Independence and Upcoming Plans

I’m feeling extremely independent this July. Also enjoying a little bit of “told ya so” energy lately, not that any good will come of it.

It has to do with yet another interminable social media forward, but this one was about music, sampling, and the Amen Break – and AI. Some dude wrote it, and he concluded with the opinion that we’re not going to be able to uninvent AI, so we needed to get some legal protections in place for creatives that are affected.

Same opinion I was expressing a year ago, when one of the science fictional futuristic societies I belong to challenged us all to write about AI. And I came up with the only opinion which did not amount to “AI is evil and we must uninvent it.” Nobody wanted to engage with it back then, although one dude did stop by to cuss me out.

There was a similar outcry when scientists sequenced DNA. A bunch of moralists wrote a letter demanding they cease all research on this issue right now, because it can only lead to evil.

I’ve been stepping back from science fiction ever since. I do have a couple more books rattling around in my head that I want to eventually write. At the moment I’m fascinated with quilting, and working on my first quilt.

My motivation for taking up novel writing was more about socializing. A lot of people have this bizarre delusion that the main reason people write novels is so they can get rich, but hardly any novels make money unless they’re authored by somebody like Stephen King, who has put a lifetime’s worth of effort into establishing his career. Those type of books have broad mainstream appeal. For the rest of us slobs writing what the publishing industry used to term “midlist” (weird books that appeal to a small audience), we’re on our own. And hopefully we enjoy activities like constantly peppering social media with updates on what our writer persona is doing.

I had this notion that I could spend my twilight years maintaining a writer persona on a small time basis, hanging out at conventions, discussing new technology and futuristic stuff. That idea collapsed once I spent some serious time in the subculture. I made a few friends, but I also found a lot of hivemind behavior like what I described on the subject of AIs. Sometimes the hivemind opinions made sense and other times they were grounded in weird theories steeped in obsolete and speculative ideas. Like the one about destroying institutional discrimination by writing novels with positive role models. Usually it amounted to something more like bullying obscure novelists for their perceived sins against the received wisdom about positive role models (search “helicopter story” and “Requires Hate” for some digressions). Since I’m an obscure novelist, as well as notoriously antisocial, it seemed like there was a good chance I’d eventually wind up on the receiving end of some hivemind dogpile for bizarre fabricated reasons.

That’s why my more politically oriented horror novel is out of print now. I’m not sticking my neck out to criticize politics in an environment where I don’t have a lot of trust in my own side.

The horror novel about how space aliens subjugate earth by manipulating a populist election and basing their strategy on Cortes’ conquest of Mexico is still in print. Nobody likes that one because it has a cover containing multiple elements, one of which went through a few passes of AI, so re-doing the cover in handmade embroidery to give it that authentic sort of aesthetic is on my “to-do” list. I like it though, so it stays up.

Lots of political turmoil is happening right now, and I don’t have much to say about it. Maybe an “I told you so” here and there. Sometimes I tell myself I’m with the Third Thing that arises out of the ashes like a phoenix, some kind of “enough is enough” movement made up of disaffected yet pragmatic folk teaming up to keep democracy and human rights afloat. Other times, I look at what’s happening in the world and console myself with the idea that I’m old and will be very surprised if I last another decade.

And then I close the blackout curtains and resume working on my quilt until the gloominess lifts.

Aside from the quilt, I’m juggling two theoretical projects.

The first one has to do with Sebastian “Baz” Rose, my teen idol character from the dinosaur book. I started writing a sequel about him and got bogged down in discussions with my co-author, who wanted him to be fighting the forces of patriarchy. I preferred having him live in a place where there wasn’t a whole lot of patriarchy forces getting in peoples’ way, so we had a philosophical split that resulted in me losing Baz until the intellectual property battle resolved. Kind of like what Walt Disney went through with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Now that I’ve got Baz back, I’m sending him to a faraway planet, where his assignment is to assemble a band and make a hit record. At first I was thinking of putting him in a crime drama, fighting the sleazebuckets who tend to infest popular music. Then, when I came to terms with the idea that crime dramas aren’t really my preferred genre, I tried going for Scary Science Fictional Psych Thriller, and came up with a Black Mirror-ish plot where Baz was trying to find out who partially wiped his memories.

When I came up with Baz’s character, I did a whole lot of research on teen idols and boy bands. The main thing I learned was that the only common thread had to do with financial exploitation. Some idols fall to the depths of depravity, others continue leading charmed lives until they die peacefully of old age. Then there are some like Michael Jackson, who spend their lives bouncing between extremes. They all get ripped off by older men dangling them before enthusiastic mostly-female consumers.

The second most important thing I learned is that they’re people. We tend to think of them as being the face of a multidisciplinary team of professionals including songwriters, choreographers, and makeup artists, all conspiring to remove money from girls’ wallets. They’re the focus of lots of hate from jealous teen boys. But basically they’re just musical kids, the type who join garage bands. Because of their culture, or their parents, or the opportunities that crossed their paths, or maybe because they were exceptionally pretty or talented, or both, they wound up in grownup show biz instead of high school orchestras. Musical kids are like water, they’ll flow wherever you channel them. The music business, however, is full of predatory opportunistic sharks that occasionally eat their own young by accident. All the biographies I read were full of similar stories about “the time they woefully underpaid me” and “the time I got attacked by deranged fans” and “suddenly I had all this money so I started doing drugs.”

And I realized they were just like the musical kids I’d grown up with, practicing in garages, struggling to cover top forty hits. Singing in chorus, playing in the orchestra. Going to dance class, taking lessons on piano and guitar. They just had parents who steered them in different directions.

I did more research on Baz’s character than any other character I’ve written. Possibly he’s some version of my Jungian animus that I didn’t know about, or the manifestation of my own inner chaos. Since I’m a major Stephen King fan, I’ve wondered if Baz is my Holly Gibney. That’s quite impressive for a character whose job was to look really good in music videos while being an insufferable prick in person. As comic relief. Although he was also incredibly brave and heroic whenever the need arose, and most of his insufferable tendencies clearly had to do with the dysfunctional world he lived in. Like expecting girls to be down for instant sex, because he encounters so many of them who are. The more three-dimensional he got, the more I started gradually making him more sympathetic, until finally he turned into the sort of guy whose voice I could channel for an entire book.

Lately I’ve decided to try taking him back to comedy. I wasn’t happy with either the gangsters or the psych thriller, both seemed market-driven and fake … so instead I decided to make the story ABOUT being market-driven and fake as a lifestyle (i.e. participating in the music business), and now it’s leaning more toward being a comedy with thinly disguised musician gossip here and there. A fish-out-of-water comedy as Baz, who has superhuman levels of confidence, tries to assemble his band and make a hit record. On a tight deadline. On an unfamiliar planet full of aliens and strange cultures.

So that’s the book I hope to have done in time to justify attending Worldcon next year, assuming it doesn’t get cancelled due to nuclear war or anything like that.

I’m not even sure if I want to do any promotion, but Baz sort of needs the kind of creative control that only self-publishing can provide. Mainly because it’s a story about a creative having constant conflicts with corporate overlords over things like having a marketable image. Submitting that to a corporate publisher would be sort of like trying to find a lawyer to represent you in a class action suit against all lawyers. I can’t think of a better way to go out with a bang after a lifetime of artistic self-sabotage.

So it’s more of an internal satisfaction kind of book than anything else.

Then when that’s done I want to write one more, also a comedy. Lots of people can write thrillers, including me, but I also can write comedy, since not many people can pull that off.

Anyway, this last one takes place in Hawai’i. It’s a ghost story, about teenagers who have to repatriate some Hawaiian artifacts stolen by grandma, a Vaudeville entertainer who did a ukulele act playing fake hapa haole songs back in the 1920s but now she’s a ghost trying to repent. That one I’m actually going to aim at a small Hawai’i publisher as a local style beach novel with some stealth history lessons.

Until I actually do any of that, I’m probably going to be putting the blog on hold unless I feel a great burning need to comment on the modern world we live in, and its deficiencies. Being a novelist was an interesting experiment but it’s not giving me the kind of results I’m seeking as far as interesting conversations about the future. Time to head in different directions.