Tuesday, March 16, 2010
It's either you or them...
Everything's the same but everything's different... You know what I mean? It's either you or them, so open your eyes and look at the world, Goddammit!
I'm still on the quest to find another opus which can really peel back my skull and molest my brain. Maldoror was a beautiful piece of ugliness, but I haven't really read anything since. Every time I submerge myself in something dark, disturbing, depressing, and bizarre, I feel like it may be the last thing that will ever do that to me. Not that having my mind violated is the most important thing, a good heart blackening laugh from a solid black comedy is just as good. Putting my mind into a taffy puller with something intensely surreal is always a pleasure. And an intellectually stimulating anything always makes a monocle grow out of my eye.
I'm still working on [The Noxious Novel] which I hadn't for a while because I started flirting with the idea of submerging myself back into [The Obscure Opus]. Increasingly as I walked, ate, lied in bed, sat in crowds, my mind would drift back into the world of those characters. They would speak to me and say, "You know I would have much more dimension to me if you just blank, blank, blanked." They would sit beside me on the bus and whisper, "Remember the scene where blank, blank, blank? Wouldn't it be stronger if you added blank, blank, blank and made blank, blank and blank, blank?" A little devil who looked like me but wore darker attire, and the evillest of evil grins would tickle my eardrum with his forked tongue as he whispered, "Your prose is bland. Who do you think you are? Dan Brown? It's a book, not a screenplay, take some bold steps, make it ergodic literature, why not?"
Ultimately, I went back to it for two weeks before deciding to toss it back into the vault. I had an emissary put up an ad in [Miskatonik] University's [Literary Lane]. A cheap ad with little tabs to tear off the bottom, as if I'm selling an old microwave. Somebody did indeed tear one off. But the devil never contacted me. I sat by my phone and kept checking my email, but nothing. I was left hanging. The 12 foot candle I had sitting at the table melted into a blob in the shape of a broken heart. My spaghetti went cold, gained blocks of ice, and hopped into a Michelina's box.
If necessary, I will hire another emissary to stand in [Literary Lane] and wait for people to pass by, then harass them into taking a tab, getting their phone numbers and addresses, and staying on their cases to contact me. I find people edit books much better when under duress.
In the meantime, [The Noxious Novel] is really becoming more than I hoped it would be. I thought that it would essentially be Gallows-Lite, but I've bled as much of myself into it as I have with [The Obscure Opus]. Maybe not as much in quantity, but the same quality for sure. It's supposed to be a young adult novel, but I'm not sure why this one is and [The Obscure Opus] isn't. [The Obscure Opus] does feature sex, sometimes extreme sex, and I guess there are themes which more explicitly attack religion, politics, and culture. It is also more complexly written, and a character with a toilet mouth and ridiculous views could be taken out of context by younger readers. But that's giving younger readers too little credit. I've had customers who are little girls that fully embraced Geek Love and read Jane Austen (even if her books put me to sleep), and grown women who genuinely believe Twilight is the best book ever written. At the end of the day, it's the reader.
Siiidtraaaacked... Anyway, this book will be dark, funny, surreal, and unconventional. I do think that the judges for the contest I'll be submitting it to will have the gumption to at least not think that it's too offensive. I read a book that they published earlier, Going Bovine, and that book was pretty vulgar and surprisingly surreal. The protagonist was a shithead though. It will definitely be done in time for its submission. That's about it for now. So...
See everyone in hell!
