* * * * *

                          20 minutes into a quagmire

There is nothing quite like having thirty days to write fifty thousand words
and you have no idea what to write. So you write. And write. And write some
more. And end up with a mess that will either be really terrible (The
Flintstones, while a movie, and not a novel, still had no central idea in
about fifty thousand minutes) [1] or a masterpiece (Apocalypse Now, yet
another movie that wasn't really written but more or less filmed as Francis
Ford Coppola went along slowly going mad but it's one of the best films ever
made, despite the horrah, the horrah) [2].

> It's early 1961. Eisenhowser gave his farewell speech that warned about the
> millitary-industrial complex and Kennedy, after the closest Presidential
> race in U. S. History, is turning the White House into Camelot. The horrors
> of the Cold War have yet to come. Vietnam is still back page news in the
> papers, McCarthyism is, if not completely dead, mostly over. The mood of
> the nation is optimistic.
>
> And into this idyll place a novel is given to some random 20something to
> read. It's not a novel in the conventional sense but more of a collection
> of vignettes about the future. Nothing exciting, nothing overly grand. Just
> normal life as it would appear to someone in the future. Some fourty years
> into the future.
>
> About our now.
>

Notes from my poor attempt at a novel, 20 Minutes Into The Future

My intent was to write a series of loosely coupled stories taking place in
the near indeterminate future, some fourty, maybe fifty years down the road.
Just take current trends as I see them, and extend them down; maybe toss in a
few outrageous things that can't possibly happen (who could foresee the fall
of Communism or terrorists piloting a plane (a commercial plane!) into the
Pentagon? Or two of the tallest buildings in the U. S.?) and let it stand at
that.

Only I'm getting rather depessed the more I contemplate the near future. And
not just over Pax Americana [3] either. The abolishment of anonymous money
(Electronic Money: Threat to Law Enforcement, Privacy, Freedom, or all
Three?) [4] (unless of course, you are already filthy rich in which case
there are plenty of tax havens (Tax Havens of the World) [5] for you to
shuffle your funds towards), the abolishment of ownership (and not by a
Communistic government fiat but by the relentless shift of ownership from
personal to corporations and foundations), creation of corporate fiefdoms (An
evil empire for the new century: How Walt Disney made Times Square and the
State of Florida its corporate fiefdoms) [6] (which are worse than the
fiefdoms of Europe—at least there you gave your fielty to your local barron
and he protected you—now you still have to give your fielty to your local
corporate masters but they don't have to protect you, or even keep you
employed), errosion of privacy (data mining (NYT: You Are A Suspect (requires
registration)) [7] of cross indexed corporate and government databases,
ubiquitous cameras watching our every move, and every citizen being
fingerprinted (How Fingerprints Can Help Locate A Missing Child) [8] and
chipped (Boca Raton family volunteers to be first for microchip implants) [9]
from childhood) and excuse me whilst I slit my wrists right now …



> For Sale!
>
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> so hurry!
>
> Two days overnight use only. Use during Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas
> extra. No Trick-or-Treating allowed during Halloweeen. Dinner parties of
> more than 20 require permission of the Board. Taxes include city, county
> and school district. Monthly cleaning required.
>

Excerpt from my poor attempt at a novel, 20 Minutes Into The Future

I thought it best to rethink my strategy, and it's then when I turned to The
Hero Of A Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell did extensive research into the
myths from around the world and noticed certain themes coming up time and
time again. These he outlined and explained in his book, The Hero Of A
Thousand Faces, notes of which I made into entries [10] (mostly for myself
but hey, someone else could find a use for them). So if George Lucas [11] can
apply the monomyth to a crappy script (“You can type this XXXX, George, but
you can't say it.” –Harrison Ford), bad acting (Need I mention a whiny Mark
Hamill? Or Carrie Fisher's faux British accent through half the film?) and a
derivative plot (taken from Kurosawa [12]'s Hidden Fortress [13], right down
to the two peasents rendered as A2-D2 and C-3P0) and have one of the top
grossing films ever, then it couldn't hurt me, right?

But I have a problem with the Hero's Arc [14]. Not that I don't think it's
valid (it is) but more for what it represents—that the Hero is extraordinary
in some sense; that he's of divine birth (or noble birth, but really, there
is no difference as the early kings and emperors of our history were thought
to be of divine birth anyway) and has a higher destiny; a calling to
greatness. Joe Serf need not apply. And that doesn't sit well with me. Even
Luke Skywalker turned out to be the spawn of a knight and a queen …

The other problem I'm having is that I've yet to write fiction. Okay, sure, I
have a few comedy sketches [15] I did (Monty Python [16] phase) and my humor
columns [17] towards the end [18] might be considered mostly fictional but
they did derive from actual events (however exaggerated they became—perhaps
this was my Hunter S. Thompson [19] phase, unbeknownst to me) and there was
the one college paper on Gothic Cathedrals was largly fabricated on the spot
(I was in my Dave Barry [20] phase at that point) but overall, most of my
writing has been non-fictional in nature. This fictional stuff is quite
different for me, so there's difficulty there.

So right now, I'm at a loss of where to go …

[1] http://us.imdb.com/Title?0109813
[2] http://us.imdb.com/Title?0078788
[3] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Pax+Americana&btnG=Google+Search
[4] http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/mac/cfp96/newsletter/money.html
[5] http://www.escapeartist.com/taxhavens/taxhavens.htm
[6] http://www.jhu.edu/~newslett/02-8-01/Focus/2.html
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html
[8] http://www.childidprogram.com/ChildID/howfingerprints.html
[9] http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/2654727.htm
[10] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/11/08.2-3
[11] http://archive.salon.com/directory/topics/george_lucas/index.html
[12] http://us.imdb.com/Name?Kurosawa,%20Akira
[13] http://us.imdb.com/Title?0051808
[14] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/11/08.2
[15] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/sketches/
[16] http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/monty.html
[17] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/murphy/
[18] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/murphy/ml409.html
[19] http://www.gonzo.org/
[20] http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/dave_barry/

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