welcome to the freak show

Write about that unpleasant fact, said the agent. Literate types want something to read while stranded in a foreign airport when an Icelandic Norse goddess volcano explodes creating a huge swirling cloud of ash complicating their mundane superficial lives with anxiety. Pass me some Xanax please. Life happens where sheep feel anxiety as a subterranean level of FEAR.

Travel isn’t fun. It’s an adventure.

Many humans love living in the past filled with regret being exhausted by their monkey mind where it is very comfortable … They absorb static or moving pictures to escape their terminal condition needing electronic reality and soft machine material…They burn out brain cells staring at little screaming screens … Cheap effective pervasive advertising permeates their consciousness speaking of Faust and making a deal … Dying is a grim comic business. It’s messy. It’s more expensive than anger.

There’s nothing more expensive than poverty.

Ask Grave Digger about plot development, said Rita. Humans suffer from monkey mind. They regret genocides and fear the future. Not me! Why me? The ego loves the CIRCUS of daily distractions … it wears them down … they become lethargic, depressed, suicidal, lazy and so on… lazy people never kill themselves.

They die of boredom, alienation, loneliness and neglect.

Fate and Death conversed, I’m a funny thing, said Fate.

Yes, you are said Death.

Healthy individuals respect the monkey mind. They are present now. They meditate. They are patient, understanding, tolerant and kind. Sheep don’t read and are lazy to face their fears with courage and honesty to learn their truths. Brave ones ask why exploring flow with their microscopic pure energy … A bag of bones … Atoms … WE are pure light.

Everything is energy, frequency and vibrations.

Many are not cosmologically or ontologically or evolutionarily engaged in how the world works on a sub-atomic level. They want fast food and a remote to operate their 46-inch plasma screen with 500 channels … They eat their phone … They enjoy simple stories with simple characters, a hero and a quest … They want happy endings like orgasms. Got it?

Keep it simple stupid. KISS. Experiment with dirty realism. Give me the surface. Be a witness. Throw in some absurd human activities.

Don’t write about what you know.

Write about what you need to know, write to find out.

The role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. - Anis Nin

Write to discover a new universe, a new skin, a new lover, an old idea with shiny tin foil packaging like a love sock named OK condom. Write about a decisive moment, like the condemned guy stepping around a puddle on his way to the gallows in Burma.

The Savage Detectives by Bolano is about poets searching for a lost Chilean poet in Europe, another quest to consider. Don’t take it too seriously. Everyone dies in the end, one more unpleasant fact about publishing and life. My tedious job is to accept or reject manuscripts. In the food chain I market it to a publisher.

Publishers have editors who read the work. Editors leave or die laughing. New editors read the work. Maybe the first editor helped us. Maybe a new editor thinks its garbage needing a major rewrite, revisions, deductions and electromagnetic fluctuations.

If so, a narrative HOOK leaves the author in the brothel-publishing graveyard, got it?

Yes, said Zeynep. Does that mean or imply you’re really a publishing prostitute with no values, morals or principles?

It’s all about money honey, said agent XYZ, And eyeballs … everything has a price, a user and exchange value in the world market of ideas, weapons, drugs, and humans…don’t give me any philosophical arguments.

You’ve been very helpful. What a great saga, said Zeynep. Now let my storyteller friends and an omniscient blind scripter show the tale.

Yes. It’s all yours. I have one question, said lick clit lit agent, how long have you been here?

All fucking day said Zeynep. Here’s your ticket to the greatest freak show on Earth.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Mystery Personified

Earth, this is God … I have someone who’s interested in the property and I want you OUT by the end of the month. How’s that? Imagine an accelerated space program? said Z, Only the very rich can afford a shuttle seat. So it goes.

Everyone else fights for their survival. Noble Savages are free to do anything; rape, plunder, take a vacation, build an ark, move into abandoned mansions, run businesses, grow gardens, buy and sell dreams and have unprotected sex with strangers. A doomsday scenario plus or minus links, tags, categories, electronic social networks and technological wiz gadgets, said Z.

Do not give me punctuation marks like parenthesis, said the agent. They stop me cold. Give me thesis, coma commas. Rational certainty.

How about quotation marks, asked Z.

Periodically. Just capitalize the first letter when a character speaks. That’ll work.

Have you read The Stone Raft, or The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, asked Z.

No. I only read the first five pages of everything that lands on my desk. I’ve got a slush pile higher than Everest. Talk about mountains of trash, water bottles, equipment, and frozen bodies.

Z: They’re by a Portuguese writer named Jose Saramago. He wrote about the human condition. How people feel isolated and struggle with their need for community and individuality. He addresses their need to find meaning and dignity outside political and economic structures.

Fascinating, that’s all well and good. Mainstream readers do not want a slow paced, intelligent thought provoking memoir, or non-linear esoteric eclectic threaded saga. They like fiction with Swedish journalists, oligarchies, smart and crazy tattooed misfit computer hackers. Remember her t-shirt? The Apocalypse was yesterday. Today we have a problem.

Mystery personified. Throw in some hardcore sex. Readers want dreams, fantasy, magical realism, desperate heavy deep real situations, romance and delicious recipes filled with hope illustrated by language animals like pigs and talking monkeys living on an Animal Farm in a Brave New World.

Some pigs are more equal than others. Oink.

How about talking chickens in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam? Chickens with beautiful faces? Innocent naive dirt-poor chickens?

If you must. Sex sells. Can they read?

No.

Can they write a synopsis?

No. They fuck for a living.

Yes, well I sell manuscripts for a living. Same-same but different.

I prostitute myself for money, status, recognition, leverage and eyeballs not vaginas and erect phallus symbols. The average reader in the United Snakes of America has an 8th grade education. Reading paper is declining, even though 175,000 books are published here every year. Newspapers are history. Weep. They line birdcages and wrap fish. Read the fine print.

Average human worldview is limited to electronic mass media entertainment bullshit. Make me laugh. Ha. I am a cynical realist with the attention span of an infant. I eat distraction morning noon night. Many humans are too poor to pay attention. Their life is a constant struggle for food, clean water, medicine and education.

One billion humans do not have access to clean water.

17,000 children die of starvation every single day.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Lit Agent Speaks

Give me international investment fund managers manipulating Goldilocks, NGOs skimming 70% off the top in Asian countries, greed, corporate monopoly play money profit and an orphan with no motivation but survival.

Give me heartbreak, emotional tragedy, drastic home foreclosures, massive unemployment, millions dying of C-19, jealousy, pride, and make sure pride is filled with glimmering prominence. It brings people down, crashes empires, creates and resolves conflicts.

Give me disabled homeless angry American war veterans struggling with PTSS, divorce, authenticity, domestic famine and revenge, a central motivating factor  ...

Give me imaginary borders on a crazy fucked up planet.

Crossing borders is a transcendental act of courage.

Ascertain the intention before the motivation, said Zeynep staying on a true line. The agent climbed a literary mountain.

If there’s no literary mountain the publishing road would be flat, short and paved with gold.

Give me a new paragraph with short dirty realism sentences, said lit agent … Give me a classic Greek drama in three acts … Give me romance and treason, deception, intrigue and mayhem  ... Humans are the only animals that can scheme and deceive. 

Give me a life sentence with no chance of parole … Give me 1.7 million Khmers on death row tormented by ghosts … Give characters fear, forgiveness, shock and awe … Like Orwell give me the unpleasant fact about a Burmese man, on his way to the gallows, stepping around a puddle of water … Give me his awareness of impending death and quick generous insight into his frail gentle human life.

Strap me into my chair living in a kingdom with twenty-four virgins. Virgins strike for equality. Give me a lethal literary injection. Drip by drip. Yes, the metaphor of a single drop of lethal mind numbing, fumbling, bumbling drama intrigue and chaos. Entropy - the 2nd law of thermonuclear dynamics. The center cannot hold, said WB Yeats. Find the big metaphor Zeynep.

Give me revenge and betrayal - the how and why wars began … Give me a dumb downed version of primordial Faust … Give me humans selling their soul to the Devil down at the crossroads at midnight to achieve immortality. Ain't nothing but the blues … Give me a heart-wrenching tale of abandonment, loss, misery and redemption. Tie in hope, the last thing that dies with gravity and arc.

Hope walks through the fire. Courage leaps over the fire.

Allow your characters to explore their feelings, thoughts, and reactions with total comprehension knowing the scientific fact that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and approaching TOTAL COMPLEXITY. Some refer to total complexity as God.

You may want to move this fact to the brutal satisfying conclusion, said the agent. This means the long now or 20,000+ years of human evolution is speeding up. Period. It’s becoming more random and chaotic. There’s a huge difference between complicated and complex. If you can write in God’s voice, it may sell. Many have tried few are chosen. God has a huge slush pile.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Process Not Product

Give the gentle reader saatch aur himmat, Z said in Turkish.

Translation please, said Devina.

Truth and Courage.

Keep them engaged, said Tran. Be gentle with the dear reader. They are educated. Challenge them.

What’s a word doctor, said Leo.

Someone who fixes manuscripts with a sharp axe, said Tran waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston-driven fountain pen splattering blood red ink on everyone in his radius. The pen is mightier than the sword. Edge focus. WE, you and I, them, he, she and us aint going anywhere. We live forever.

In your dreams, yelled Devina. Everyone’s doing hard time. It aint nothing but the blues sweet thing.

Have mercy.

Rita, an orphan and independent visionary writer from Banlung chimed in with a voice sweeter than a Buddhist bell, I’m going to be an English facilitator and historian. I’m going to stand on a street corner begging people to give me their wasted hours.

Where have I heard that before, asked Leo, an activist in exile from an orphanage on the Yangtze, heavy with silt and six trillion cubic meters of garbage flowing to the South China Sea.

What will you do with collected time, said Tran, Visit sick children in hospitals where they do DNA evolutionary experiments to stem the cells, can you sell the stems?

Speaking of stems, I’m moonlighting as a gardener, said Omar, There’s nothing more beautiful than nurturing nature in this impermanent life. We plant seeds for trees we will never see mature. Another leaf leaves life’s tree.

If you plant roses and need someone with experience to take care of the thorns give me a shout, said Tran, a one-legged Vietnamese child wearing his heart on the sleeve of a ragged 101 Screaming Eagle t-shirt.

A bird pressed its breast against a thorn singing, O what a beautiful morning o what a beautiful day.

A poet, like a chef or gardener, needs everything because they love everything.

I’m going to study Donatello, said Devina.

Who’s he?

He was a great Renaissance artist. He was born in 1386 in a place called Florence, Italy. He was honest had integrity and was super original. Technically he worked with anything. You name it: wax, bronze, marble, clay, all kinds of rocks, wood and glass. He raised the status from someone who created beauty to a craft, a real artist.

Painting with smoke and mirrors, said Tran.

Hey, that’s what the Greeks said. They believed everything was beauty and order, said Rita. Order, structure, design, form, function, oratory, mathematics, musical notes, all the beauty originated with them didn’t it?

You got it, said Tran. Hey, you know what, I think I’ll take the day off and be creative. Ha.

This present instant contains all reality, whispered Zeynep. We can call this experiment The Theory of Z, about a young precocious girl, her friends, artists and seers. Why not?

I taught a blind nomadic gardener/janitor/gravedigger and kid friends about emotional life in an alien schizoid civilization called Turkey, said Z. We shared values, stories and art with a free spirit.

I’ll tell you a secret. There’s two of me. One young and one old. The older is Kurdish and plays a cello in a cemetery. Can you dig it?

Aliens and fantastic probabilities said Rita. Tell me the difference between possibility and probability. It’s about process not product. Whew, now that’s deep.

Yeah, said Devina, We’re all in the shit, it’s only the depth that changes. Yeah, if it’s not one thing it’s something else speaking in the abstract.

Let’s not have this conversation in the abstract, said an authoritarian demanding Realist vomiting contrarian hypotheticals, truth, logic, verifiable data based evidence, scientific facts, precise specifics. We must ascertain the immediate personal moral and ethical values with lofty principles and assistant principles on principal.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

fear sells

Earth peoples, oceans wave,  celebrate life energy sex and harmonic forces, said Rita, What happened in the love hotel? Use your imagination.

They paid a woman 3,000,000 Yen through a slot in the door. She gave them a key. It unlocked Akiko’s chamber of secrets. The room featured an American wild-west motif with an Indian chief on a white horse. Very cute, said Akiko. They stripped each other down. They took a long hot herbal bath exploring geography with tender lust. They jumped each other’s bones. It was in-out dialogue, pure passion. Show doesn’t tell, said Z.

He toweled me down, said Akiko. I felt thick cotton noun fibers edge my thin shoulders, along my verb spine, weaving his fingers across my flat stomach, erasing, tracing water fingering my direct object jungle. Slow and easy baby, I sighed being his Shinto shrine as he gave me his offering. Our relationship ignored verbal language, said a blind Japanese masseuse in a love hotel.

What conflicts exist?

-Human vs. Human

-Human vs. Nature already mentioned.

-Human vs. ______><_______

-Human vs. self. Do I or don’t I? Will it eat me? Is it safe?

-Nature vs. Nurture

Will someone playfully deconstruct the truth with literal facts to move the narrative along and get to the mind-at-large awareness of his or her experience, said Tran.

I hope so, said Omar, A literary agent at a writer’s conference in Oregon said my writing was a word photograph jazz beat. She suggested throwing the narrative out.

She said and I quote, Pick one time or geographical place and flush out the narrative with more exposition. I would like to see character development and social and political realities in 60,000 words.

Yeah, said Rita, What did you say?

I told her some novelists do exactly the opposite of what they’re told because disobedience is freedom.

Beware of book doctors and blood thirsty greedy dictatorial aliens with an agenda, said Rita.

Ok, said Tran, How’s this sound? Write everything in the first five pages. Grab the reader with a hook in every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and at the end of chapters.

Yeah, said Grave Digger, WE need a hook, a big iron hook covered with dried blood hanging in the center of an empty Kampot market reminding genocide survivors what happens to them if they fuck up. They get a big fat rejection hook in the neck or through their trembling beating pulsating heart. Fear sells. Fear is a universal language.

Good idea, said Zeynep, Work fear, sex and growth into this. Readers need to keep turning pages. This work doesn’t flow from A 2 Z. It presents a form with a minimum of punctuation  ... punctuation is a nail. Is it an error or a mistake (part of a statement that is not correct) that’s a question for a linguist.

I love Linguini, said Devina, but he doesn’t love me. What else? Split the infinitive hairs. Infinity. Infinite. Finite. Dynamite.

Kids know eternity adults are scared of it, said Death. It’s long, cold and black. Nothing ever happens again.

Well, it’s ok to be horrible, said Z. Some writers give up because they want it to be perfect. You need to be passionate and persistent about your art without become obsessive-compulsive about it. A writer has grit and stamina. Do it because you love it. Make a mess. Clean it up and make another mess.

A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned, said Duchamp Ulysses Take Nothing For Granted. Kill your father. Marry your mother or versa visa. Push a stone up a hill. It rolls down. Push it up again.

We are all orphans sooner or later, said Rita, Speaking from my hard-lived sojourn, Experience is my teacher. The rest is just information.

Editing is a form of censorship, said Leo Told Story, waving a pile of rejection letters from lame stream mainstream upstream.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged