicious? Oh God, the answer is yes! So you go off and find a toilet or a virgin or a typewriter or a quill if you’re super fancy and just get it over with.
As you can tell, I’m really conflicted about the whole thing.
I started writing at the age of five for the reasons listed in the second paragraph and mostly continue to do so because I mostly can’t stop. The groove in my brain is too well established. It’s like my mind needs to take a shit and most people turn that shit into garden beds or vacations or productive hobbies and I for the most part turn them into google docs that I don’t share with anyone else. Otherwise I’m just super irritable and snapping at people al the time.
I was internet fame-ish around 2007 to about 2014 for writing stories about my family and childhood. I nuked that all from the internet a long time ago because it was probably a pretty bad idea to just post every formative experience I ever had publicly for the entire world. At its peak I probably had tens of thousands of active readers and then all the weird parasocial relationships that went along with that. I’m the kind of person where if I’m in the same location as you for four days, I basically consider you to be my cousin, so it just wasn’t a good thing for me to do. I realized I was basically treating myself as a character after a while and just walked away from the whole thing.
I also wrote a few horror stories after that under a different name that became fairly popular (I haven’t fully deleted those yet but those are next up) which I found kind of validating because it was nice to know I could just show up somewhere and start clacking away and keys and people would still see value in it. But then I stepped back and thought, do I really want to be bumming people out this much?
Recently, I also seem to have written a science fiction story that is a smash hit with racists. In my defense, I thought they were only ironically racist and I only submitted because I wanted to make some extra money to buy a walnut slab to make a dining room table and the prize money was the exact right amount.
I have a son now and I want to write things he could read and be proud of and which also move the world in a good direction. I don’t know if this story will be that, and I sort of doubt it because it has to do with internet bullshit, so if you like it just save the emails. I will post all of these chapters as a first draft, do some clean up and editing, then deliver a final copy. After that, I’ll probably delete this substack and toilet the whole thing. If we get over say thirty subscribers I will also delete it but continue to send out emails to the first thirty.
Not a gimmick. It’s fun to have feedback so feel free to comment, but I’m just past wanting the bother of “please read my stuff” beyond very limited, low effort stuff.
I don’t get a big ego thing out of it anymore like I used to when I was younger, and I’m old enough now to know there’s not really much chance of there ever being money in it (the publishing industry seems to be full of really bad business people trying to sell low margin low volume products) so I’m not interested in doing this in a way that is disruptive to my real life. I work in IT, so I’m not going to go out and risk blowing up my family to maybe have someone give me a few thousand dollars to publish a book that less than a hundred people will ever read.
I don’t know what this introduction is for, other than a general rant —my other substack is me fixing the government, so I’m a bit of a nut job— but felt I had to put that out there. Does this sound bitter? It seems bitter. I just am not psychologically suited to having lots of people pay attention to me is what I’m trying to say.
These notes will have spoilers for how I intend to finish this for anyone interested.
I write first drafts like I’m lying out pieces of flat pack furniture and just trying to get things in the basic right shape. I’ll assemble them all and tighten later but I want to put the concepts down first for later use. My stuff usually doesn’t get really good until the third pass. Everything you’ve read so far is a first draft.
PROLOGUE NOTES:
I like the idea of attention causing imaginary people to exist in some kind of collective unconscious land. Sort of like a Terry Pratchett view on gods. Not sure if the diary idea is going to work like I wanted. We’ll see how it hangs together at the end. Not that this needs to be a reminder but I will just have lots of fun with this idea.
The prologue needs to be edited to introduce some of the characters earlier. I discovery wrote a lot of that and Sherlock can’t be “expelled” that quickly in chapter two if I didn’t build up his attachment and connection earlier. Pay off isn’t quick enough. There might need to be a whole other shorter chapter in here to flesh that out.
Need to find a way after I get to the end to go back and reinforce theme. This story is about how real people are trying to reimagine themselves as fictional characters in the age of social media, because we’re no longer just being ourselves but putting on a performance for other people all of the time. That’s what the void is made of, by the way. Fictional selves of real people (or at least that’s my intention right now), and when you do that to yourself you end up making nothing because you’re giving up the thing you really are to do it. That’s where I got the Dust Factory from. And maybe that’s how that rant above is connected to the story. I’ve been a real person trying to be a fake version of my real self. It gets to be pretty heavy.
Even though it’s “Telly” overall it’s good tell and sets the blocks in place, at least as I’m reading it right now.
Biggest piece here is introducing Sherlock. Also don’t think he’s going to work without a Watson. Someone needs to hang around to keep the character alive. Keep the mystery as a thread to pull us through the story and other YA bullshit. Genuinely hadn’t thought of introducing one but on writing this think I will need to.
CHAPTER ONE NOTES:
Need to re-read a couple Sherlock stories and tweak dialogue here. The star imagery is good but I’m leaving stuff on the table here. These should come in the form of conclusions if I’m giving the speech to the guy who is famous for making conclusions. Huck Finn was a bit more natural to me but that’s also not Huck Finn and I need to go back through and make sure I get the voice right and re-read Huck Finn as I know I”m not doing justice to the spellings/dialogue from the source material.
Sexy Dracula comes off way too speechy and creepy here. Also way too soon and the staging between all the characters isn’t right. Need to show that in actions more and less in the dialogue. He can be chthonic but he can’t just talk at people. Also, want to pair him up with some other romance bros. Names I always assign these character types from stories my wife likes (she likes Romance) are “Alexander ManCandy” and “Sebastian Brood.” So maybe they can be part of his clique and that can soften that piece a bit.
We went over the Halflings too quick, like it was a chore. Had an idea while eating oatmeal this morning that they could all meet every morning to have a Bechdel Breakfast, which is where they all meet up to have breakfast and start their day off having a conversation about something other than a man. Also don’t be mean. Think of really nice yoga ladies you know.
King Arthur isn’t doing anything here and he can be moved until later. Let’s try to hit one or two “types” of character per chapter and not stretch ourselves out there. Arthur is a Chosen One. He can wait until chapter four or five when they get to the round table of the rebellion.
Stretch this out a bit, give a sense of timing since the death. Next day is too quick. Do the C’s go dormant for a while after they destroy someone’s life just like real internet hate groups? Seems like I could use that to give a sense of time.
If Sherlock has figured out something about how to survive being expelled (spoiler: he does) then I need to plant the seed he’s right on the cusp of it here.
I have repeat character expressions. Sighing, eye rolling, etc. Make up a new expression called “Snarfleblunking” for when someone wants to do something that a writer can’t describe. That’s dumb, but maybe I’ll use it later. But also it’s dumb. But it still makes me laugh.
Conclusion here doesn’t snap like it should and doesn’t set the stakes/sides appropriately either. Huck should enjoy the hucksterism of being a freedom guy who survives by compelled reading.
CHAPTER TWO NOTES:
The transition from Huck to the expulsion is way too quick and Aliss isn’t showing any character development along the way. She’s a “fixer” and she thinks she can control everything and make it right. She can’t. That’s the lesson that both she and the world need to understand. There’s no such thing as being able to exert perfect control over all problems. You can and should try but life is about balancing contradicting principles just as much as it is about solving problems. I feel like computers made everyone kind of autistic where they just want to choose one thing they care about and maximize it without thinking about how it impacts everything else.
Need to dwell on the nature of the C’s some more. The not talking thing isn’t working although I do like the idea of them being mindless. Thought of a funny bit here where Huck can be the one who gave them the name and someone can compliment him on being so clever for figuring out their natures so quickly and he just goes “yep, that’s what I meant” but really he meant they’re all a bunch of c’s. This might be a good chance to bring out King Arthur since Twain wrote stories poking fun at him too. Maybe a return to Watson as well.
Overall like the way Huck Finn is unabashedly unashamed to work the system. He’s funny and clever and sort of embodies the spirit of “you have to figure out what *you* think is right and what *you* can live with because that’s all that really matters and it’s all you’re going to have at the end.” Which is my answer for the void and all this bullshit in real life. A lot of people live based on experiences they watch on tv and they think of it like a memory from their real life. Or they get this set of expectations that comes from thinking you’re a disembodied soul on the internet that can just think through things logically and the “meat” is just a distraction that gets in the way. Read a Reddit post once about a lady who watched her male best friend risk his life to save a child, successfully, and she said she couldn’t stop fantasizing about him sexually and she felt it was fake and a passing response to trauma and seeing him rise to the occasion. And I was like “Bitch, that might be the first real feeling you’ve ever had in your life. He just passed the quality assurance test in your DNA. What more do you want him to do? Are you worried you won’t like the same fucking television shows?”
Need to figure out more to do with the Jade Dragon girl here and figure out how much of this I want to mirror real life. I think it would be funny if her personality was made up mostly of her author and also the perverts (because these people are always perverts) who read the early release copies that banned her from the internet. And then maybe she becomes a libertarian free speech guy as soon as her author self-publishes on kindle? That’s way too convoluted but might be a few throwaway lines in there that will be good.
Need to talk about going gray somewhere earlier.
Need to mention Harvey Kettle (the Christian, self-pub version of Harry Potter).
Please feel free to leave your thoughts here. They really are welcome with all I said above. I like the people from the only thread I posted this on. Mostly wanting to know if you were ever bored or confused.
Neural IBS! Sexy Vampire was nicely creepy. The worst “good guy” wolf in sheep skin blah blah blah. Would a vampire become more petty or detached with time? Is he insecure by the stupid sparkles in sunshine skin and overapplies goth makeup?
There is show called Bluey for little ones. It’s heart achingly delightful, despite being on Disney.