The End of the Beginning
Posted by Gremlin in What's New on Friday, 3rd October 2008 at 10.39 am Zulu Time
Having taken a few days off from Lurkers, partly to think about how to go on from here, and partly just to do other stuff, I'm back to writing it again.
So. A couple things about that.
First: I'm done now, I think. Not actually with the book [though I'm kindasorta nearly done with that too, which I'll explain in a minute], but with uploading revisions. Though in fact I kinda just printed this thing to .pdf and uploaded it without reading it over yet; I'll do that when I'm done here and make sure there are no problems I need to fix before printing it and uploading it again. If not, then we're done here: I'm uploading the book through Page Fifty-eight. beyond which you'll have to wait until the book's done, read over entirely, printed, uploaded elsewhere, and made available through WastedDiscourse and stuff.
I'd had a few questions, pretty much for myself, which I discovered in writing the book to date.
One of course was whether I really wanted the guy fictionally writing the book to be much like me and, if he wasn't, whether I wanted even the stupidest of people to be able to misunderstand that and think it was about me anyway. Probably, nothing will ever prevent that; but I did drop in hints I can refer to later, when some idiot sues me for being less than nice and responsible and boring; so that's not a problem.
Another question, since the original version in 1998, which I've really strayed from this time, got a little strange here and there, was whether to write this in a way which stands a chance in hell of being at all realistic. I made a decision on that too, which I kinda talked about last time, in Welcome to the Real World. You can go back and read that if it happens to matter; probably, it doesn't.
Since it's at the moment October 2008, and the book is set in August 2009, and the book is set in the real world, and I don't really wanna take at least the next month off to make sure I know who's won this year's election, I just made a call on that. Incidentally, I might well not be wrong about that: to the extent that this nation can be predicted in its weirdness, it's not actually all that unlikely to work out as I've written it; if it doesn't work out as I've written it, then that's okay too, since it's actually a work of fiction; it just might be something of an alternate history thing, in the end. Fine by me.
So. Those things all figured out now, the rest is reasonably easy to write. I'm still guessing that the thing'll come out between 300 and 400 pages, though there's no real guarantee of that—it could be more or less, I suppose—which, in terms of typing, which I do less quickly than I think, probably means about a week of realtime thumping, provided I don't do much of anything else in the world. Meaning, amusingly enough, that I'll probably actually get it done around the end of the month, just before the election. If someone decides between McCain and Obama here in the real world before the book is committed and available, I guess I might rethink the version I've just written and consider changing it [if necessary] to reflect reality. Though, if I did happen to get it right, then we won't know who won until sometime in December. Again. And I'm pretty sure I'll have this thing done sometime this year.
What I'm really wondering at this point is why I bothered setting it in 2009 at all. I barely remember doing that anymore; it just kinda happened. Probably, I could go back and set it in the summer of 2008 without changing much of anything; but, for the moment, I'm okay with it being set slightly in the future, especially now that I've decided to run with predictions about the election, the various and occasionally misidentified crises in the world today and forthcoming, et cetera. I've always been pretty good at figuring out what was gonna happen before it did—sometimes too good—so maybe it'll be fun to let people wonder how I knew various details about 2009 in a book released in 2008. Presuming I get it right.
I guess that's about it for that.
In other news, I got LegoJoker the other day. The case calls it LegoBatman, but it's wrong. Once you've played through the whole game—all six games, really, at five levels each—you'll notice that Batman kinda sucks apart from the ability to touch hot things or fly or place bombs [all actually redundant against other characters] while Joker's just fun and able to blow the hell outta everyone and everything with a really rapid pair of automatic pistols; the handbuzzer would be even better, if it didn't take so long to kill people.
Also the other day, kindasorta unrelated, I got the new hardcover recolour of The Killing Joke. Not that the new, subdued colours mean much to me, personally; but I don't seem to have got out of the eighties with the original, so I wanted another copy anyway. What I'm waiting for now is the day Hunter gets round to reading it, granting that she's met Swyndle [whose personality today isn't unshaped by my own], to see how long it takes her to stop in the middle of the story and let me know that Joker is very much me. Again. That kinda already happened with The Dark Night earlier this year, except that Ledger didn't look at much like me as Joker does in the comic. We'll see, I guess.
I think that's most of it for now. More later....
