Max Barry's Blog, page 8

A 6-minute radio adaptation of a short story I wrote a few years back,
thanks to Greg R. Barron.

Greg just noticed it on my site and decided to make an audio version,
which is pretty great.

Original story.

Might we have a new book from you by the end of 2017? I’m jonesing for some new material. I guess I’ll go back through and re-read your old books again.

Anonymous

That is an excellent idea, because no, sorry, there won’t be a new book from me in 2017. It
takes about a year to go from a draft I’m not ashamed to show to an editor to something
that can sit on a bookstore shelf, and I don’t yet have a draft I’m not ashamed to show an
editor.

But 2018 looks good! I’ve been working on multiple books and now they’re
all getting close to finished. So one of those should be ready to go. I don’t know which one, though. Sometimes I feel like a book is on track and then I realize it’s horrible and I
should burn it and feel bad and go work on something else. Then, a little while later, I
realize that other book needs to be burned, and the first one is actually all right.
It’s not a linear process, is what I’m saying.

This has been a really great year for me creatively. One of my best.
It will take a while before that becomes apparent to anyone else. But I’ve enjoyed it
a lot. I still don’t really know where good words comes from or why but I’m grateful
for the ones that found me this year.

It’s hard to know what to expect from a President-Elect who’s promised a
lot of things he can’t possibly have meant. On the one hand, maybe he did mean
them, in which case, dear God. But on the other, surely not. This leaves a lot
of middle ground for wild speculation, which I now intend to provide.

Also this election has reminded me that however far-fetched I think I’m being,
it’s not far enough. So here are four possible Trumps.

Benevolent Dictator Trump

Beholden to no-one, President Trump dispenses with political bickering,
cuts away swathes of bureaucracy and red tape, and replaces it
with simple, direct, effective solutions that no-one tried before because
they were so caught up in politics or not wanting to offend anyone or
reading books or something. I think that’s right.

Trump crafts an unpredictable yet nimble, energetic, and
effective administration, unafraid to make unpopular decisions so long as
they’re right. It is happy times for everyone who agrees with Trump’s
version of right, which is everyone, by decree of a new federal law.
Protesters and other unpatriotic unAmericans are taken to the desert
to toil to build a statue of Trump so high it can blot out the sun.

Term limits are abolished. In his eleventh year of rule, a small
band of protestors vandalize the statue by blasting off the toupée and are
shot on live national television, their remains displayed outside
the city gates. God-Emperor Trump dies peacefully in his sleep in his
twenty-third year of rule, surrounded by concubines.
After a week of national mourning, the nation descends into bloody civil war
as various full- and half-blooded Trump offspring lead armies in a
battle for control of their father’s empire. Dragons return. Ivanka
rides one.

Robber Baron Trump

By the time he waves goodbye from the chopper, Trump has vacuumed so
much money from the American public that he and his family are the wealthiest
people in modern history, richer even than he claims to be today. A
drip-feed of revelations of fraud, embezzlement, and cronyism on
an unprecedented scale hound him, along with persistent talk of federal
prosecution, but none of it goes anywhere, dissipating like waves against the
rocky shore of Trump’s now-impenetrable empire of lawyers, cash, and paid-up
influence.

Weakened by pillaging, the welfare system faces a short-term
credit crunch, leading to riots among the poor and unemployed. This is held up by
Republicans as proof of the fundamental non-viability of the welfare state
and the need to abolish it altogether, a view supported by low-skilled male white
voters who are shortly to become unemployed themselves as the shock of decreased
government spending rolls through the economy. California and Texas secede and
close their borders. Nevada falls to roaming biker gangs. The Trump family acquires
Manhattan at market-bottom prices and builds a wall around it, a real one,
not just a fence.

Capitalizt Trump

With a businessperson’s win/lose perspective on the economy, Trump abolishes
regulatory authorities, slashes taxes, eliminates labor laws, privatizes
public bodies, and ushers in an ultra-capitalist paradise in which corporations
are free to do whatever the hell they feel like. It is a rich, refreshing new world
for the already-wealthy, who find an ever-expanding array of services aimed
at them, while the poor die of easily-preventable diseases or
in back alleys after muggings gone bad on their way home from one of their
three-dollar-an-hour jobs.

Employment becomes so critical to survival that people revert to the ancient
practice of calling each other by their occupation rather than their surname.
A shoe company deliberately incites a violent riot to promote a new brand of
sneakers. A plucky government agent… ah, you know what, just read the book.

By mortgaging its future, the US is temporarily awash with cash, creating
a false dawn that ushers in a second Trump term. He exits office just as the economy
begins to run off the cliff. Via a running commentary of tweets, he blames
his successor for the ensuring collapse, depression, and takeover by Chinese real
estate speculators, labeling all of the above “sad!”

Commander-in-Chief Trump

Trump has always been a big believer in the “speak loudly and carry a big stick” approach.
To date, his sticks have been lawyers, but starting January 20, 2017, they are
stealth bombers and 7,100 nuclear warheads. Carrying his philosophy into office,
Trump rattles a few sabers before going ahead and invading someone.
It’s an irresistible dynamic: The benefits of military action are largely
personal (status, pleasure of defeating an opponent) while the costs are born by
an American public and purse he’s only borrowing and is allowed to hand back in any condition.

Military adventures in Asia, the Middle East, and Alaska breed a host of new enemies for America,
ensuring the need for ever-more defense spending and a twitchy, paranoid, nationalistic
voting public. Trump exits office calling his military record his proudest
achievement, despite the loss of several million citizens on the east coast after an
incident that looked a lot like a biological attack but officially was just a bad flu season.
Via a running commentary of tweets, he blasts the new President for
weakness as she attempts reconciliation with foreign powers. Much of the Western hemisphere
is annihilated in a nuclear exchange started by a relatively small rogue nation that
nobody was paying much attention to. Trump relocates to Australia and begins to hoard water,
leading to a Mad Max scenario where he is killed in a car chase after the escape of one of his
breeders.

That’s what I’ve got for now. I mean, there are other possibilities. But these feel the
most likely.

Like me, you may be feeling a combination of shock, distress, and terror
at the news that Donald J. Trump will become the next leader of the world’s
largest military and economic superpower.

But it’s all right! It’s all right. It won’t be that bad. I mean, it
will be pretty bad. That’s for sure. But we can get through this. To help
you through this difficult adjustment period, here are some comfort thoughts:

Many Trump policies range from mutually contradictory to the physically
impossible so they can’t all be implemented.

Writers of satire or absurdist comedy need never again be told that their
work is too far-fetched.

Reagan was a TV actor with fantastical economic ideas and latent Alzheimer’s
and the US came out of that pretty okay.

Exposure of electoral system that weights votes of residents of North Dakota
and Wyoming 3-4X greater than those in California and New York, holds
elections on a working Tuesday, and uses plurality voting, may prompt actual
change, perhaps to “Best Out Of Three” system, or drawing straws.

He is pretty funny, for a President.

Inevitable war with foreign power and subsequent nuclear winter may offer
effective solution to global warming.

Nation avoids messy spectre of four years of depressing gridlock where bitter
Republicans hold White House hostage and nothing gets done.

Small children can be told that anything is possible with a straight face.

Nation will undergo a great strengthening, in “what doesn’t kill me
makes me stronger” sense.

Shocking the hell out of the ruling class is necessary from time to time in
order to avoid a build-up of complacency and corruption, so why not now.
And election campaigns are all about demonizing opponents but only rarely
are they actual demons.

Also the UK voted to Brexit, so, you know, sucks to be those guys.

Max, I hear a lot of authors talk about “fresh eyes”. How long is it after finishing a
first draft until you go back and begin the process of revision?

David

Fresh eyes are very important. I like to wait between one and three minutes. Not really.
That was a joke. I actually don’t wait at all. I go back and re-read and revise
everything all the way through while I’m writing a first draft. By the time
I finish, my first chapter is actually draft thirty-nine, my fifth chapter is
draft twenty, and so on.

I don’t recommend this. The better method is to bang out a first draft without looking
back and only then discover how bad it is. Then at least you have something to
improve. You can’t abandon that thing. You’ve invested too much.

But I can’t do that any more because I know it’s bad. I mean, I like to think of it like I’m
developing higher standards.
But really it’s just that there’s too much counter-evidence to maintain the delusion that I’m capable of writing brilliant first drafts. I’ve seen
them. They are not great.

This exacerbates the “fresh eyes” problem, of becoming too close to a book and losing touch with how it appears to a new reader.
That’s definitely a real thing, and critical in rewriting. If I could truly re-read
drafts through fresh eyes, I could make them a lot better.

But I don’t think the solution is to put it aside for three months. It’s helpful—I have
a couple of unpublished novels that I go back and re-read every few years and the fallow period does show me things
I didn’t notice before. Usually how something I thought was pretty great actually isn’t.
But it’s not enough.

Most writers, including me, need to think about how what they’re writing will
play to a new reader all the time, every sentence. There’s some small technique there, clearing your head
and forgetting what you already know for a moment, that you need to develop in order to write
well. You’re scratching marks on a page; you need to consider what those marks will
do inside other people’s brains. It’s better to become good at this and do it often
than to wait until you have a finished draft and hope a few months away will do it for you.

The hardest time I have is during feedback from early readers. These are people who
are reading something like a fifth or sixth draft, before it goes to my agent or editor.
Often I find someone’s feedback truly mystifying, and it won’t make any sense at all
until I manage to crawl out of my head and into theirs. That process of figuring out how someone
might feel a certain way about the book is tough and confronting but always valuable, even if
I do then decide that they’re insane and we should stop being friends. Because at least I’ll
have fresh eyes.

Hey Max. First, thanks for making NationStates. Second, did you really find a sock full of pennies? If so where?

Red

I did not really find a sock full of pennies. That was a humorous fiction.
But everything else on this site is true. Some people think I make up
stuff for it, like I’m inventing the “Ask Max” questions, but that’s wrong.
I’m actually a little shocked anyone would think that. The truth is that by
the time I finish working on my novel each day, I’m fictionally tapped out. I don’t have enough creativity
left to make up anything. It would be a good interrogation technique: If you have a terrorist, make them write
fiction for eight hours, then ask them where the bomb is. By then he has no lies
left, I guarantee it.

But I have been tardy about answering Ask Max questions, which I feel bad about.
Here are some more:

How do you become a banana for a week?

Thatguy

You start by becoming a banana for a minute and work your way up.

Do you even look at these?

Anonymous

Yes.

Have you met an Alien?

TheENugget

No. But I’m a little concerned by your capitalization of “Alien.” I feel like
your next question is: “Would you like to?”

Does this site cover the complete list of all your works, or only a certain genre?

Skankhunt42

Holy God. So, what, I’m maintaining a stable of websites, one devoted to my mainstream
fiction, one to my series of romances, another to my erotic swords-and-sandals fantasies, and
so on? I think you’re saying I don’t publish enough, Skankhunt42. Okay. Message received.

What time is bed time?

Greg

I go to bed about 4am Pacific Time. This is 10pm in my local timezone.

What do you put on the census when it asks what your job is? Do you think it is creative that I put penguin tamer?

Greg

No I don’t, Greg. I think that’s irresponsible. The census is no joke. It’s used
to make informed public spending decisions, like where to put schools, and which
populations need suppressing because they’re too close to the truth. I
put down “Writer,” which is technically true for anyone who is in the process of
filling out their census.

Have you heard about these creepy clown sightings in the Southern and Eastern US?

Austin

It’s nerds with too much time on their hands, right? I mean, I don’t know
anything about it. But it sounds like something I would have thought was an awesome
idea when I was about 19: Dress up as a weird clown. Now it sounds like a good way
to get punched in the face. People don’t like weird clowns.

How are you? Do you still live in Australia? Is there a lot of spiders? I’d love to come to your country, but bugs and spiders scare the sh.t out of me…

Kenza

I’ll be honest with you, Kenza, there are basically no spiders here. We just like to
perpetuate that idea because it makes us seem tough and fearless. Well I mean there
are some spiders. I did just catch a spider in the living room yesterday and move it
to the back yard. But only because its thick furry body was blocking the light. I could
hardly see a thing in there.

what is your net worth

buzz

I am worth several hundred nets.

If there was one word you could use to describe Emily from Lexicon, what would it be?

Olivia

“Emily.”

Is Jennifer Government a young adult novel?

Zoe

Oh I don’t know, is the MARGARET ALEXANDER EDWARDS ALEX AWARD for young adult novels?

It is. That’s the answer to that question. Well, kind of. It is the American Library Association prize for “adult books with special appeal to teen readers.” Which I guess isn’t quite the same thing. Probably a true young adult novel primarily appeals to teen readers, like features them as main characters. I think that’s right.

I just asked Jen for the definition of a a young adult novel. She is a school teacher-librarian. She said, “It depends what you mean by young adult.” I feel like there isn’t a really hard line here.

Anyway, Jennifer Government is a book I would have liked to read in high school. So there you go.

P.S. Hahaha, I totally misled you. Lexicon won the Alex Award, not Jennifer Government. And Lexicon has sex and death and horror and is quite a lot less goofy than JG, which just goes to show those things don’t disqualify a novel from appealing to teens, at least in the eyes of librarians. The opposite, if anything. Librarians are amazing like that. They will hand you a book they know will make your eyes bug out because they know that is the point of novels, not to satisfy but to surprise.

I was thinking about how unfair it is that reality has evil right-wing corporate overlords
named the Koch Brothers while if I wrote that in a novel people would call me shallow
and juvenile. I mean, it would be true. But also unfair. You’re supposed to have more creative
license in fiction, not less. Then there’s Trump, who does things on a daily basis
that no satirical character could get away with. It makes you wonder where there is left to go.

But then people have been complaining that satire is dead forever. Satire has died a
thousand times, apparently, at the hands of JFK, George W. Bush, in fact probably every
US President since about 1960. Before then I’m not sure. But I imagine a long line of
despairing intellectuals stretching back through the centuries.

So it’s probably just a failure of imagination. We have a set of societal standards, and
when someone veers close to the line, we can satirize them by portraying what it would be
like if they crossed right on over. Oh, you think taxes should be lower? WHAT IF THERE WERE
NONE AT ALL. That kind of thing.

But when someone does cross the line, and stays there, like Trump, it’s a problem.
It feels like there’s no way to satirize it because the only step farther
is pure ridiculousness. Still, on reflection, I think you have to consider that
the line has moved. It moves a little every year, in one direction or another, and this time
it’s moving very pro-clown. Many US Presidents have been a little clownish—Reagan, Clinton,
George W.—and in fact now I think about it, more Presidents than also-rans. It has been
an asset to be clownish. No wonder we wound up here. But my point is that
it’s probably fair to imagine a very clownish
President in the future, and elections contested between clowns.

This time, crossing the line hurts Trump. And that does indeed put him beyond satire, as
well as making him unelectable. But he also moves the line, and nothing is as shocking
the second time, so the next clown will seem more reasonable. The next clown will be
more reasonable, having observed the hits and misses of Trump. They will keep all
the goofy style over substance and just pare off the awkward Hitler parallels. So get ready for that.
Maybe not next election.
You wouldn’t run a second clown against Hillary if your first clown got obliterated.
But after that. I see 2024, two clowns.

I started writing a book and I’m at about 13,000+ words so far two years ago. Then after that I got busy with schoolwork and other stuff and couldn’t go back to it. Now, I revisit it and realize that, well, it’s total crap and that my writing style essentially changed. Now I’ve got to do a major re-edit and I haven’t even finished it yet. Should I abandon it and start writing other things?

Blair

Yep. Definitely. One hundred percent. I know this is the right answer because you said “and start writing other things.” If you had stopped at “should I abandon it” I wouldn’t be sure. I often feel like abandoning a book just because sometimes I can’t figure out how to get everyone from A to B without characters acting like soulless automatons so it’s not feeling at all like it did in my head and everything sucks and why am I even doing this. But that’s just writing.

I also often re-read the start of a draft I’m only part-way through and decide it’s terrible, because back then I had no idea what I was doing, so now everything feels a little off. Or a lot off. This is why it’s actually a bad idea to re-read a draft-in-progress. You ideally want to save that inevitable disappointing discovery until you have a complete manuscript, at which point you’re too invested to walk away. But I can’t help myself.

So getting cheesed off with your book can manifest as one of two feelings. The first is an urgent desire to start fixing it because you know it can be better. That’s good. The second is an urgent desire to throw it in a fire and go do something else. That’s also good if the something else involves writing. Because it’s never a mistake to write something. I honestly think you can find something like 50% of a great book in the first sentence, just because occasionally you stumble across a line that gives you tone and character and world in a way that immediately suggests the next 20,000 words. Starting something new can be a great reminder for me that I’m not not actually a shitty writer, I’m just stuck in a difficult narrative.

Write what you feel. Everything is better, faster, and more fun when you love it. So when it’s a choice between writing something you enjoy and writing something you don’t, that’s easy. Just as long as it’s something.

I just read
“Misinterpreting Copyright” by Richard Stallman,
found the points he makes very convincing and am curious about your opinion as
an author and someone who writes about piracy, DRM, and such things.

Anon

Stallman is right about everything. It’s just that the logical conclusions he reaches are so uncomfortable, it’s easier to pretend he’s wrong.
It’s like PETA. There’s no way what we’re currently doing to animals is moral. But burgers are awesome and you can enjoy them better if
PETA is a bunch of hypocritical wackos. So we’re all ears for that narrative.

Stallman is the guy saying, “You know, instead of buying that coffee, you could have given an impoverished third-world child safe
drinking water.” You can’t fault the logic. But no-one wants to take it to that extreme. So you never hear people criticizing Stallman’s
arguments. Instead, it’s always how he was late to a lecture or dresses badly or was rude to someone once.

So what Stallman is right about this time is that copyright was created for the benefit of readers, not writers. This is a
foundational principle of capitalism in general: that the purpose of production is consumption. It’s not to create jobs. Jobs are a
side-effect, a byproduct of having more stuff available more cheaply. Ideally, the stuff would be free and unlimited, in which case we wouldn’t
need jobs at all. The stuff is the point, not the jobs.

The goal of copyright wasn’t for me to give up my day job selling Unix computer systems and live a luxurious life of working naked from home.
That was just a side-effect of a system designed to encourage me to write more books. And frankly I’m not sure how well it’s working.
It’s been a while since my last novel. Sure, it’s helpful to have time and freedom for writing, but I found being trapped in a
corporate sales job pretty motivating, too. I can’t for 100% certain say that I’m producing more words today than I would if forced to sit
under fluorescent lighting in a suit for 8 hours a day and given a laptop and freedom for one hour in the middle. Or threatened with waterboarding.
There are lots of ways to incentivize artists, is my point.

But copyright isn’t even about that any more. At first it lasted for 14 years, after which anyone could sell copies, write a spin-off,
or adapt the work; now it usually lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, so just forget about doing anything ever unless you buy the rights.
That’s not because we think we’ll get more books if dead authors’ estates can get paid in 2116; dead writers can’t write faster, and
no-one ever decided whether to write a novel based on their prospects for postmortem royalties.
Instead, we have adopted the idea that copyright is a moral thing, which artists deserve.
If you make something up, you should be able to control it for the rest of your life, and then some, because it’s yours.

Personally, although I totally get the proprietary instinct (you’ll never treat my kids as well as I do),
I think stories are bigger than authors. There’s no doubt to me that if
copyright still lasted 14 years, we would be a lot richer for random artists and companies taking James Bond or Superman or Star Wars
and doing what they liked. There would be a lot of dreck, yes. But from that hotbed of competition and evolution there would also be some
truly great stories.

And copyright today financially benefits companies more than people. The vast majority of writers wouldn’t
be affected at all if copyright was radically shortened, because the vast majority of books don’t generate
royalties for decades. They do it for a few years, if at all. Only the mega-blockbusters have that kind of tail,
and if you’ve produced one of those, you’re not starving. So in practice, the nice idea that artists should enjoy creative
control forever translates into a small number of media companies cranking the handles on a couple dozen money-printing machines
that no-one else is allowed to touch.

I’m a lot less idealistic than Stallman, though. Of course, everyone is.