Market Theocracy

I’ve been writing my ass off for the last few weeks, finishing and final drafting and polishing up the ten stories that will make up Bad Patterns. One of them simply didn’t come out the way I wanted, so I’m replacing it with a very recent idea that more or less just started writing itself.

I’m ready to start bumming people for cover art. (Hint hint Astoria! ) and once again try to get people to contribute a few interior b&w illustrations. For some reason, an illustrated book is one of my big dreams.

I’m going to start trying to post daily on this blog again. It seems to keep me focused and in the writing mood.

[The Critique Circle](http://www.critiquecircle.com/default.asp)

Interesting workshop site that uses a point based system to ensure fairness and access to crits. There are also some really helpful looking tools (outliner, sub tracker, character brainstormer, etc.), a forum, and a really well designed system for composing and presenting the critiques themselves.

I’ll be exploring this one for a while, and will report on the quality of the crits I get as soon as I, you know, get some.

Had a bunch of company show up out of the blue today, which means I didn’t get to polish Part 3 of Coyote. I’ll try to get it posted by tomorrow night.

I’ve been doing some thinking about writing lately. I’m conciously attempting to avoid all mytho-folklore tropes in the fantasy work I’m doing now. This is beastly, bitchily hard considering that the very structure of storytelling is bound up with those tropes.

It can be done, though. LeGuin’s mid 70’s and early 80’s short work, Jeff Ford’s entire career. Jeff VanderMeer, Hal Duncan and Steph Swainston also labor in this particular garden.

My…hmm, direction may be the best term…at the moment is a sort of focused use of the unexplained as both a reflection of and map through various human conditions, which are then distilled through the individual characteristics of normalized characters. The responses of everyday folk faced with ‘reality unmasked; naked and with no excuse’ to quote a work-in-progress (Meeting The Last Man On Earth, For Coffee: A Raincheck) functions as a form of hyperactive allegory. The metaphor rests not in the description, but in the interpretation of events and facts that fit no previous dataset.

Why? Because, to be honest, I’m bored with reading about vampires, werewolves, ghosts, elves, fairies and the like. The idea of writing about them holds even less appeal since it’s so much more work.

Another reason is the simple fact that a framework like the above is far more amenable to inserting my pro-individualism ideals on a subconcious level. The idea that the universe is a funhouse mirror construct that requires subjective interpretation makes a case for individualism in a basic, brass tacks sense. Objectivism and the like then becomes a mindset (or toolset) to strive for rather than the ultimate truth of existence.

Or, as I said to a guy on a debate forum years ago, I have no idea if there are objective truths to life or not, but I see no reason in not behaving as if there were. You have to ground your actions in some form of value. I choose to ground mine in a respect for life, compassion for others, preference for beauty and a goal for finding joy in the days that I have been alloted.

After a brief hiatus, I shall endeavor to post Part 2 of Coyote Laid Low tomorrow. I’ve allowed outside distractions to cut into my writing for the past week, and that’s a no-no. While this is far removed from the bad old days — when I’d sometimes go weeks or months without writing anything — it’s not a good habit to get into.

The funny thing is this: I’m never not writing. I write in my head from the time I wake up until I drift off to sleep. A huge chunk of my mental activity is constructing stories: imagining characters, building their back stories, their personalities and virtues and flaws. Crafting scenes and sequences and individual descriptions. That might actually be the problem. The story in mentat is perfect. When you sit down to write it out you are conciously deciding to render it out messily and imperfect. “The words you say never seem to live up to the ones inside your head”, to quote Soundgarden.

But, thems the breaks. You just have to do the best you can and live with the results.

Like everything else in life.

…I have decided to keep The Ballad off the ‘net. In fact, I’ve decided to finish up three long stories that I began on TCF and — for all intents and purposes — stop posting fiction fo’ free.

Oddly, this is going to be a tough resolution to adhere to. I like posting my stuff for the whole world to see. I write so that people can read my stories. It’s a rough idea to digest, that I should keep the stories to myself until and unless I’m paid a certain amount per word for them. It’s not that I don’t like money, or that I dislike being paid. It’s that my writing has — since childhood — been the way that I let people into my life. For many years I found it almost impossible to verbalize things to people I hadn’t known all my life. I could do it with the written word, though. From notes and letters to stories, writing is how I got to know people and let them know me.

This carried over to internet communication.

But the fact remains that I’m deeply sick of laboring for a living. I detest having a ‘boss’ even more than labor. The only way a person of my’official’ educational level can be self employed is via contracting the sweat of the brow. This didn’t bother me for a long time. But I’m getting older. I have screwed up knees and a screwed up shoulder.

I dismissed the idea of writing for a living mainly because I had no discipline, wrote very slowly and took forever too finish even the shortest of works. Over the past few years, this has changed. I can now quite easily knock out 2000 words or more per day. And, as I continue to meet that quota, I find more and more of those words are usable.

I doubt I’ll be able to ‘quit the day job’ any time soon. But that possibility now no longer seems far fetched. It actually now seems quite logical and the only goal I should be striving for.

To do that means I’ll have to start submitting stuff to the magazines and markets that do pay.

So, these last three stories are to be the last.

They are:

Coyote Laid Low (about 10-12000 words)

Trenching (about 15,000)

King Of The Road (16-20,000 for the main segment)

First up is Coyote, a strange little combination of mid-term future building and the trickster mythos. I’m not quite sure how many parts it will be, but I’m going to try and stick to the Mon/Wed/Fri publishing schedule. Of all three stories, Coyote is probably the most interesting to anachist-libertarians. The world it takes place in is a few decades before the much stabler system depicted in Roberta — a mixture of free zones, mini-states and the like.

When those are done I will probably, eventually, post my sequel to Roberta — mainly because I doubt any paying market would be willing to buy it.

Here is an excerpt from my in-progress story Two Hundred Head Of Pig:

i. surveillance

Of course he sees them arrive. They won’t understand, but what they understand is based on ancient paradigms that no longer matter. He sees them arrive via a hundred cell phones and cheap digital cameras, flashed towards them in quick, subversive gestures: their own hard built surveillance state attitude turned against them as it must be turned.

Justice that demands two hundred head of pig.

ii. in brief

“What is this son of a bitch’s name?” Agent Dangeld asks his new assistant.

She’s a quick, polite sort. “James Franklin Farmer, sir.” she says in her crisp, perfectly modulated voice. She passes a depressingly thin dossier to him. “No real criminal record. No real records of any sort.”

The agent pretends to glance through the file, catching glimpses of Ms. Amanda Tate as he does so, assessing her, letting the voices argue.

He’s not schizophrenic — a dozen doctors have assured him of that. The voices — which have been with him for as long as he can remember — make no pretense of control or play none of the noted power games amongst themselves.

“Ugly but nice bod.” says Rickie, the perpetual teenager. “Consolation prize.”

Hiram sniffs. “First in class at UofM, Top 10 percent at Arlington. Her looks are the last thing we need to worry about.”

“A wild card.” mutters Rook, ever paranoid. “And too young to really judge.”

Dangeld drops the file on the desk in front of him. Amanda Tate stares at him attentively.

“Why the lack of records? Child of hermits?”

A half smile. Dangeld reflects that Rickie is right. She’s not a pretty woman. That smile is far from seductive.

“Not quite, sir. Just a hillbilly. Born and raised in these mountains.” She grabs the file and pages through it, using it as a reminder. “High school dropout. No college. Busted once for possession of marijuana.”

“No different than half the hicks in this hole in the world, then.” Dangeld snorts.

“Exactly.”

“Why then?”

Tate settles back, cocking her head in thought. “Local consensus is revenge.”

“Revenge?”

Tate returns to her file. “Last year — 6 months and three days ago to be precise — A heavy DEA/BATF CoOp Unit performed a routine raid on the property of Paul and Elmer Farmer.”

“Relation?”

“Uncles, sir.”

“Reason?”

“Propagation.” Tate returns. “Dead to rights with almost two hundred mature plants. Real connoisseur strains according to the final reports. Extremely potent NoCal/BC boutique hybrids. 450 dollar an ounce stuff, even in these boondocks.”

Dangeld sighs and rubs his forehead. He can almost guess the rest of this story.

“The Farmer’s were well known to be firearms freaks and pretty damned hard core anti-gov types. The CoOp Unit went in hard and heavy.”

“Results?”

Tate shrugs. “Five dead agents from a 20 man unit. The Farmer Brothers had armor piercing ammo and both the steel and the will to use it. Both men killed. Their house was burned. The crop that wasn’t destroyed was seized.”

Dangeld shook his head. When he started this job a story like that would have made the rounds to every agent in every agency as soon as it happened. These days, it was so common that it barely registered on the grapevine.

Tate wasn’t finished. “The Joint Unit didn’t know that Paul Farmer’s daughter and grandchild were visiting from Georgia.”

“Jesus.”

“Neither were killed, but both spent time in hospital. Both have developed some deep seated psychological problems as well.” Tate had a nasty smirk, and she showed it off. “Though it wouldn’t surprise me if that was mainly an attempt to snag a government check and a lifetime script for Xanax.”

Dangeld ignored that.

“So their nephew decides it’s up to him to get revenge.”

“Until we received his…pleasant little manifesto…he was actually thought to have been either killed in the raid or fled the state when informed of it. He was a known accomplice — dealer and errand runner — for his uncles.”

Dangeld picked the single sheet of paper from his desk, the message that had started this whole mess. The message that had sent him to this civilization forsaken sprawl of hills and impassable roads, as head of a Homeland Security CoOp unit of fifty troops. A contingent of the best DEA/BATF/FBI anti-terrorism forces available:

ATTENTION —

THIS IS WHAT IS LEFT OF YOUR WOEFULLY UNPREPARED AGENTS.
THESE HILLS ARE MINE. STAY OUT OF THEM.
I WILL KILL ANY PIG WHO SETS FOOT IN THESE MOUNTAINS.
I WILL TAKE TWO HUNDRED SKULLS BEFORE I AM THROUGH.
TWO HUNDRED HEAD OF PIG BEFORE I MAY REST.
LEAVE US BE OR SEND THEM ON.
YOUR CHOICE.
MY PLEASURE.

-J.F.F.

Tate has read it a hundred times at least. I had been found on the bodies of two DEA agents on secret maneuvers in these hills, looking for commercial pot grows.

The agents had been missing their weapons, body armor, electronics and heads.

Not fled, nor hiding. The voice was Rook. There was something unmistakably satisfied about it.

Fighting, by God.

iii. dear momma

I write this simply to say goodbye, and to plead with you to leave this area. Go stay with Aunt Flora in Gatlinburg, or your cousin Jean in Ohio. But please leave. This is not a situation that will resolve itself or blow over. No disrespect, but this isn’t a matter for prayer and trust in the Lord.

If the Lord has anything to do with this, it’s the Lord who parted the sea and dealt with Pharaoh. It’s the Lord who made the rock call out ‘No hiding place!’ when the unfaithful sought sanctuary from his wrath.

I know what you are thinking: that your Jimmy finally found an elaborate enough form of suicide to suit his temper. I won’t argue with that, Momma. You may even be right.

But I know this:

What they did to Uncle Paul and Uncle Elmer was wrong. Flat wrong. They were hurting nobody. Taking from nobody. They weren’t stealing or killing or touching a hair on an innocent head. They were growing a flower they liked to smoke.

I have to do this. This is what I’ve been left with. The only path open to me.

Remember when you used to tell me that the Lord put every soul on this Earth for a purpose? And that one day every soul discovered that purpose?

I’ll leave it at that.

I don’t expect to convince you of anything but leaving. Please go. This will be over soon enough. But go to where it’s safe.

Give my love to the family, especially Autumn and Cecee.

Know that I love you, always have, always will.

Goodbye, Momma.

Your son,

Jimmy.

Smooth sailing on The Crumbler today. Got a nice chunk of it fleshed out. I am far enough along that dialogue has ceased to be a barrier. I know the characters well enough now that they are starting to say what’s on their minds in their own voices. That’s always a wonderful place to hit. The fact that the story takes place in the here and now makes this easier.

I’m going to try and never just gut out such a skeleton for a first draft again. I’m running into pages where I have no clue what I meant by the notes and cues I left. I’m thinking these may be the places where my traitorous brain, bored with novel writing, wandered off into various other short fictions that I have since cut out and assigned their own place in the mental and digital file cabinet. Then again, they could just be where I started falling asleep and began babbling.

I also did a little work on a fragment I ran across this morning. Two Hundred Head Of Pig. I don’t know how long of a story it will be, just that it’s a tale of revolution in near future America in which a spreading number of small towns begin to rebel against increasingly Draconian DEA, FBI and BATF actions to confront ‘domestic terrorism’. Of course, as we can extrapolate from today’s news reports, ‘terrorism’ in the near future can be whatever such agencies deem it to be. In the story, it’s slapped on everything from growing cannabis to selling your neighbor a shotgun.

There’s a fine line to writing such a story. I hate to generalize and depict black and white conflict. When it comes down to the wire, I want clear individual decisions to be the crux of the action. Simply being a cop or an agent is not enough to make a character a ‘bad guy’ in my fiction. That’s sloppy and lazy, in my opinion. Cops and agents have their choices to make as well. Orders can be refused, allegiances changed.

In other words, it’s not a matter of ‘pigs is pigs’. People who act like pigs are pigs. People who act like people are people.

It all comes down to that choice.

No Ballad today, folks. Sorry. I got caught up working on the 2nd draft of The Crumbler and ended up doubling my quota doing that. This isn’t something I can actually complain about, since The Crumbler is actually what I’m supposed to be concentrating on. It’s the only project I’m working on that might actually make some money. The Ballad (despite its personal significance) isn’t. It’s not really a commercial prospect. Some people don’t understand why not. It’s a science fiction story after all. They figure I should be able to sell it to science fiction magazines.

It doesn’t exactly work that way, unfortunately. For several reasons.

The first is simply that my style, subject matter and political viewpoint are at odds with most of the top magazines and their editorial agendas. I’m not saying that the editors of those magazines are ideological hard cases. In fact, if a story is good enough and to their stylistic taste, I’m pretty sure they’d ignore even the most blatant disagreements with their personal philosophy.

I’m basically only saying that editors are human: they have their stylistic preferences (though many of them probably choose along a broad canvas) and they are not going to recognize a piece as ‘good’ that doesn’t adhere to that preference.

I have, in many ways, an old fashioned style. There are places for it. Like, say, Analog. I don’t write Analog type stories, unfortunately. You see the predicament?

I generally write what is termed modern fantasy — a catchall term for fantasy that isn’t Tolkien-esque. My best story is probably Roberta (which is an Analog style story in most respects) and that involves so many in-jokes and references to an overall little known philosophical movement that no mainstream mag would buy it. I can’t blame them. For the mainstream audience, it would be a real head scratcher.

I do plan on shopping Hitch Hike around to a few of the online outlets that accept previously published work. The trouble there is that they don’t pay much more than token. Some of them, though, are quite well regarded and will help in the effort of building a ‘name’.

What I really need to do (other than finish this damn novel) is focus on writing stories and not immediately sticking them online for the whole world to read. That’s a hard thing for me, though. I write so I can show people. Every story or essay is, in a sense, an attempt by me to explain something of how I see the world or think the world should be. To illustrate some aspect of human nature I think is important. To finish a story and not show people feels like not finishing.

Anyway, I’ll try to have something for you folks soon.

…part 2 of The Ballad Of I Know Damn Right will be posted tomorrow.

And I’m back on the 2nd draft of The Crumbler.

Woke up feeling like warmed over bullcrap this morning. Low grade fever, sore throat and nausea. 

So, I’m not up for writing. I’ll try to get Part X of Hitch Hike up by tomorrow or ASAP.