Who Writes My Stuff

I just put up a small paleo-art gallery at Redbubble -- go ahead and take a look!

So Catherine Schaff-Stump posted a link to one of those hideous internet sell-your-soul-to-the-devil thingies. You'll have to check it out for yourself, but it's exactly the kind of brain candy I can't help but gobble down. You give it a chunk of text, it tells you who wrote it. I had to give it a shot; the results were interesting.

I began by feeding it the current first chapter of the novel, one scene at a time. The first scene involved a conversation between two friends, a man and a woman. It was supposedly written by Steven King. Look, I respect King, but he is not my god of prose. No flies on him, I read and enjoy much of his work and wish him well, but he's not the kind of writer that makes me wish I'd done what he'd done.

Steven King. Huh.

The next involved an encounter with a couple of street musicians and was written by Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club is a movie I love way more than it deserves, okay? And Palahniuk has a reputation for being exactly the kind of writer I treasure. But I've read Choke and gotten halfway through Haunted and I just don't seem to like his work. I'll try more but... Palahniuk.

Huh. Okay, I can see my stuff on the shelf with those dudes. It does make a certain sense.

Next scene? King again. Okay.

Then Salinger.

I mean, what the fuck? J.D. motherfucking Salinger. I write like J.D. mother-god-damned-fucking Salinger. I will be dipped in shit and then spit roasted.

Next up? Jack London. Okay, I can see that fitting into a certain sorta polarity with King and Palahniuk. The next one is by Ian Fleming. I read Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang as a child and enjoyed it; I read a James Bond novel and 007 was bound and spanked by someone named Blofeld. No, thank you. The last is by King again.

Then I run the whole chapter through the thing and it was written by Palahniuk. Okay. Right. Sentimental types, tough-ish, a tendency toward spare phrasing with regular decorations. I can see something to this.

So then I decide to try my published story, Tourists. You've read it, haven't you? If you haven't, go and fucking read it and come back.

Sorry about that, but unless you've read the story you won't get this. I mean, I busted my fucking ass on that story. I ripped my goddamned heart out for you people. And even if you don't like the stupid fucking thing, you've got to admit it's a rich mix -- everything from religious satire to sensitive observations of family relationships to science fiction horror embodying a critique of colonial appropriation of intellectual and cultural property and no, I am not shitting you on the last.

And who do you think wrote the damned story? Dan F.-is-for-Fucking Brown. The daVinci Code motherfucker. That goddamned jackoff no-talent --

Okay. Okay. I promised myself a long time ago to be moderate in my critical positions. I'm not one for the snark, you know?

But the missus made me read that goddamned book and it was just well-plotted enough to keep me hooked until the end. Oh, you should have heard me cursing and quoting and getting up to look up verification for my refutations of Dan Brown's repulsively boneheaded made-up factoid grout. It was a horrible, horrible experience and I took it very personally, so to find out that Dan Brown wrote a story so personal, so important to me... it hurt.

So I figured I'd try another.

I tried Hate Her, Hate Her, Tribulator! That's an odd one. It's a deal with the devil story where the devil is the sympathetic character and winds up destroyed by interspecies culture shock. It's an attempt to portray a supernatural character that observes the classic rules for a science fiction alien -- as John Campbell requested, something that thinks as well as a man but not like a man. It's about love, fate -- the big shit.

It was written by William Shakespeare. Fuck you, Dan Brown!

Then I tried my tribute to tiny SF worlds and got Palahniuk again. There seemed to be a lot of that going around.

Then I tried my favorite of my stories, a straightforward vision of a man in hell and how he makes the situation worse. Oh, it is nasty. Very pleasing to see that it was done by Raymond Chandler.

Steven King wrote my most recent story about a single mom pestered by raccoons. Fair enough. But then he wrote the excised acid trip party clearance scene from my novel! No way! That was supposed to be by Hunter Thompson!

I decided to try something different, an old trunk story that's probably a spoken word piece in disguise. It was by Chuck Palahniuk again, so I gave it up.

But hark! One last throw of the dice... Let's see who wrote one of the dizzying cosmic trip-in-present-tense-and-italics passages from the novel!

Holy motherfucking shit. This is too perfect. It was written by...

(drum roll, please)

James.

The Mutilator!

JOYCE!

That is right, folks, my writing seems to rest in the Tough Guy section of the Sometimes Vaguely Literary department of Popular Fiction, but it officially runs the span from Dan Brown to James Joyce, taking in Jack London, Raymond Chandler, and William Shakespeare along the way.

Somehow this seems about right. Holy smokes, that crazy gizmo really works!

Trilobite!

I believe I may have neglected to send you to the latest Art Evolved extravaganza, The Trilobite Gallery. Go on, check it out.

Space Bear

I told you this was going to go badly. I'll explain this later, once all signs of danger have cleared. I will say that the biggest challenge this offered was the right eye.

Baffled

I'm not sorry I did it, but one has to wonder at the nature of a life that drives one to draw toads in diapers crouched on skulls. This all makes sense if you know the four -- or is it five? -- stories behind it.

Uh-Oh.

This can only end in tears.

The Residents Are Deadheads!

No. No, they aren't. But there are rumors to that effect... Back in the day, I did in fact have a Deadhead friend try to get me into the band by claiming that the Residents sometimes attended Grateful Dead shows in costume. Imagine my shock when I learned the truth behind the story -- a shadowy truth linking the Residents, the Dead and my very own guitarist, the hon. Richard Talleywhacker!

I have a vague feeling I may have told this story on the blog before, but I can't figure out where and when. It's good enough to be worth re-telling, though. For those unfamiliar with certain types of popular music, let me introduce our cast of characters.

First off, the Grateful Dead. They were a hippy-era band from San Francisco. They're one of those bands that's actually a lifestyle in disguise, kinda like (and predating) Jimmy Buffett. Their followers were a gentle drug-addled cultish group referred to as Deadheads.

Musically? They combined roots music with psychedelia, and were well-known for their live improvisation. I do enjoy some of their stuff, but the majority of their their oeuvre makes me feel as if I have the flu. They were skilled and gifted musicians -- it takes remarkable ability to do music as bad as the Dead at their worst.

(I am awfully fond of Jerry Garcia's solo work and especially his collaborations with Dave Grisman.)

The Residents, on the other hand, are exactly my dish of tea when I'm in the mood. Right now I've got a copy of their faux-Innuit folk music album Eskimo sitting next to the bed for listening-in-the-dark purposes.

I first heard the Residents back in the early eighties, on the Dr. Demento show. Even in that venue, their music came off as aggressively weird and willfully intelligent, so of course I fell for it. The Resident's are actually nearly as old as the Dead -- I think their first release came out in '69. And they have always been way, way avant guarde. They did some of the first videos, early use of synthesizers and sequencers, etc, etc. They have an admirably unified aesthetic, incorporating multimedia and design into their work. I fucking love them.

They are totally anonymous. No one knows who they are; I've heard that one of their core members is a really famous musician who you'd never imagine would be a Resident. I'm hoping it's Bob Seger, just for the shock value.

They perform wearing masks. Initially, the masks were all eyeballs wearing top hats. (see above) But when an eyeball was stolen at a live show, they replaced it with a giant skull, thus enhancing their mythology.

I've recently heard a theory put forth that at least one of them is a woman. It was an interesting theory, backed by intriguing rumors of circumstantial evidence. So I'm changing my mind. I now hope that Dolly Parton is a Resident.

So when Brian --

("Brian, you can play your fucking Dead until the cows come home, but you have played Sugar Magnolia six times today and if I hear it a seventh time I promise my behavior will be both shocking and spectacular." "But dude! Those were all from different shows! They're totally different songs!")

-- when Brian told me the Residents attended Dead shows in their stage costumes, I was troubled.

Years later, after the hon. Richard Talleywhacker and I decided to play music, we set up a studio at his house. (The special quality of our early recordings is due to the fact that the space we occupied could be described accurately as being both a garage and a basement, thus squaring our credibility.) And what did I find decorating the studio?

See the image at top.

It turns out that it was a costume that Mr. Talleywhacker created and wore in high school.

And Mr. Talleywhacker, may the lord pity him, is a Deadhead.

(When Jerry Garcia died, out of respect for my dear friend's grief, I waited more than a year to tell Mr. Talleywhacker what my initial response to the news has been. "Dude, I knew it was just a matter of time before you dragged my ass to a Dead show. So when I heard Jerry died, my first thought was that the band was finally living up to its name -- he was dead, and I was grateful."

He looked at me with great sorrow in his face, flooding me with guilt. "Dude, I knew I'd hear something like that from someone, but I didn't think it would be you."

Of course, our at-the-time asshole lead guitarist suggested that the Dead's best hope for continued success would be to put Garcia's corpse on stage and say it was the Touch of Grave tour...)

Anyway, it seems that for a number of years, Mr. Talleywhacker was in the habit of attending Dead shows while wearing the eyeball. We were discussing this last night and Mr. Talleywhacker expressed some disgust for the gullible Deadheads.

"Just look at it. The real eyeballs don't have that heavy stoner red-eye on them. And when did the Residents ever wear fucking tie-died shorts?"

I'd just like to remind Mr. Talleywhacker that all of the witnesses to his awesome presence were high.

Very, very high indeed.

The Final Stage Commences

From time to time the missus says, "You're starting to look like your self-portrait." This is the self-portrait she means. I'm waiting to start two major projects -- the place mats and the illustrations for Swill -- so I figured I may as well start another large-scale print. This should be fairly horrific by the time I'm done.

So today I did the last advance plotting I'm going to do before beginning the novel. If I find elements I need to track as I go along, I'll be sure and do so. But right now I've got a nice fat stack of file cards in a clip and they tell me that I've got a novel to write.

(The fact that most of those cards were written in felt pen by Walter Jon Williams is a thrill -- hey, everybody! The best plotter in SF helped me plot my novel! So if it sucks, it's pretty much his fault. And if it's any good, well, I suppose the benefit accrues to his name as well. That only seems fair. Except to the roomful of skilled and gifted imaginations that did most of the work. I just stood back and said, "Yeah, that's fucking brilliant," and "No, he/she wouldn't do that," and "Oh, shit, there's this whole other thaaang I never told you bout." Actually, that's what I was doing today. Adding them thaaangs. And for the record, EF Kelley was the one who saved the goddamned novel.)

Anyway.

The main changes are to ditch most of the, "but it really happened!" stuff, to simplify the elements in order to unify the motives behind events, and to increase the cohesion and sense of connection between events.

In other words, I've decided that this is primarily a work of adventure fantasy rather than a thinly-disguised autobiography. I've been schooled on the plot and I think it will show. The elements that were most important to me during the mid-stages of creation will all be there, but they won't be as strident and overwhelming. Rather, they're like bay leafs in the stew. Yeah, you've got to have that flavor -- but you don't want to have your guests biting down on bay leafs.

When I was at Taos Toolbox, I was told that I need to rewrite the novel -- but that I need to rewrite it once and then send it out. And that is what I'm going to do.