in which kevin tries something new (and pretends you care)

[erf_]

Spending this morning reading Murakami got the muse stirring again. ("Oh, it's you," it said, drowsily, "I thought you had forgotten all about me. Don't you have, like, coding to do or something?") I have an idea for a new story. It's funny that this should happen, because the story is decidedly not Murakami-esque. In fact, it's not even new--it's

Comments

[retch]

cool, and fuck lit-fic, it is pretentious bullshit that confuses style for substance and forgets that you are putting words on paper to tell a story, not engage in masturbatory excess (and frankly associating lit-fic with masturbation is an insult to the entertainment value of masturbation).

[erf_]

The way I see it, most literary fiction is like experimental percussion music. It's fascinating to practitioners of the art, from a technical standpoint, but utterly inaccessible to anyone else.

But sometimes cool shit comes out of it, especially when it loosens its death-grip on pretension. Have you read The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno? It's an Encyclopedia Brown story, complete with mysteries and decoder rings and secret messages in Morse code, but set thirty years later. (Turns out being a precocious hotshot boy detective is surprisingly useless in real life law enforcement...and in real life in general.)

[erf_]

Also, House of Leaves.

[drabheathen]

Fuck literary credibility! I'm going full-blown genre hack.

Ha, you can join me as I build my neo-noir cyberpunk late-21st-century world, and we can ignore literary credibility together.

Actually, how would you feel about actually joining me in it? My editor bailed.

[erf_]

I think I might like that. How far into it are you so far?

[drabheathen]

Four chapters so far. It would be a pretty hands-off editorial process - like, I send you a chapter, you send me feedback. As in, that part in the middle didn't make sense. Or, that bit about Smart Elevators could go in at the end, instead of the beginning.

Basically, you'd be more of a "test reader" than an editor. Steer me in the right direction, but not nitpick.

It's schlocky and probably not going to make much sense eventually, so it's an Exercise in Letting Go, as well as an Exercise in Having Fun.

If you're interested, I'll email you the synopsis and the chapters I have so far.

[erf_]

Sure, with one caveat: Please do the same for me for the next story I write.

[soullessthinker]

I'd read that. I mean, I'd read anything you wrote, but I do like yetis.

[erf_]

I think I forgot to mention it also has a giant robot in it.

You know, for fighting the yetis.

[syntaxvorlon]

You know where it's at?

Dinosaurs.

[erf_]

I was considering dinosaurs instead, but I decided that was too cliche.