Category: Literature

Can We Move on from the Zombie Apocalypse?

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Since Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968 there has been a steady stream of zombies.  Now that stream has become a raging torrent in the last ten years.  It’s been relentless.  TV shows, spinoffs, movies, sequels, commercials, comedies, romance novels, you name it.

But hasn’t it become an enormous bore?  First off, how ridiculous is the whole concept?  The rotting corpses of the dead are walking around attacking and devouring the living.  It’s really incredibly stupid as science fiction.  And as horror it’s so played out it’s hard to imagine there are still people willing to pay money to watch any more of this fare.

Isn’t it about time we came up with a more interesting apocalypse?  Even the Mad Max dystopia is better than zombies.  For instance, the Lord Humungus looks like he might have an interesting back story.  Maybe he was bullied as Schoolboy Humungus and would have preferred to rule the Wasteland with a more humane and progressive regime but you know how those dogs of war are once they’ve been unleashed.

After all, this is a big world full of all kinds of interesting people and customs and problems.  And with the Global American Empire seemingly winding down, writers and storytellers could concoct any number of fascinating local plot lines involving wars and criminal enterprises and local disasters that would require heroes and villains to give the audience their best efforts.

And of course, with the advent of AI and drones and all the other aspects of high technology leaving the precinct of science fiction and entering reality there really is no end to the possibilities available to a writer looking to thrill his audience with wholesale mayhem.  I hesitate to play up the bio-weapon genre because that comes too close to the “realistic” school of zombie apocalypse (ala the “I Am Legend” virus plotline).  But whatever the angle, the world is full of marvelous dangerous stuff where the most marvelous and dangerous stuff is human beings; live human beings not walking cadavers.

I am drawn to the idea of a future world where technology breaks down over the majority of the planet and has to be reignited by some local renaissance.  Maybe we reach peak oil and we get pushed back to steam locomotives and coal fired industry.  There could be some havens of modernity with old nuclear power plants limping along using fissile material scavenged from ICBMs.

And then some genius comes up with a new power source.  Or maybe it’s an old power source that he improves.  But whatever it is it would cause a ripple of change in this stalled out world.  And anyone with a little imagination can spin that into an epic of a bunch of novels.  In fact, it’s not that different from the Foundation books.  And of course, it’s a variation on the history of Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Of course, there is probably someone reading this who looks at this the other way around and says, “Wait a minute!  Why not write a zombie apocalypse in Roman Britain?”  To which my only answer would be, “Damn you, George Romero!  Damn you to hell!!!!!!!!!!”

Tempus Fugit – Part 5

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“I said, That’s impossible.  That world has been dead forever.  You must be mistaken.”  Bertram McKenzie shook his head and I could see there were tears in his eyes, “No the stars don’t lie.  We are one thousand years in the future and that is Earth or what’s left of it.  And the rest of the solar system has also been impacted.  Mercury is completely gone.  Venus is worse than Earth and even Mars has lost its atmosphere completely.  The only thing I can think of is that a massive disruption of the Sun’s fusion process occurred in the last thousand years; something like a nova.  And the Earth as we knew it was destroyed utterly.”  I asked him exactly when did it happen and he said, “Without searching for the event it’s impossible to know.  It could have happened just a few years after our present day in the twenty first century or it could have been almost a thousand years in the future, right before when we are now.”

And then I asked him the question I had been thinking about most, “Bertram did we cause this?”  And he shook his head violently, “No!  No, no, no.  I didn’t do this.  This is just a coincidence.  How could the tiny energy I used to transport us cause this stellar event.  It’s not possible!”  But I was pretty sure there was fear in his voice and panic.

I was as frightened and panicked as McKenzie but I could see we had to get back to our time as quickly as possible and try to get ourselves re-grounded with reality.  I told him, “Alright none of this is anything we can act on here and now.  Let’s go home.”

The boys did some calculations and set up the drive within a few minutes and we made another run.  This time it was our Earth.  Alive and blue and beautiful.  I think there must have been tears in everyone’s eyes.  We were back about the time we left the LHS 1140 system to come back to Earth.  We had decided that two sets of “us” in the same time period even fifty light years apart might be asking for trouble.  We brought the craft in for a landing and I sent everyone home for the day.  And I went home that night and got pretty thoroughly drunk.

The next morning, I tried to think of who I should tell this awful thing to.  In a 1950s science fiction movie there would be a convenient convention of physicists with someone resembling Albert Einstein to break the news to.  All we had was tech billionaires and all they would be interested in was how to short the market at the perfect moment.

So instead, I decided to tell the President of the United States and let him figure out how to let the world know they were doomed.  Or maybe not let them know.  After all, maybe we should have some smart men think about this for a few days and then break the news in a way that won’t stampede civilization off a cliff any sooner than it already was.

I got on the phone to the White House and I set up an appointment with the President and his science advisor.  And I got a few of the wise men from the voyage to put together a dog and pony show to give some proof to my story.  It wasn’t a normal experience.  I don’t think either man actually believed me.  But the President told me not to breath a word of this to the press or anyone else until the NSA had a chance to think up a way to break it to the public.

On the flight back to Texas I got a text from McKenzie.  He said he needed to talk to me so I told him to meet me at my home at midnight.  He was there when I arrived and he looked like hell.  He said, “I think we did spark the nova.  When we caused the surge in the field that threw us back into the distant past it must have disrupted the time-space environment of the solar system and triggered the solar activity that destroyed Earth.”  I said, “Well, it’s too late to do anything about that now.  What we have to do is figure out how to save humanity from this disaster.  And I don’t think it’s a good idea to be taking the blame for all of this.  That’s probably the fastest way to commit suicide I can think of.”

But he shook his head and said, “But there is a way to fix this.  We take the ship and travel through both time and space and meet up with our ship while it’s in the LHS 1140 system and tell them how to adjust their program to avoid the surge.  Then the disruption will be prevented and everything will be back to normal.”

I think I looked at him as if he had three heads and said, “Do you know how insane that sounds?  How can we change the past?”  But he just shook his head and said, “It’s the only way!”

I told him to take the week off and we’d talk about this crazy idea when we’d both had a chance to get some rest.  I went to bed and when I got up in the morning there was a message from the field saying that McKenzie had refueled the ship and taken off.  At about the same time there was a message from Bertram it read, “Devon, I performed the mission.  Meeting myself was a frightening but interesting experience.  I convinced them to change the program and afterward I took a time trip, about fifty million years into the future and the big beautiful blue earth was still there.  So, all’s right with the world.

But I realized that this technology is much too dangerous for humans to fool around with.  So, I’m not coming back and I’ve taken all the key documents you would need to duplicate my invention.  I’m going home.  Goodbye.

Bertram McKenzie”

And that’s almost the end of the story.  He never came back.  But he said he was going home.  So, I had a contractor do a metal detector search of the area where the McKenzie family has lived in Maine for the last two hundred years and sure enough, they found a lot of those precious metals buried out in a field in Maine.  There was a rock with an inscription carved into it, “HEY DEVON.  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.””

At that point Devon stopped talking and just stared out at the wall behind me.  I said, “Well, it sounds like it all worked out for the best.”  His eyes snapped back on my face and he said, “Sure, sure.  You’re right, everything’s great.  I guess I’m just tired.”

But as I sat there, I thought of something, “Devon, if McKenzie met up with his earlier self and yours in the LHS-1140 system and they came back on time where are they now?”  He looked at me and nodded his head, “That’s what I’ve been thinking about.  I think the program fix he gave them destroyed their ship inside that system.  We’ll probably never know but I kind of think in some sense I may be a ghost.”

He was preoccupied so I said my farewells and left.  I’m not sure I believe the story, but I think he does.  I think I feel sorry for the richest man in the world.

Tempus Fugit – Part 4

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“McKenzie’s face paled and his eyes were wide.  He said, “Something must have happened at the end of the program.  It got us back to Earth alright but then some kind of power surge must have caused a tachyon overload and shot us back along the time axis.  I need to review the instrument data.  I can figure out a way to send a tachyon pulse in the opposite phase and throw us forward but I need to do some calculations to calibrate the size of the pulse.  This is an enormous time change.  It may take a few oscillations forwards and backwards to calibrate it perfectly to our present day.  So, it may take us a few days to get home.”  I calmed down considerably after hearing this and told McKenzie to take his time and not to get upset.  And he did seem calmer after I said this.

The seven wise men got to work and were buzzing away at the data from the drive instruments for several hours.  And over the course of those hours, I suddenly began to see this accident as an opportunity.  I asked the photographic expert to see what he could do to capture as much data on Earth at 55 million BC.  And when I said this, it was like a switch was snapped on him and he got incredibly excited realizing what a scientific opportunity was in front of him.  And McKenzie lost one of his assistants as this fellow worked feverishly to record everything he could before we left the distant past.

And within a day they had their program worked out.  They even found out what had gone wrong.  Apparently, the drive needed a slower de-ramping at the end of the cycle to completely rule out the overload we had experienced.  McKenzie even cavalierly said it had been a lucky break because now we could add time travel to the capabilities of his drive.  And I laughed seeing him so full of bravado.

We set the time voyage for the next “morning,” whatever that meant, and when the time was upon us, we put on a brave face but I could tell everyone was keyed up.  We strapped in and the drive snapped on.  All the familiar feeling happened and then after what felt like a slightly longer period it shut down.  We cranked back the cover off the viewing port and there was Earth.  And it was awful.  The oceans were gone.  The planet was a blasted airless rock like the Moon.

We were all hit hard.  I said to McKenzie, “What is this?”  He looked even more upset than before but stammered out, “I must have overshot by a billion years.  This must be Earth after the sun runs out of hydrogen and becomes unstable.  But it doesn’t seem possible I could have been off so badly.”  He said he would use the position of the stars to get a read on how far in the future we were.  I said, “Sure, go ahead.”  And I tried to sound casual but I was scared, plenty scared.

The boys got busy figuring out the date from star locations.  After a few hours McKenzie came back to me and said he had the date.  I asked him how far in the future we were and in a flat intonation he croaked out, “A thousand years.””

Tempus Fugit – Part 3

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“When we returned from Pluto we began the planning for the first interstellar trip.  We had about fifty stellar systems that had earthlike planets in what we measured to be the Goldilocks Zones around their stars.  We selected a red dwarf about fifty light years from earth; LHS 1140 whose second planet was believed to be a super-earth well within the habitable zone of its star.  We intended to take a lot of measurements of the planet and its neighborhood and then head straight home.

The crew would be me, McKenzie and a six-man science team that would take the measurements of the exoplanet and the surrounding system.  I also insisted that Bertram train one of his colleagues on his star drive in case any accident incapacitated him before the return.  He started laughing when I told him this, “Afraid I’ll jump ship and go native?”  I told him this was a dangerous mission and we had to have some redundancy for something as important as the astrogation.  He laughed again but he put together a manual for running his equipment and trained one of his “bosses” for the upcoming flight.

McKenzie set up the program for LHS1140 and the ship was equipped for a one-month voyage; oxygen, water, food, medicine.  I even brought some firearms, only because I realized where we were going there was no law in effect other than force.  I kept the locker those were in under lock with me the only one with a key or even knowledge of their existence.  I guess that was a little paranoid but you never know.

Came the morning of the trip everything had been inspected three times and the dashboard was all green lights.  We launched into the upper atmosphere and McKenzie set the program and a display counted down from sixty seconds.  When it reached zero, we felt the strange sensations of the drive for a few moments and then we felt normal again.  When we uncovered the viewing port there was a strange world far below us and the light of a red star was illuminating it.  The whole crew burst into spontaneous cheers.  You never saw seven nerds happier than these boys.  I thought they would never stop slapping each other on the back and jabbering about who had been most right about the planet’s appearance.  I have to admit I was pretty excited too.  That world was a mostly ocean planet with white clouds and what looked like island chains sprinkled across the equator.  There were even what looked like ice caps at the poles.  It was an amazing sight.

The boys spent the next week photographing and taking spectrograms of everything they could see.  I made a decision that for this first trip we would not enter the atmosphere of the planet.  Probably out of an exaggerated sense of caution I wanted to make sure that no microbes from this alien world found their way back to Earth.  The boys were bitterly disappointed but shrugged their shoulders and took it in stride.  After all, even a week flew by shockingly fast because of how busy all the observations and tests kept them.

Finally, I set the return hour for the morning of the eighth day.  McKenzie recalibrated his instruments by stellar observation and as the final minutes ticked off, we took our places and strapped in for the ritual.  Once again, the skin numbness and mental unease hit me but a few moments later it ceased and we cleared the viewing port to see Earth below us.  The rotation of the Earth had us facing the Eastern Hemisphere and so we could see Africa and Asia.  But something was screwed up.  India was floating off shore.  There was ocean between it and the Asian continent.  And when you looked at the whole world all of the land masses were “off.”

One of the scientists explained it to me, “That’s what Earth looked like 55 million years in the past.”  I looked at McKenzie and said, “I hope you brought your tools because we’re a long way from home.””

Tempus Fugit – Part 2

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“Devon, what was your genius’s name?” I asked.  “Bertram McKenzie.  He was originally from rural Maine and all the rest of his family were working class people who labored in the fishing and lumber industries.  But he had always had a mind that looked at things differently.  When he looked at a landscape of hills and trees his mind saw curves intersecting in geometric figures.  Everything was a jigsaw puzzle waiting for him to find the missing pieces.” said Devon.

I could see he had lost focus and was stewing over whatever loss he had suffered.  I said, “Had he made any progress on your FTL drive?”  Devon startled, then nodded, “Yes, yes, he had figured out a way to produce tachyons and use them to freeze time while a vessel moving at normal speed was translated across any distance in almost no time at all.  It had to do with a particular juxtaposition of different atomic environments adjacent to an electron flow.  Very thin layers of complementary metallic elements produced a surface against which time slipped by without aging what was enclosed in the field within the surface.

He had performed thousands of tests to perfect the environment needed.  He’d been sending out orders to a firm that did atom thickness vacuum metal vapor deposition work.  He’d built small test units with a number of crazy metallurgies.  Various platinum metals with layers of gold, tantalum, niobium and several other exotic elements sandwiched between in various geometric shapes.  Finally, he identified the perfect metallurgy.  There were even hollow spaces designed to allow cryogenic liquid hydrogen and helium to be pumped in.  With these as walls he built his miniature ship, about three feet long.  Inside he installed various generators to produce electric current and a control system to run the programs that his machines needed to perform.  It was fascinating.  The test program was to place the ship on a platform at the top of a cell tower and then when it disappeared, to immediately inspect a spot fifty miles away that lay in line with the rotation of the Earth from that spot.  The first fifty-three times the experiment was run absolutely nothing happened.  The ship stayed completely still.  But Bertram doggedly retrieved his test vessel and changed some of the parameters of the equipment or the program.  On the fifty fourth run the vessel disappeared.  It did not show up at the site it was meant to reach.  A careful inspection of the ground in between found it embedded in a tree about half a mile south of the expected line of motion.  The tree had been knocked down and the vessel was a flattened hunk of junk.  But it worked.  The concept had been proven.

Bertram’s budget was expanded asymptotically.  No expense was spared.  We got to work on a prototype that would be a craft one hundred feet long and capable of flight inside and outside of planetary atmosphere.  The work was done under the highest level of secrecy.  But somehow the secret leaked out.  Intelligence agencies around the world were buzzing with news that we had a star drive.  Washington was livid.  But what could they do?

Once the vessel was built and its first few trials to the Moon had been successfully run it was decided that the first exploratory mission would be to Pluto.  After all that was a good tune-up for a stellar mission.  I insisted on being aboard and since Bertram was game, I made sure he would be there too.  And after all, he might be needed for repairs.  The takeoff was a traditional aircraft ascent into the upper atmosphere, no gee force, no rapid climb.  When we reached a cruising height the field was built up and the program was activated.  It was the strangest feeling when the ship energized.  I could no longer hear the rush of the air against the outer skin of the vessel.  All I could hear was the hum of the drive.  But I also felt some strange sensory effects.  It was as if my skin became numb and I had a feeling of depression settle on my mind.  But when the drive shut off all the effects ceased.

When we uncovered the viewing window there was the strange heart-shaped vista of Tombaugh Regio visible on the surface of Pluto!  An unforgettable sight.  I sat there and stared for half an hour before I could believe it was true.  We had a star drive.  I congratulated Bertram and realized he hadn’t heard me.  He was doing some calibration measurements for the journey home and was singing lowly what sounded like the “Ride of the Valkyrie.”  When I floated closer to where he was sitting, I could make out the words, “Death to the Wabbit, Death to the Wabbit, Death to the Wabbit.”  He really was a strange man.  But he was also the greatest genius of all time.”

Tempus Fugit – Part 1

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He was the richest man in the world by quite a lot but he looked like he had seen a ghost.  I had interviewed him several times and had always gotten along better with him than the rest of the journalists around.  Maybe because I had treated him the same whether he was schmoozing the Democrats or the Republicans.  And that was because I found him interesting.  And that was because he actually did stuff that was interesting.  He made personal helicopters and robot servants and had invented a cure for baldness.  He was a Thomas Alva Edison for the 21st century and he was always surrounded by a bevvy of super models.  What wasn’t to like?

But when I showed up at his office for our appointment the man looked stricken.  His face was completely colorless and his eyes were blank.  I had been let into his office and he was sitting at his desk but he was looking past me at the wall behind me.  After an uncomfortable minute I said, “Devon, should I come back another time?”

His eyes slowly shifted to my face and he shook his head, “No, you’re here.  Let’s talk.  What do you want to talk about?”  I said, “Well, I guess I’d like to know what happened to you?  Was there a tragedy in your family or with your friends?”

He thought about that for a bit and said, “Yes, in a way there was.  A very sad story.  But I’ll have to tell you the whole thing for it to make sense.  Why don’t you sit down.”  He opened up a drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one up and said, “For the last ten years one of my government contracts has been a research project into a faster than light (FTL) space drive.  For five years we looked at all kinds of reasonable and crazy ideas and we found exactly nothing that was even remotely possible.  I hired every physicist that graduated from MIT or Cal-Tech and every single one of them came up with nothing.

But eventually I heard about a brilliant theoretician who was wasn’t working on space travel but instead had been investigating the fundamental basis of time.  He was attempting to find the tachyon, the basic particle underlying the phenomenon we call time.”

I said, “But Devon what would this research into time have to do with faster than light travel?”  His face showed a glimmer of life for the first time, “Because in the general theory of relativity it is assumed that time is just another dimension along with the three spatial dimensions.  If you can control time, you can control the speed at which the other dimensions are traversed.”

I nodded my head with a somewhat confused look on my face and he continued, “This time researcher was a very strange man.  He was in a sense, self-taught.  He had attended a state college as an undergraduate and done exceptional work in physics but he didn’t have the money to continue on as a graduate student so he dropped out and somehow found himself at work in my company as a laboratory technician.  I discovered that one of my labs was using an inordinate amount of electrical power and I traced it back to this fellow.  He was running his own experiments off-hours.  When I told his boss to fire him, he confessed that they’d be lost without him.  He had an astounding collection of skills with the advanced electronic and high energy equipment that was needed for this faster than light research so replacing him would take months and require hiring five or six separate technicians.  I relented but ordered that the pirate report to my office for “orientation.”  I wanted to meet this strange man.

And strange he was.  He was about thirty years old.  He was about six feet tall, brown curly hair and very thick glasses.  He had an intense expression as if he wanted to ask a question but didn’t know how to say it.  This sort of intrigued me so I tried to put him at his ease so that I could delve into his peculiar circumstances.  It turned out he was incredibly well versed in almost every aspect of general relativity and particle physics.  He had a theory about the speed of light and how it related to the “viscosity of time.”  He said that photons were laminar flow phenomena and what he was investigating was turbulent temporal flow.  I at first assumed he was completely crazy.  I later discovered I was wrong.”

Real and Compelling

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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been smugly telling myself that because of the recent cold weather I wouldn’t have to cut the grass until June or July or something.  But recent walks through the fields revealed the absurdity of this notion.  There were a couple-a-three spots that I neglected to cut at the end of last growing season and those areas were horrendous.  And the rest of it was overgrown to a greater or lesser extent depending on whether those areas get more or less light.

So, when I heard that Saturday would be sunny in the morning and rainy in the afternoon, I resolved Friday night to get up early and cut it in the morning.  Well, of course I forgot all about that because as a special treat, Camera Girl was making pancakes and that along with a good cup of coffee is a holiday to me.  After all, pancakes and syrup are just plain carbohydrates with no redeeming quality other than human joy.  But at a quarter to eleven I realized that I’d forgotten the grass and ran outside and started doing the perimeter with the push mower.  And it was eighty degrees and I was sweating like a pig and my safety goggles (for mayfly prevention) were fogging up and I had to keep stopping to clear them with my handkerchief.  And then I did all the crummy areas that wouldn’t get done right by the sit-down mower and by then it was noon.  So, I had my lunch and then ran out and started around the yard trying to finish it before the rain came.  And I did, but just barely.  Then I took a shower and put on a movie I like watching whenever it’s on TCM; “A Man for All Seasons.”

And this movie always has the same effect on me.  It makes me serenely happy.  Not because the movie has a happy ending.  Because at the end Sir Thomas More is convicted of a crime based on perjured testimony by a former friend and in the final scene he has his head cut off.  And not because the story is exciting or the events change the course of history.  It’s not.  It’s a very small story.

It’s only because the acting and the dialog of the lead actor and several of the other cast members is remarkable.  The conversations between the lead actor (Paul Scofield) with his family, friends and even bitter enemies is altogether compelling.  The character displays a combination of intelligence, compassion, honesty, moral clarity and courage that I find inspirational.  Here is a man who is trapped between an egocentric and possibly unhinged absolute monarch and the toadies and sharks that act as his enablers, but remains faithful to his religious convictions.  As long as lawful means are employed, More is able to hold off a charge of treason.  But his most malevolent enemy (Thomas Cromwell, played ably by Leo McKern) finally employs perjury and this seals More’s fate.

But as interesting as the final duel at the trial is, the real payoff is More’s final meeting with his wife in the prison.  Seeing these two opposites, one a highly intellectual scholar and the other a woman who could not even read, is wonderfully moving.  As she scolds him for his failure to yield and he attempts to placate her we see the enormous affection and love between them and understand just how much he is sacrificing for his beliefs.

And as I was watching this familiar movie it occurred to me that here was a story that had none of the attributes that supposedly make a good piece of art.  It was backward-looking rather than forward.  It was basically a grievance story.  It lacked action, pacing or any of the other characteristics of a book or movie that makes them promising prospects.

What it did possess was human interest.  It showcased the noble characteristics of a man and allowed him to make a stand against the world.  So, in a sense, a book does not have to have the perfect plot and pacing.  What it needs are human beings who can make us believe they are real and make us care what happens to them.

And that way of writing a story seems clearer to me than the other ways of framing the process.  I think I’ll apply that same test to my own writing.  Seems about right.

Vitality and Right-Wing Literature

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I was listening to a podcast by NY Times token “conservative” Russ Douthat talking to conservative publisher Jonathan Keeperman.

Keeperman is a publisher for a press called Passage Publishing.  He has a lot of avant-garde friends like Curtis Yarvin and possibly some of the Silicon Valley folks like Peter Thiel.  He and Douthat talked (a lot) about how the Right is becoming a sort of counter-culture in the way that the Left did back in the 1960s and beyond.

It’s kind of interesting to hear them discuss this shift in the culture in general but one of the more interesting things that Douthat said was that up until now the Right hasn’t produced any real literature on its side of the cultural divide.  Then Keeperman made some offbeat suggestions saying things like Cormac McCarthy’s

“No Country for Old Men” is from the right.  I think specifically he said that the Coen Brother’s movie based on it is from the Right.  Now never in any imagining have I ever equated the Coen Brothers or their movies with anything right-wing.  So, I find this very strange.  And honestly, all the people associated with Curtis Yarvin have always struck me as hipsters.  And I have always ranked hipsters as the most left-leaning of all the various weirdos to be found in New York City.  So, none of this makes a lot of sense.

But I guess if someone interested in literature who wasn’t a Leftist wanted to talk to the New York Times about literature, he would talk to Russ Douthat and try to find some middle ground where they could both make believe that Douthat wasn’t a total leftist.

I was interested to read that Keeperman has published illustrated editions of H P Lovecraft and Robert E Howard and that leads me to think that maybe he’s not a leftist.  The Left despises both of those old authors and would never publish their works under any circumstance.  So, I need to find out a lot more about Keeperman and his press.  It could be interesting.

But he said one interesting thing about the current state of right-wing literature.  He said that the problem with most of it is that it’s mostly just grievance based.  It exists to rail against and blame the leftist society we currently live in and therefore loses the chance to be “vital.”  Essentially, it’s existence is only as a protest against the status quo and therefore only has a negative presence.

And that interested me.  Because my book is in a real way, exactly that.  It is a war being fought against the status quo.  And so, I have to look at what I wrote and see if his criticism of this kind of story is a legitimate case against the value of the story I have written.  In order to do that I will have to look at what gives “vitality” and entertainment value to a story.

Of course, all things are relative and being objective, especially about something I myself wrote is fraught with peril.  Probably the only way to know for sure is to attempt to get it published and see what results.  But it has given me pause and I will think long and hard to see if I think there are any aspects of the story that lack “vitality.”  Whatever that is.  Boy when it rains it pours.

Curses!  Foiled Again!

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Ah, the whiplash sting of rejection.  My manuscript has been rejected by Ark Press (see bold text below).

 

Thank you for submitting to Ark Press.

The Ark editorial team has reviewed your work and given it careful consideration. We appreciate the opportunity to review your treatment and manuscript, however, The Sniper isn’t right for us.

We would, however, love to see another project from you. The writing was quite good and the story kept us engaged. Please do keep us in mind in the future

Best of luck with your writing,

 

If I were a drinking man I’d probably go on a two-week bender and drown my sorrow in 180 proof rum.  But the show must go on!  I will gather up the jagged shards of my dreams and limp off stage to nurse my wounded pride and super-glue my shattered dreams of literary glory back together somehow.

I told Camera Girl of this crushing defeat.  She told me to suck it up and stop whining.  Not the sympathetic shoulder I was hoping for.  In another age maybe I would have run off and joined the French Foreign Legion but I don’t think they allow enough free time for macrophotography and right-wing punditry in the Legion.  Vive la France!

Well, it wasn’t all bad.  They did say the writing was pretty good.  I mean, maybe they were just saying that to soften the blow but I’ll take a positive spin on that and continue to work on finishing the book and then either get it published or self-publish it on Amazon.

Honestly, I was very glad that they got back to me.  And I liked the polite and professional remarks they sent.  I think a lot of publishers don’t even bother to send rejection letters anymore.  So, an honest rejection is actually kind of comforting.  But still, there is a disappointment when you don’t win the prize.  But we know that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.  At least that’s what that crazy atheist said back a hundred and some odd years ago.  And he should know because he went crazy and died!

So, the show must go on and all sadness and chagrin must be pushed aside and efforts must be redoubled.  I intend to memorize a hundred new adjectives every week, take up MMA fighting and try my luck at swordfishing to increase my relatability with the reading audience.  After all Hemingway did some of that stuff and he was very relatable.  I wonder how good Camera Girl is at MMA fighting?  She’s pretty strong and agile so maybe she would be a good sparring partner.  But she is kinda mean and I can’t afford to be injured too badly before I get into the octagon with my real opponents.  Maybe she’ll agree to fighting me blindfolded and with one arm tied behind her back.  That seems reasonable.  But just to be sure, maybe I’ll also tie her ankles together.  Yeah, that would be good.  I could definitely take her then.  Alright, I love it when a plan comes together.

Donald the First

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William Shakespeare breathed life into Prince Hal and Marc Antony when he portrayed them in his plays.  He took some historical accounts and turned them into…?  Into what?  Well, into dramatic personae.  They joined Oedipus and Socrates and all the other characters that we know from the drama.  And not that the characters are historically accurate; they’re not.  They’re the invention of the playwright.  But they’re better than accurate.  They’re vivid.  Alive.  We know them.  We know them better than we know any real personalities from history or even the news of the day.  So, in a way they’re immortal.  Millions and millions of human beings have watched and heard and read the words spoken by Hamlet and Falstaff and Macbeth.  They’ve thought about the words, the intonation, the feelings the characters portrayed to understand what the characters were feeling and thinking.  This is a level of existence that otherwise only occurs for most people within the confines of their own family.  And in fact, rarely even there.  Which of us is so witty or profound or emotional that the day-to-day dialog we share with our spouses or children or friends does more than just bounce off of their consciousness?  It’s almost background noise in a way.  It’s only in moments of crisis or discussions about important matters that we choose our words carefully and fully listen to what is being said.

Outside of drama we rarely listen with our full attention to what people around us say.  Maybe during times of crisis.  I remember very clearly after September 11th 2001 that Bush gave a few very carful and important speeches and I remember that I was glad that his rhetoric wasn’t too flowery.  It was more about retribution and I was glad for it.  But that was an exception.  Most of what gets said by talking heads in the news goes in one ear and out the other and rightly so.

But it makes you think.

Who will be the next Shakespeare?  When will we get another dramatic poet of his stature?  And who will he write about?  I was thinking, “Will someone write a play called Josef Stalin or FDR or Donald Trump?”  It could happen.  These were men who defined their times.  If a great poet came along and breathed life into the character and made the story compelling future readers and viewers would be mesmerized by scenes where these characters mouthed the words that the author heard in his soul.

Of course, it might be a hundred years from now or even a couple of thousand.  Shakespeare’s closest foray into recent history was one of his last plays, “Henry the Eighth” and it was hardly in line with his greater works.  In fact, it’s doubtful he wrote most of it.  If an audience a thousand years from now watches (or however entertainment is sensed at that point) about Donald Trump it’s doubtful that the real Trump will shine through at all.  Only a comic genius, a futuristic Aristophanes could capture the bombast and swagger that “The Donald” provides in all of his speeches and interviews.  And if he did manage to capture that spirit would the audiences (especially the critics) reject it as too over the top and exaggerated?  They probably would.  But I’d go see the show on the first night.