A few years ago [okay: twenty...ish], when I started writing books, I hit this large snag I've never fully overcome: there's nothing the hell to do.

Not that it's really about books. In fact, books break the rule: writing a book is something to do. Sorta. While that lasts. Even if it leads, in the bestcase, to lots of nothing to do, like talking about it. Which of course I hate. It's the primary reason I avoid things like interviews: I've got nothing much to say about anything I've written, except that I already did that. The aftermath is boring.

But, within a given book—within a story—there's nothing to do. Seriously. Nothing's interesting enough to do. Ever. At all. It's possible to do things anyway; doing them is rarely especially painful; but there's really no looking forward to doing these things. For me, anyway.

In the past, I've complained [nearly worth doing; not quite] about crisislifers. If you're not sure what those are, the simple definition is Boring People Inventing Boring Crises to Which They Can React in Boring [and Shatneresque] Ways. LARPers, really. Creatards. Conspiratards. Largely just people in general; though what might remain a majority of people are a little more tasteful about it. I guess.

In some ways, I'm sorta the ultimate crisislifer, though I don't overreact to boring and invented crises for the sake of trying and failing to show what an exceptional actor I am. Or, to misuse a different word, I'm something of an adrenaline junkie. Except that nothing's exciting enough to become addictive. Getting a skateboard up to about thirty going down a hill, knowing that I've got pretty much exactly one good leg to land on if and when I hit a bump or crack and bail, is almost unboring, but really not quite. That works like this: Wow; I'm going really, really fast; everything's numb now, just from the vibration; the only thing keeping me upright is the disturbing fact that it would require more energy to deviate from this inertial course than I could conceivably transfer to either side; oh jesus fuck an obstacle; not actually on the board anymore; whee: flying; landing; ouch; that was amazingly deadly and—nope; it's over now; boring.

So, maybe, it's just me. Probably it's just me. People who aren't me think I'm nuts. People who aren't me are reasonably content not risking death sliding off a board at the speed of a velociraptor. Because they're boring.

So, that translates initially into novels. All novels being Grendel Attacks; Grendel Loses with some extra adjectives, Grendel attacking being boring, I have to try to think up something more interesting before there can be a book. More and more, that's been pretty well impossible. Lately, I've been doing books about the world ending, since that's roughly as unboring as things can get. Even if it doesn't work in the end.

To some extent, it's convinced me that I can't write books. Other things threaten to convince me of that too, though none is anything the morons who'd wanna lawl that, yeah, Gremlin can't write books; lawl would ever come up with. I suppose there's a shabby victory in knowing that boring morons who objectively can't write books are at least wrong about the reasons I subjectively can't. Really, really shabby.

One problem is other writers. Not that they get in my way; they just remind me that there's really sorta no point. Even if it were possible for me to think up a plotline I'd personally regard as interesting [that roughly any plotline I could think up would look interesting to my readers is probably a good if irrelevant thing], and even if it could remain that interesting until I was done writing the book, and even if it were so interesting that it would still be interesting after I'd released the book, when people expect me to talk about it as if it weren't some boring idea I'd had last year and only just managed to finish writing before going narcoleptic from my lack of interest: then what.

Of course, I've seen the answer to then what. Which is also boring, if a little deplorable. Which is a given, since it's largely political. I'll cover this with a true, boring story from a couple weeks ago....

You know MondoHebe. Or at least of him. If you've been here for any measurable amount of time. He teaches college, if you haven't been here long enough to know that yet. Technically, he teaches English, though his field is actually history; not really the point. The point is that he's reasonably intellectual, realistic, and grownupish; we get along regardless. And he and I know this third guy—a fireman—who also happens to have this farm halfway between Denver and Cheyenne. So MondoHebe, being intellectual and curious and way more immune to boring things, goes up to this farm a couple weeks ago, because he's never really seen one. And so the story starts....

'So, I went up to that farm over the weekend,' he says.

'Right,' says I.

'It was interesting,' he says, 'Got to drive around those big whatevers—not literally a tractor, but various vehicles.'

'Yeah.'

'There's some serious money involved in farming.'

'Oh yeah; I know.'

'I mean the equipment itself.'

'Right. Operational costs.'

'Yeah,' he says, 'Like, seven figures.'

'And they break even.'

'Just about. That's the crazy thing. Any other business you can think of,' he says, 'you'd expect to dump, say, a million into operations and make at least, say, a million five.'

'The gross.'

'Yeah. Spend a million; make a million five; keep the five.'

'I'd try to keep more than that personally.'

'Optimally; sure. But these guys spend a million and make, like, a million fifteen. Like fifteen thousand a year after expenses of a million.'

'Yeah. It's not about the money. They do it because they like doing it.'

'That's what everyone there told me. Just about word for word.'

'Polar opposite of my job,' I say.

'Palaeontology?'

'Writing.'

'Oh. I guess; yeah.'

'Which is funny: farmers are always republicans. They hate taxes. Spend a million bucks to make fifteen thousand, and you'd have to hate taxes.'

'I can imagine.'

'Write a book, though,' I say, 'And your overhead is as little as a pencil, with profits routinely hitting seven figures. Which is why writers are all democrats. Make a few million bucks after spending a dollar on a pencil, and you feel guilty enough that you have to agree with the mendicants about the redistribution of wealth.'

'That would explain a lot,' he says.

Of course, I don't feel that guilty personally, because that would be boring. So that distances me from other writers. So does my lack of community service. You know what I'm talking about: people with lots of free time doing arguably worldimproving things as hobbies. Douglas Adams climbing mountains to raise awareness for endangered species; Angelina Jolie adopting Africa; whatever. Not really my thing, because I just don't give a damn.

Except that I've suddenly identified something of a problem. Granted: I don't care about endangered species [that I'm a writer doesn't stop me from being a palaeontologist], or Africa, or anything else people devote time to trying fecklessly to fix; but, I suppose, if I were doing something like that, it might be something to do. At the least, it would probably be something to write about. Even if I'd consider it boring. Maybe the readers wouldn't. Who knows.

Anyway. This has all got me thinking. Especially factoring a couple other things no one seems to understand. I recently learned from someone who isn't in fact stupid that the supermessage in Paroxysm, literally spelled out though it was, wasn't terribly clear. Like, no one actually caught it. Which in the good news column might mean that there's no spoiler alert here. The whole point of the book—if there really was one—was that the zombies were just One More Thing. One more predator. One more proverbial bus running people over. Once there were zombies in the world, those who survived simply adapted to accept that zombies were just another icy road, meth addict with a gun, lurking cancer, and anything else poised to strike and make people dead. Sure, it was also a return to the stone age; but the stone age had anthropophagous wolves sneaking in to eat everyone.

Zombies are boring too.

Here's what I suppose it all really means. Even though it still sounds like a meaningless excuse. Particularly once stupid people start lying about it.

I have this mental condition. You've probably heard of it. Smarts. Seriously: it's like a disease. Certainly it's a syndrome. And it's detrimental. Believe it or not.

Before the manufactured syndromes cured by Ritalin were to be honest totally invented, there was this alternate theory that smart kids tended to flunk because they weren't being, you know, challenged. The cure for that was of course to prescribe more challenging homework. Which may have worked for a few morons; I dunno. For me, it was meaningless and still boring. All of it. All known levels of 'challenges'. To the extent that I bugged out and started college when I was twelve. Which was, to be honest, still boring. Even if I was allowed to do things at my own pace, without waiting for the status quo to catch up from my status quo ante: still kinda boring. And what I'm starting to realise in solid terms is that it's still going on.

Ignoring a couple of physical impossibilities—in my case as far reaching as sprinting a kilometre in thirty seconds with one good leg—there's nothing I can't do. I get that. Painfully. You know: that thing where parents lie to their kids with you can be anything you want to be, but actually true. This by the way isn't bragging in any sense; it's pure lament.

Name it. I can do it. If necessary, I can learn it; it's rarely necessary. And that's annoying, to me. People test me on this shit. Not necessarily to get me to flunk, but just to see if something needs to be explained to me. People tell me about diseases they have, jobs they do, postgrad degrees they're going after; they ask if I know what they're talking about; of course I do: it's obvious. And boring. And that's bad. People ask whether I know about the latest and greatest theropod [okay: they rarely use the word theropod] and the only thing confusing me is the difference between the one unearthed yesterday and the one I heard about five years ago, which has just now apparently made the mainstream news. Seriously. Recentlyish—sometime this year, in 2009—someone asked if I knew about that new one larger than T.rex, which turned out to mean Giganotosaurus carolinii. Some of you will smirk at that; others will think it's fair to ask me whether I'm yet aware of an animal discovered in 1995. And some, I suppose, will wonder when and why we gave an animal apart from Tyrannosaurus rex two names; it must be very special.

Sometimes I spell stupid as stupid. Sometimes I spell it stoopid. But always I spell it Tee Rex.

Seriously. Never, ever say Tee Rex to me. Ever. Because all I'm gonna hear is Hi; I'm retarded; and my mouth is making noises at you.

So. This is my problem. And I acknowledge that it's my problem. And that acknowledging that it's a problem is the only step toward recovery, which can't ever actually happen. Things are boring. Because they're easy, and stupid, and boring. And there's apparently nothing to be done about it.

Which of course leads me to the sort of question I don't get as often anymore, though it remains as valid as ever: why am I wasting my life doing whatever it is that I'm doing, to the exclusion of whatever boring morons think they'd be doing if they weren't boring morons therefore incapable of doing what they think I should be doing. Or, the shorter version: why do I just sit around playing videogames instead of, you know, X. I dunno. Except that X is at least as boring as any videogame. And I can do the videogames without standing up much.

Also, let's be honest: who's gonna hire me to do X. Seriously. Simple facts: hire me to do X, and I'm gonna do it really, really well, utterly quickly, and probably about once. To be practical, the odds are against me bothering to come back tomorrow to do it again. Because it's almost certainly boring. Like everything else.

So. In the unlikely event that writing another What's New ever sounds remotely unboring:

More later....

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