Friday 14th November 2003
Back. Again. Whee.
Okay? I'll assume that, at this point, you've played the thing back and found what you're going to find. If not, go back up and click the options in the flashfile before reading on.
So. What's new. Erm....
We recorded a new episode for Radio Free Duhmerica 'tonight' [we got done with it just before midnight; I guess it was technically last night], so there will be a new new episode streaming from AtheistNetwork.com on Sunday [look through the schedule to figure out when it's playing in your timezone, and when the reruns are throughout the week]; meanwhile, it's also up at duhmerica.com, under SHOWS, for those who truly can't wait.
I think the show actually managed to stick to three primary topics. Eventually, we might even learn to stick to one. Never know....
One secondary topic wound up being hidden messages back when LPs existed. Which happened to remind me that we'd found the weirdest hidden message in the history of the recording industry back in 1990 or so. Since I don't particularly want to influence anyone by spilling it out in advance, I'll just give you the song we found it in, and the opportunity to listen to it backwards at the speed at which we were reversing the record:
While the entire thing, played backwards at ten percent normal speed, sounds like a Scamway convention of zombies...am I crazy, or is there really a point at which you can hear satan loves you in the middle of all that?
I assume that, if that's what we're hearing, it's unintentional. Probably. If there's any order in the universe at all. Then again, the mere fact that Jimmy's surname is Soul makes me wonder how accidental this is--if I'm actually hearing this phrase in the first place.
I dunno. You find some strange things out there in reality when you're not really looking for them. And even, in cases, when you are.
The backstory on this thing, by the way, is that we were all sitting there in 1990, drinking way too much of something way too cheap, going through someone's collection of records. In retrospect, the strangest thing was that we were in my flat, using my recordplayer; I've never in my life owned a record containing this goofy fucking song; so I have no idea at all why the record was available to play backwards in the first place.
It's usually best to avoid worrying about the details of any situation in which I was effectively tranqued beyond reason.
Now, nearly fourteen years later, I'm reminded of that quirky night. And, with the twenty-first-century availability of WinMX and various programmes, I'm able to recreate the situation. Except for the part where I was tranqued beyond reason.
I'm assuming, for the sake of defensible argument, that the record we were listening to in 1990 was somehow something I owned. I truly doubt I purchased the damned thing; but the simple fact that it existed in my apartment suggests that, in one way or another, it was regardable as my property; downloading the .mp3 some fourteen years later just saves me the hassle of looking through a hundred thousand cubic feet of accumulated junk to find the original record in question. Yeah: that's what going on here; that's the ticket....
And, of course, uploading the thing to gremlin.net is done merely for the purpose of critical review. Review it critically; see whether you're hearing this strange little christian message in the backwards version of this deplorable song.
Okay. What else is new....
I'm in the middle of an unprecedented activity here. I'm actually doing preproduction on a novel. That may require an explanation.
Ordinarily--which is to say the last couple dozen times I've done this--when I write a novel, I go from thinking up a goofy idea [all unwritten novels are goofy ideas; rational ideas have no need to become novels] to typing words into Page One in a matter of seconds. Sometimes that's thirty-six- or seventy-two hundred seconds; but I've usually gone from conceptualisation to groundwork in just an hour or two. Sometimes less.
I've been thinking about this one with some dedication for the last month or so. The more thought I put into it, the more detailed it becomes. And the scarier.
Not because it's a horror story, per se, although it is, in fact, a horror story--or, really, it will be, in fact, a horror story, whenever I get done thinking and get started writing--but because, given the sort of detail I've already worked out for the horror story, it's got a decent chance of being well over a thousand pages long. Potentially fifteen hundred pages or more. Given the nature of the story, it really doesn't allow itself to be chopped into volumes, either; I want it to be a standalone oneshot. Which will be tricky if it's somewhat longer than The Stand.
So that's a concern, at the moment.
I'm not quite ready to announce the goofy idea itself, although it won't come as a real surprise when it turns out to be what it is. I want to keep going through a few factors of the concept and work out whether it can really be written. Being a horror story, the primary situation relies on some really precise circumstances; I'm trying to come up with ways for those circumstances to make sense in reality. Which is to say that I'm always upset by a story which has all these wild and impossible situations going on, but which totally fails to explain how and why those things were able to happen in the first place. Which is one of the reasons I can't stand the damned bible. When an epic relies on the deus ex machina of totally unbelievable magic and miracles, the story itself tends to fail the reader.
On the other hand, using the bible as an example, the goofy idea might end up working with less than a thousand or fifteen hundred pages; granting that the entirety of the bible is simplified into a silly little black comedy: A retarded deity creates the universe, accidentally creating Evil in the process; the deity fails to exterminate Evil by creating Death; the deity fails to exterminate Evil by banishing Cain and letting him marry someone it never created; the deity fails to exterminate Evil by flooding the planet, but for yottatonnes of animals crammed into 1.5million cubic feet of space; the deity fails to exterminate Evil by cloning itself and having the clone get nailed to a telephone pole; the deity fails to exterminate Evil by--after the end of the novel--sending a bunch of illiterate morons into a chatroom to tell everyone else to 'belive or birn [sic]'....
Hopefully, this new book can be slightly better than the bible; one question is whether it can also be shorter.
Loosely related to that, I'm still looking into alternatives to dealing with my publisher, who, as some of the regulars already know, elected to risk being sued for failing to distribute News of the Stoopid [NotS] to avoid being sued for managing to distribute News of the Stoopid [NotS]. Which is to say that, having already contracted to publish and distribute the book, they finally got round to reading it and decided that it was too volatile to release. I don't get that either. But that's the story I'm getting.
Having concluded that the publishing industry appears to go from that to worse, I'm not real interested in dealing with publishers anymore. As such. So I've been looking at various alternatives to dealing with established publishers--everything from going through semipublishers who print books on demand to going through printers who charge several thousand dollars to print a thousand books at a time and do nothing for distribution, to spending several thousand dollars on the gear required to print the books in the first place, avoiding everyone else in the damned industry altogether.
Whichever way I deal with this, there are additional concerns. NotS, for example, is now effectively outdated. That, being outdated, it managed to predict more bullshit correctly than incorrectly is entertaining, to me; but it's also problematic now that there's no longer a critical need to inform people that the twenty-first century won't begin until 2001, that the electoral college is going to work against the popular vote, or that the World Trade Centre is likely to be attacked by terrorists. It's just not relevant anymore.
Also less than completely relevant, anymore, are some other things I've written and shelved since writing NotS. Like Damnitology, for example. Elements of Damnitology are timeless enough--specifically the beginning and the end; the stuff in the middle is no longer entirely useful, now that I've personally learned a hell of a lot more about religions and deities than I'd known when I wrote it in AD2000.
I know that--amzingly enough--a lot of people are waiting on the release of Damnitology. I also know that, if I had it all to do over again, I'd do a few things differently. Still also, I know that I technically have it all to do over again, since I haven't actually yet released what could arguably be considered the bible of this bullshit religion which, believe it or not, now has over a thousand confirmed members, despite its total lack of real marketing. How scary is that to consider?
So. I'm thinking through this new goofy idea, and rethinking through the goofy idea of Damnitology. At the same time, I'm thinking about ways of releasing either or both, along with a couple dozen other books I've got lurking around here, waiting to move out into the world. As it were.
I'll read through Damnitology one of these days and see what I think of it three years later. If I can release it without changing too much, and if I can figure out an acceptable method by which to distribute it, I'll...I guess I'll announce that I've done both. When the time comes. Possibly sometime this year.
Which is pretty much how things happen anyway, isn't it. Wait and see, I guess.
More later....
--Gremlin