Forbes is running
a special on “The Future,”
and a bunch of writers, including me, contributed fiction.
The deal was everyone’s story had to be based on this:
It’s the year 2027, and the world is undergoing a global financial crisis.
The scene is an American workplace.
I was intrigued by the idea of going head-to-head
against other writers. It sounded like a kind
of writers’ cage match. I found myself thinking, “All right,
Doctorow’s gonna lead with a world controlled by draconian IP law,
he won’t be able to resist. But maybe I can counter with
the entire American economy being purely about advertising. He’ll
never see it coming.”
Possibly no other writers saw it this way. They may have just been
concentrating on writing a good story. Suckers.
Anyway, my short story,
Springtide,
is up now. To read
the others, including shorts by Cory Doctorow and Warren Ellis,
visit the Forbes
Future page and scroll down to “Fiction.”
Forbes has a 90-day exclusive on this piece but after
that I’ll post it alongside my
other short stories, with formatting that doesn’t suck so much.
In other news, you can now search this site. Little box on the left
there. Thanks to Wyatt, who complained about this until I got
off my butt and added it.
Maybe you heard about
the arrest of Jose Luis Calva, who is described
as an “aspiring horror novelist.” Police found a draft of his manuscript
Cannibalistic Instincts, along with pieces of his girlfriend stashed in
various places around his apartment, including in the frypan. I know, I know, I had the same
reaction: it’s pretty unfair to call him “aspiring.” It sounds like that draft
was finished. And not just finished, but comprehensively researched.
Sure, some people say you’re not a novelist until
you’re published, but in this day of print-on-demand and internet
vanity presses, is that really a meaningful distinction? I say, if the
guy went to all the trouble of crafting a story arc, putting words
on the page day after day, and boiling his girlfriend’s flesh, he’s a
novelist. Give him that.
I’m sometimes asked how much research you should do when
working on a novel, so let me say: this is probably too much. It
wasn’t just the girlfriend, you see; there’s also a missing
ex-girlfriend and a chopped-up prostitute. That seems
excessive to me. One, I could understand. I mean, I wouldn’t
support it. You let horror novelists start cutting up hookers, and
the next thing you know Tom Clancy is commandeering nuclear
submarines off the coast of Florida. Or, I guess, appointing
ghost writers to do that for him. But the point is I can imagine
a frustrated Jose at his keyboard, a half-finished sentence
dangling from the screen, thinking: “How do you
sever a femur with a railway spike?”
Three corpses, though, that’s getting carried away. I haven’t read
Cannibalistic Instincts, but I bet it contains
long, tedious passages where Jose was unable to resist info-dumping
his hard-won knowledge onto the reader. That’s the problem when
you get to body number three: your research overshadows the
writing. At that point, Jose really needed to be cutting fewer limbs and
more adverbs. Fleshing out his story, not his apartment. Also,
having a supportive spouse or girlfriend can be really important,
especially to a first-time writer, so I can’t help but think it was
counter-productive to eat her.
But there’s something in this tale to make writers everywhere feel a little
better about themselves, because no matter how bad your own
work is, at least you wrote it without butchering anybody. That’s
a plus in anybody’s language. The corner
Jose has backed himself into is that even if his book is
published, when people read it they’ll be thinking, “Yeah, it’s good…
but is it three murdered innocents good?” It’s extra pressure he doesn’t
need. I mention this because I’m sure there are unpublished horror
writers out there thinking, “No wonder I can’t get an agent; all the
other horror writers are out there sawing limbs.” Sure,
that probably provides a certain amount of realism that could elevate
your fiction to a more visceral plane. I mean, I’m just guessing.
And it’s hard to ignore the fact that Hollywood bible Variety
reported this story with the line,
“How soon before someone gobbles up the film rights to this?”
But still. Call me a purist, but I prefer to do things the old-fashioned
way: dismember people in my head.