{"id":377,"date":"2009-04-30T08:42:52","date_gmt":"2009-04-30T13:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=377"},"modified":"2018-10-31T08:41:43","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T12:41:43","slug":"this-article-is-really-about-deadly-prey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=377","title":{"rendered":"This article is really about Deadly Prey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Revisiting old stories for the Sunday Archives<\/a>, unearthing the New Testicle<\/a> after more than a decade, and chopping up my lousy novel for serialization has been a wild experience.<\/p>\n


\nThe New Testicle is horrible and embarrassing, and some of these Sunday Archive stories are a mess (like the one coming up this Sunday), but some of the stuff has caught my eye.\u00a0 On Sunday May 10th I\u2019ll be posting the first part of \u201cThe Walkers,\u201d which is a short story that I don\u2019t remember writing.\u00a0 It rips off just about every single post apocalypse story out there, but it was strangely fun to dig it out of the virtual shoebox and dust it off.\u00a0 I\u2019m having the same experience with my lousy novel, which will debut on June 5th.\u00a0 I\u2019ve worked through the first 35 pages so far and\u2026well, I\u2019m enjoying it.\u00a0 I see all the mistakes I made, but they aren\u2019t as terrible as I remember them.\u00a0 Much of my novel was an experiment in pushing through towards the end, which I failed to do after 370 pages.\u00a0 I sacrificed quality in an attempt to get over that great hurdle \u2013 hitting the end of the story.\u00a0 More on that in the intro.<\/p>\n

Serializing the novel has gotten my writing bug going again.\u00a0 There\u2019s no money in it but, secretly, it\u2019s an enjoyable life-long experiment.\u00a0 The only problem has been understanding the purpose.\u00a0 It\u2019s a na\u00efve mistake to write with publication, money, or success of any sort in mind.\u00a0 Quite simply, one writes because they have to.\u00a0 Call it a demon, a calling, or Alice Weaver Flaherty\u2019s \u201cMidnight Disease<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s not about filling time, changing your life, or distracting yourself from pain.<\/p>\n

For many years, I\u2019ve been saying that the purpose of Greatsociety (and, before it, Dirtyfreaks) has been to exercise (or exorcise, maybe) those \u201cnotes in the margin,\u201d which I\u2019m always scribbling.\u00a0 A place to practice the craft of writing. That still holds true.\u00a0 When writing (or preparing recycled material) for the front page, there is a sense of audience.\u00a0 Not a voice that holds you back, but rather a framework created by the knowledge that you do have to at least make a drunken, cursory pass with the spellchecker and try to make sense.<\/p>\n

Writing for an audience is a mistake, but writing with an audience in mind is the secret to creating beginnings\u2026and middles\u2026and, hopefully ends.<\/p>\n

Or it\u2019s simply the secret to get the blood flowing again after a long hiatus, as I did with the GS reboot last year and Cass did with his own novel project.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard, after life has pressed against your skull with a dull blade, to justify sitting down and writing.\u00a0 Why not just pop on the tube, or get drunk, or keep working, or down a few Xanax instead?\u00a0 Why not turn off and give up?\u00a0 We\u2019re all so busy, anyway.\u00a0 The last thing I think of when I get home is doing anything more productive than mixing a gin and tonic and watching whatever shit I\u2019ve recently downloaded.\u00a0 Which, right now, is Deadly Prey<\/em>!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Doesn\u2019t that look awesome?\u00a0 We all know that movies started to suck after they stopped making those painted movie posters.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Wikipedia entry<\/a> features a much better poster with a comical cartoon grenade.\u00a0 And they even link a review<\/a>!<\/p>\n

Wikipedia, by the way, is the enemy of all production.\u00a0 It is the running dog ally of procrastination.\u00a0 I know some writers who swear by it but, Jesus, I can spend all day trapped in a clickfest as I dive deeper and deeper into stuff I didn\u2019t really want to know.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s example is Prince De<\/a>.\u00a0 A footnote in history, and the \u201clast Mongol prince\u201d allegedly descended from old Genghis himself.\u00a0 De struggled wildly against the waves of colonists and foreign invaders in the 20th century.\u00a0 He\u2019d pretty much side with anybody who could further Mongolia\u2019s independence, and spent decades trying to keep Mongolia from becoming a Soviet puppet state or yet another province of always expansionist China, both Nationalist and Communist.\u00a0 His reward was to be tried by his own people for treason and placed under house arrest, then to live out his final days as the humble, eccentric curator of a museum.<\/p>\n

I looked up Prince De because he has a big role in my current nonfiction read, Into Tibet<\/em><\/a>, but then once I hit that page I was off into the pocket history of Inner Asia in the first half of the 20th Century.\u00a0 Which makes me want to read The<\/em> Wind-Up Bird Chronicl<\/em>e<\/a> again.\u00a0 So then I wikipedia Murakami to see what he\u2019s up to and, well, there goes the day.<\/p>\n

So where was I before I attached a poster of a gay man with a machine gun?\u00a0 I wrote the first half of this article last night and then started reading about the swine flu (PANIC<\/font><\/strong>) and now I\u2019m returning to this after 12 hours.\u00a0 Which completely blows the finely crafted through-line where I was trying to tie editing the New Testicle into an essay on writing.\u00a0 I wrote the New Testicle in two very drunken weeks during a snow storm.\u00a0 It\u2019s insane garbage that makes the Old Testicle look like Dickens.\u00a0 I shouldn\u2019t take myself so seriously.\u00a0 I should, instead, express how disappointed I am that Sesheshet\u2019s tomb<\/a> was a let-down.\u00a0 When they found that bitch last November, it was a big Geraldo Rivera vault of Al Capone moment.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But then they go in there and it\u2019s boring.\u00a0 There\u2019ll never be a Tut in my lifetime.<\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s not true.\u00a0 We\u2019ll get it when they finally go into Qin Shi\u2019s tomb<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Anyway \u2013 \u201cThe Walkers,\u201d May 10th.\u00a0 I\u2019m very happy with that one.\u00a0 Judgment Day<\/em>, June 5th.\u00a0 And plenty of the Old Testicle to go\u2026though the quality starts to peter out.\u00a0 Well, more than usual.\u00a0 But I never expect much from myself anyway.<\/p>\n

Sometime in 2010, all this recycled stuff will be finished.\u00a0 Then I don\u2019t know what I\u2019ll do.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019ll have to write another novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Revisiting old stories for the Sunday Archives, unearthing the New Testicle after more than a decade, and chopping up my lousy novel for serialization has been a wild experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[403,164,84,397],"class_list":["post-377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-cult-culture","tag-deadly-prey","tag-movies","tag-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":914,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions\/914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}