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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Thursday
Oct102024

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

 


Tuesday
Oct012024

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

 

Tuesday
Sep242024

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

 

Sunday
May192024

Structure

Trees are the most inspiring structure. - Godel

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