Fouche’s starts by describing the premises of Nassim Nicholas Taleb: when historians look back on history for the cause of some famous historical catastrophe, they tend to look too far. They look for a narrative in history that connects all of the dots leading up to the horrible event they’re documenting, trying to discern which ones were causative and which ones were not. There are, naturally, academic objections to the narrative theory of history, which show that political catastrophes are not the result of long-term trends but are immediate chaotic perturbations that lead to disasters. Thus, for example, people link 9/11 to the execution of Sayyid Qutb in 1966, whereas the more proximate cause of 9/11 can be found in Saudi politics less than a decade earlier. (I think I’ll take issue with his characterization of the bank disaster; many economists agree the perturbations that lead to the great recession could have been damped by Glass-Steagel.)

Fouche then says, rightly I think, that what’s missing from the argument about whether or not long-term narrative or proximate perturbations of political equilibria can be used to describe the causes of catastrophe is this: the personal narrative of the actors. His example is WWI, but 9/11 works fine. Bin Laden had little interest in attacking “The West” in the 1980s: his interest was in rooting out corruption and the invasion of outsiders within the future Caliphate, most notably the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Qutb’s opinions on America, which were substantial, were minimal to Bin Laden’s overall ideology. After the invasion of Kuwait, Saudia Arabia allowed the US to operate on Saudi soil, and that slotted itself into Bin Laden’s personal narrative about the purity of the Caliphate, and generated a response.

If you’re a writer, this is a great idea.  Instead of deep and ancient narratives leading up to the emerging crisis, what you need is a villain with some authority who has had a long-standing personal narrative– of personal greatness, of ancient darkness, of national unity, whatever– and then craft a few small events that he can, in his mind, coerce into being part of his personal narrative.  How much coercion he must do to make it fit makes a great measure of his corruption.   You can even point out failures to contain the perturbations he creates, failures of personal action or legal frames, and show how his narrative is powerful enough to infest others, overcome such objections, and lead to disaster.

On the other hand, it also reduces the idea of heroism to a counter-point.  I’m still thinking about how to contain that.

I wanted to participate– some of them are real groaners.  Much to my frustration, I found that I couldn’t.

Here’s the real truth: I haven’t written anything new since April.  Mostly, that’s because, as I wrote in my previous post, people pay me more to write code these days.  But there seems to be something else going on.  I’m not sure entirely what it is, but it bugs me.  I sit down to write and nothing comes to the fingers.  I do what I’m supposed to do when that happens: I write anyway.  I write crap.  And I mean, real crap. (Okay, some of you might actually want to read a scene involving Wish, a Sterling Y, and a bit of llerkin nobility, but the dialogue there sucks, people)

And many of the novel ideas I had to work with just seem to be equally dead.  A retelling of the Superman story as STL warfare between back-to-the-soil types and posthumans?  Completely hung up on the “just another Anglo writer” complex.  Moon Sun Dragons?  Not enough ideas for a book, not enough eyeball kick for a movie.  Caprice Starr?  Boring.  Automatic Sweetheart?  “Steampunk is so last year.”  The Last Year of the Cat?  “Nobody will ever take catgirls seriously, no matter how much Sarah Waters, Camille Paglia, and Bram Dysktra you throw in there.”  Janae?  “Too obvious.”

Bleah.  Someone find me my mojo, ne?

But as I was reading, the love scene started and the characters got into positions and suddenly it turns out, completely unremarked-upon before this, that the woman in the story is black.  I was at first annoyed by this revelation: how did the idiot author let the story get this far along before dropping this little bombshell?  And then I recalled, annoying myself further, that that had been part of the point of the damn series.  Bombshells like that were the fun stuff of the Journal Entries.   I had enjoyed tweaking the audience by doing exactly that: dropping in details that the characters themselves wouldn’t have cared about until it mattered, not bothering to announce the color of another character’s skin as an identifier but rather as a source of pleasure, an aesthetic quality independent of personality, or culture, or expectation.  I was pleased to note that the trick had worked.

Then I became further annoyed with myself for feeling tweaked by my previous self.  I wonder what other annoyances I’ll have to grind away at in the future, to get back to my former egalitarian gorgeous self?

Meanwhile, down in Vaginaland, Mr Condom’s beginning to feel a bit iffy. He’s overheating. For some reason, the shagging seems to be twice as fast this evening, and he grimaces as he gets flung willy-nilly in and out of the pink tunnel. He starts getting friction burns, hanging onto Bobby’s stiff penis for dear life, headbutting Georgie’s cervix at 180 beats per minute. ‘Help me!’ he yells in the darkness, feeling himself melting. The sex only seems to be getting faster though, and Mr Condom squeezes his eyes shut as Bobby groans and the friction starts getting unbearable and Mr Condom thinks he’s going to be sick and the searing pain the searing pain and Bobby groans again and suddenly squirts a gallon of white molten lava from his Jap’s eye, exploding through Mr Condom’s heavy reservoir end and Mr Condom screams and screams and vomits ice cream into Georgie’s vagina. Shivering and spasming, Bobby suddenly feels the endorphins kick in and he falls onto the carpet with a happy bump.

150 people seems to be the maximum number we can treat as people rather than as abstract human beings that need categorizing and simplification in order to manage.  Laws treat human beings simply, as categories rather than as people.  So do companies bigger than 150 people. We need these abstractions to marshall large numbers of people to accomplish things that require so many, but down inside our brains we’re still dealing with the same simple small number of real people.

One the things that occurred to me this morning is that writers might have their monkeysphere slots filled with their own characters.  This might be one of the reasons we’re all so famously isolationist and loner: our slots of friendship capability are limited to those not currently occupied by the characters that haunt our stories.  And I say this because I’ve recently felt as if Ken Shardik, Aaden, and P’nyssa haven’t been as much of my monkeysphere as the rest of the world.  Part of that is because they’ve been pushed out by circumstance: they don’t have twitter feeds and Facebook accounts, they’re not part of the rest of my family’s world.  I didn’t have to keep them away from Omaha, but the kids don’t need to know about them, so dealing with them is a bit like having an affair these days.  I have to go to cafe’s and long train rides to have long conversations with them, catch up on their lives, and push the stories forward.

There are, of course, exceptions: Jay Lake seems to have pretty solid characters and yet maintains a huge monkeysphere of friends.  A skilled politician often has a prodigious memorys and can glad-hand thousands of people, making each feel as if she is a member of his tribe at least long enough to vote for him.   I seem to have a less-than-well-endowed monkeysphere, myself.  It kinda bothers me, but I’m dealing.

So, if you’re a writer: do you believe that your characters take up treasured positions in your Dunbar number of friends?

Just to let you know, this story has the kind of ending you’d expect for a story about two young, gay men set in the Midwest in 1904.  I jokingly referred to this story, when it was In Progress, as Catboys of Brokeback Mountain.  And yeah, that’s mostly where it goes.  Minus the tire-iron.  A brief excerpt:

“Matt,” he said, “Do you want me to lie?”

“Lyin’s a sin.”

“So is being a queer,” Nico said softly. They sat side-by-side on the bed. Matt dared not look at him. “I didn’t hate what Mr. McCannick did. I just hated him. Because of what he did to my mother, of how he kept her– and me– long after we were supposed to be free. Long after we were supposed to be let go.” He sighed. “McCannick had the ears of senators and he used his money to keep her a slave. He tried to keep me too.”

Matt said, “So you did run away.”

“It’s like being in a cage. The food is good, the water’s clean, even the toys are good. McCannick wasn’t too bad, I guess, as keepers go. But it’s still a cage.”

Matt nodded. He understood being in a cage. He could feel his own pressing in on him, bars wrapped around his heart, squeezing so hard it felt like his eyes hurt. What could he tell Nico, what could he say? “Do you… do you like girls?”

Nico sighed. “Yes. Just as much, maybe. I’ve known fewer of them, I guess. They’re a mystery. Boys are so much easier to understand.”

Matt gulped hard. “We are?”

Nico put his hand over Matt’s, the touch of his palm, free of the hard callouses of farm work, so different from anything Matt had ever known he’d remember it for the rest of his life. Nico’s hand was soft fire. “Yes, you are.”

Whaddya think of my idea for giving away all the backstory using a faux-Wikipedia look?  In case anyone’s curious.

Here’s the link: Black Tattoo.

The Yowler series is a collection of short stories set in “the real world” that I’ve been doodling with for a few years now, but haven’t really gotten all that serious about until recently.  I’ve finished about 70,000 words or so (don’t worry, I won’t ask you read them all at once) in about a dozen short stories, plus about a half dozen more “in progress” and one fragmentary novel.

The point of the series was to take catgirls and catboys seriously.  I’m of the One Big Thing school of writing: your readers will forgive you One Big Thing in their suspension of disbelief.  My One Big Thing is that catgirls and catboys exist.  There is an entire backstory that explains how we got a contemporary universe with catboys and catgirls, and the explanation even solves the Drake equation, which I think is bizarre but fun in a way.  And it sends a big bright red raspberry to Copernicus.

As I wrote it, though, I realized that being a catgirl or a catboy, although fun, if you take them seriously it kinda sucks.  Because they have to, by tradition, be youthful and beautiful their whole lives, their lives must be short.  They’re as smart as human beings, but because of their biological incompatibility with humans (both reproductively and as carriers of disease), they will have proven conveniently useful to the decadent and unscrupulous rich over the centuries.  Their feline nature makes them very sensual, so this isn’t as bad as it seems, which drives the humans who want to “free” them crazy.  It also drives wedges between the “we’re as good as humans” camp and the “we’re different from them and we should enjoy that difference” camp.

Which brings me to the most difficult aspect of the series, that whole writing the other stuff.  I’ve been reading a lot of what some bookstores call “Black fiction,” which is that section where Terry McMillan and Eric Dickey and Samuel Delaney all get pressed together on one shelf because they all happen to be, you know, black, rather than a romance writer, a mystery writer, or a science-fiction writer (cue George Carlin’s “Where’s the surprise?” monologue).  Most of the stories I’ve written involve caucasians of American or European descent interacting with Bastet, and there’s one really unpleasant story set in the midst of the Hutu/Tutsi slaughter, so I’m a little queasy about where I’ve gone with some of these stories, but hey, if I didn’t write challenging stuff I’d get bored.

Anyway, that’s the Yowlerverse: Contemporary fiction that takes catgirls seriously.  The first episode, Black Tattoo, comes out Friday.

It’s a straightforward story about coming to grips with who you are, and dealing with the consequences. Really, the story turns when our hero realizes that most of his college classmates don’t hate him even if he is gay. It still has a few rough edges to be ironed out, but otherwise it’s pretty well-written.

I kept noodling with the ending. I had a love scene where he discovers that being gay isn’t all tricks and tearooms (that’s one of those statements I discovered early on is true both in its original and in its negation). I kept trying to write more– about the protagonist getting back to civilization, about whether or not his relationship with the man he fell in love with continued, about whether or not he survived the worst of the AIDS epidemic. I spent about two days and another 2,000 words or so on it.

I chopped them off this morning and realized that the story didn’t need them. We needed to know how he dealt with being pushed out of the closet. That’s what the story is about. He learns to live with himself, all of himself, and his friends can handle it and the people he doesn’t care about can’t. We don’t need to know the other things, they aren’t part of the story.

In some vague sense, I’ve just pushed my character into a setting where he may be more likely to be promiscuous, to be at risk of HIV infection, but that’s not what the story is about. I’m not supposed to care.

Figuring out that I was supposed to stop there was one of the hardest things I’ve done with writing. It’s pretty good. Now it just needs to be polished.

Somewhere in the middle of the book he drops this gem:

Writer’s block is never because you cannot come up with an idea.  Writer’s block is when the story that wants to come out is blocked by the part of you anxious that it will be too personal and will reveal the truth: that you, like everyone else, are not quite so sane and secure as you pretend.

Put that on a post-it note and keep it next to your writing desk.  The next time you have writer’s block, feel a little shame that you’re not quite courageous enough to tell the truth.