Category: Journal

I may have broken myself, over the last couple of years, in my misguided attempts to write commercially-acceptable, popular fiction. To wit:

I read Neil Gaiman’s new book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and I didn’t like it. (Update: To clarify, the problem is not specifically with Gaimain’s book; this is a straw/camel’s-back situation, and the final straw is not actually to blame.) The first forty or forty-five pages were pretty good, and then…

Well, then the antagonist was introduced. The plot. All that dumb, formulaic, repetitive conflict. A third or more of Gaiman’s stories share this same plot, and more share the same character arcs. Worse, they aren’t unique to Gaiman, they’re the same ones which are so common they’ve been extremely well documented over the decades. There was quite a bit of good writing; well-constructed sentences, engaging imagery, and poignant (if both obvious & contrived) metaphorical meaning in the author’s personal context.

I really wanted to like it. Even as I was frustrated & disappointed by it, I knew I ought to be enjoying it—instead, I was dragging myself through it, slogging through it, counting the pages until the heavily-telegraphed resolution.

In discussing it with my wife (who had loved the book), I described what I’d realized as I’d been reading it:

You know how some people become vegetarians because, after witnessing the process which takes an animal and turns it into food, they can’t stand to eat meat anymore? The idea that most people are better off not knowing how sausage is made. Well, I spent most of the last few years painfully (as I’ve thoroughly documented here, in the past) forcing myself to learn all the gory details of how popular and commercial fiction is created. The hero’s journey, the linear progression of conflict within and between books, the “right” way to construct a scene, point by point to manipulate the reader without them noticing, to generate and endlessly ramp up the tension and the stakes even from scenes and situations where it doesn’t make sense. I filled my head with it, against my instincts and with a great deal of struggle and pain, and now I seem to have put myself off reading. I can’t stomach it, any more.

Worse was that reading this book, by an author I respect and used to enjoy the work of… Reading it sickened me because I realized that this book was the result of an extremely talented and creative and inspiring author putting so much of himself down on every page, and it was improved by dozens of first readers and beta readers (far more than I can ever get to actually read my work & give me feedback), and it was clarified and polished in interface with his wife (another talented & inspiring creator I respect and admire), and it was further improved by not one but three professional editors of some great repute (any one of which, or any one colleague of which, stands well beyond my financial or reputational reach to work with on my own works) (not to mention, of course, the dozens of other highly-paid and talented professionals who further polished and packaged the story), and yet was still frustratingly formulaic tripe I could hardly stand to read … then what of my own work? I am no Neil Gaiman. I have no staff of professionals. I have no editors. I think I managed to get feedback from 3 readers on my last book, and one of them was my wife. If this tripe is the best an army of talented professionals can put together, how much lower is my work? What depravations am I thrusting upon my innocent readers, what absolute shit?

. . .

So, I quit.

At least until I an’t stand it any more, if not forever. This morning I updated modernevil.com to say submissions are closed, and I updated my Facebook page to say I’m on indefinite hiatus re: writing/publishing. (I’m considering going around the web and replacing the word “author” with “asshole” in every little bio about me.)

I’ve reached a point where I’ve put myself off reading, and I can’t trust my own writing, and there comes a point where you just have to give up, and I’m giving up.

This world doesn’t need any more of my shit.

If you have known me for at least fifteen years, and preferably up to twenty years, it may please you to learn that almost all the strange stories I used to tell about myself have survived, not as the oral storytelling they once were, but as a series of novels. If you didn’t know me back then, or if you have not read the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past, the following may qualify as spoilers for both/either:

Do you remember the stories I used to tell about myself? Perhaps you knew me as immortal, unable to die, tortured by the passing of the unlimitedness of time and the dull repetition of everyday life over the centuries. Perhaps you heard the story of how I came to rule Hell and the underworld, by losing a bet with the Devil himself, and what a unique burden the management of that realm turned out to be. Many of you heard the stories about my exile to Earth, sent here by the governing body of the rest of the universe for a crime so horrible they wanted to sentence me to the worst known punishment; that since I already suffered immortality they’d been forced to hand down the second-worst punishment, Earth. A few of you even dug deep enough to know my so-called crime: Love. (Even fewer heard about the woman I loved; Toni was heard of by a tiny handful.) Then there were the occasional “speculations” about how what we thought of as reality was actually a computer simulation, and how our being trapped in the simulation was related directly to an alien invasion in our true reality (though the details of these stories were, necessarily, a bit sketchy); and all this years before films like 13th Floor, Dark City, or The Matrix ever ran. There were also a lot of smaller stories, details really, about little things like mind reading, magical pockets or bags, supernatural creatures, or a few decades of my exile spent with Peter Pan in Neverland.

In 2004, after having written two other books, I set myself to trying to reintegrate all the stories I used to tell as though they were about myself and expanding them into a series of novels. The series was, as I implied above, the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past, so named because these were the lies (the untrue tales) I told about myself, as though I were merely recalling them as my own history (my own alternate past, shared originally as oral stories for my friends (stories thus one step removed from the traditional form of modern, published fiction—stories from beyond fiction) and now re-collected as novels). I wrote the first book in the Fall of 2004, the next in the Spring of 2005, and 97% of the third in the Fall of 2005 (though it was not finished until a year, a month, a day, and an hour more had passed), and I had grand plans at the time for a 9-book (or longer) series, expanding significantly on the old stories according to their novelized design.

Then I hit a rough patch, in my life and in my writing, and when I came out of it I wanted to work on different stories; to put the old lies stories behind me and create new worlds. Eventually my readers called out loudly enough for a resolution to the incomplete series, and in the Summer of 2010 I began work on wrapping up the Untrue Tales. I truncated what I had formerly intended to expand, I boiled down the story to its essential elements, and by late Spring 2011 I had written three more books and brought the series to a close. Writing these books had always come quickly to me, as I knew so much of the stories by heart; it was the same stories I had been telling, again and again, throughout my youth, as though it were the truth about me and my life and my history. Details had to be changed, here and there, but almost everything remained intact. Every story alluded to two paragraphs above was certainly included. All the main story lines I’d told about myself, and most of the little details and side stories, too.

If you knew me then, if you heard my stories, I encourage you to check out the Untrue Tales… series. You can get the eBooks or podcast audiobooks for free, or you can buy the eBooks, complete audiobooks, or paperback versions if you have the money. You already know the stories; reading them in this format should feel like settling into a familiar locale, surrounded by people you know. There are certainly a few rough patches in The First Untrue Trilogy, as it was some of my earliest published writing, but by the time you’re closing in on the end of The Second Untrue Trilogy you’ll be finding a few “patches” of the best writing of my life.

If you didn’t know me back then (perhaps don’t know me even now), you may want to try them anyway; the Untrue Tales… series remains among my most popular works, despite (or perhaps because of) its unconventional (insane?) story, ideas, characters, and narrative structure.

I thought of another way to put the question. The question I don’t know the answer to. Not for most of my books, not for most of the books I’ve ever read or ever wanted to read. “What’s the point?” What was the point in writing this book? What’s the point in reading this book?

Some authors, I know, have real answers to these questions. Very real, very specific answers. They know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and why readers should be involved.

For me, most of the time, the closest answer I have is something like, “I dunno, it was just an idea I had.”

Like, tonight my wife and I got to see an advance screening of World War Z. (No, I haven’t read the book yet; back in 2009 when I was preparing to write Cheating, Death, people who owned it kept promising to lend it to me, then it never turned up… and then I was burned out on zombie books after reading so many others and writing my own.) The zombies in WWZ are fast, and more importantly the incubation period, the time between being bitten and being a fast-running zombie, screaming and running after the living, is ridiculously fast. Twelve seconds or so. And just the thought of it reminded me of, and gave me the urge to return to the other zombie stories I had an idea for back in 2009, where the first premise was for a mutated zombie virus with a very long/slow incubation time a la HIV turning into AIDS. Where someone could be exposed to the zombie virus and not show any symptoms for months, years, even decades, perhaps not even being aware they’d been exposed. So very different from WWZ’s zombies.

It had apparently been so long since I set the project aside that when I mentioned it on the car ride home, my wife couldn’t recall the ideas at all—and they had been extensive. At least three books, and possibly a three-book series followed by two tangential sequels, where the last of any of them is the one which covers my first set of ideas for the world. My world-building to get to the mutated, slow zombie virus ended up requiring a complete rewrite of history from about WWI on, and in the Fall of 2009 and the first half of 2010 I spent a fair amount of time doing historical and biographical research toward that project. (Technically, this is part of why my books-per-year average is so low, and my apparent-hours-worked looks so low; I spent about eight months working toward a project which has yet to come to fruition, much like the way I spent most of the last year working toward a Dragons’ Truth rewrite I’ll likely never do.) I determined that the amount of research it would require to do as well as I thought I wanted to do it was more than I was prepared to do (especially with the time requirements I was facing; the “need” to keep putting out two to four books a year, every year, and to always have something new to show at Comicon), and I set the project semi-permanently aside. I mean, I was projecting that it would take me two to four years to get the first book out, which was the inverse of the rate I’d set myself at working.

Anyway, thinking about that project, then describing it all again for my wife tonight, got me almost feeling like I really wanted to unearth the project and get back to work on it. Except that describing it also brought up the same sorts of problems I was going into last night: It isn’t really about anything, not any one thing. There’s no single, central theme. There’s no point to it. It’s just a bunch of ideas I had, which I kinda liked. Sure, I wanted to address ideas like environmentalism, functional communism, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic mixing and mutual appreciation (more than plain tolerance, or silly hatred), international cooperation, sexually transmitted diseases, coming-of-age personal growth, fear of ‘otherness’ (specifically fear of becoming the ‘other’ in contrast to being truly oneself, esp. re: coming-of-age), and how to cope with the existence of religions whose beliefs and/or believers one believes to be dangerous (literally and/or figuratively)… in addition to a bunch of neat/interesting/different thoughts I wanted to explore around the existence/knowledge of zombies in a functional, modern society, but there isn’t really a point. It’s all just … some ideas I had, which I thought were kinda neat. Which I thought might make a book or three (or four, or five).

Yes, I believe in things like the possibility of running a modern world entirely on free/renewable energy resources, and that communism, separate from totalitarianism, is a functional economic system, but the book would not exist to try to convince anyone of those things; not any more than the point of writing a steampunk story is to convince the reader that they ought to convert their car to run on burning coal and steam power. Putting the protagonist of one of the stories through an STD scare isn’t intended as a way to convince readers to practice safe sex, it’s just a way to explore the idea that if a zombie virus mutated to be carried/transmissible for a long time before killing & reanimating the host, it would have different effects on society and culture than are explored in traditional zombie narratives.

…and I guess that’s the closest thing I usually have to a point: The point of writing (or reading) the story is to explore these ideas I had. Not necessarily to entertain, or to make money, or even to fit in with a particular genre or style, but simply to explore some ideas. It’s “speculative fiction” in its purest form, I suppose, in that the entire point of the exercise is to chase the tail of “what if?”

“What if ‘The Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga’ was a thing which existed?”

“What if a child vampire were asked to donate her organs to save living children’s lives?”

“What if you could literally buy time?”

And I don’t always have even that much. A fair portion of my books have begun with little more than a random sentence on a blank page followed by a few thousand answers to the question “And then what happened?” There’s no “why” it happened, why it was written. Just “this happened, then that happened, then the other thing happened,” and so on.

So… Is that enough? Is ‘exploring ideas’ a good reason to write and/or read a book? Without regard for any other reasons, purpose, or point?

I have the impression (mostly from what people write about writing) that it isn’t. That people don’t believe it’s enough. That they want, or at least expect, stories to do more.