A perennial subject of discussion with my husband is that he experienced every piece of narrative art that was capable of inspiring him twenty years ago, and the time has passed, like David Lynch himself.  Now there is nothing for him but memories.  Well nerts to that, somebody oughtter make something he is capable of finding exciting and cool again.  I guess it’s got to be me.

Now I’ve tried this before.  When my dude was scoffing at the idea every story should follow nazi fan jojo campbell’s the hero’s journey™, he introduced me to some other ideas on story outlines, including a “gothic” one.  That was not about triumph, in the heroic sense (tho it wasn’t wildly removed from it either), so it fit the idea of a dark melodrama.  I took this and tried to make a story that followed it.

Thus was born Love and Torment, which languishes in about 70% done hell, with many other projects.  The problem with Liebe ist Qual is that I was still hot to make it something I can easily enjoy, so it was in a scifi / fantasy setting adjacent to Josefina y Blasfemia, lousy with super-powered fuckoes doing backflips around neon green space goblins.  (see also this story)  This is, suffice it to say, not goth enough.

He needs a serious story with believable but heightened emotions, that you cannot help but feel because they are earnest, not manipulative, and because they speak to a goth soul.  It can have supernatural stuff in it, but nothing you could imagine being reduced to a role-playing game rule system.  It should feel mysterious, ideally making you want to come to it, rather than being pushy with its narrative.  Gotta have gay dudes in it.  Mulholland Drive is one of his favorite movies ever but gaydies instead of gaydudes probably cost it some points.  In a perfect world it should have iconic stature, emblematizing itself as perfectly as the writing of Franz Kafka, or Angela Carter, or cetera.

It should have all of these things, which means suspending my ego and my desire for self-indulgence, to have a shot at tha brass ring – Best Story in the World, for at least this one guy.

I’m gonna aim to write something like that this March, for what it’s worth, but I got no strong ideas at the moment.  Anybody wanna chip in some notions?  The point of the Spooktober event is to show that ideas are cheap, and we should not have to be precious with them, but if you wanna keep it like the kaiser, fine, no advice for me.  I’ll get through on my own.  But could it be fun to help somebody write the best story that ever existed?

Some things he likes, as notions for inspiration:  Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, Twin Peaks: Firewalk With Me, The Thing, Perfect Blue, Paprika, Paranoia Agent, Silent Hill Games in Order: 3, 2, 1, 4, and after that they are dead to him, Yume Nikki, Kafka’s Metamorphosis (tho he has Josef K’s dying words from The Trial tattooed on his arm) and A Hunger Artist, the goth music of The Cure, Bauhaus, and Joy Division (again with the tattoos), the movies of Kiyoshi Kurosawa like Pulse, Cure, and Sakebi, the comics of Suehiro Maruo (Laughing Vampire, Panorama Island), Al Columbia (The Biologic Show), Charles Burns (Black Hole), and Junji Ito (Uzumaki, Hellstar Remina), and some things less goth: Katamari Damacy, ’80s one hit wonders / fashion…  Maybe that’ll do for now.

If giving me suggestions for this project not so interesting, maybe just reflect in the comments on the things that are your faves of all time, and what they have in common, thematically, if anything.

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Something else I wanted to mention but forgot and don’t feel like editing in:  This is similar in some respects to my notion of trying to write a christian romance.  While stories are almost invariably better if the material is something you’re super into, I still think it’s possible to make something great in a domain or circumstance where you’re not welcome, like Jewish musicians writing christmas songs.  What if I could write an amazing love story that would move hearts around the world, within the genre constraints of shit-fascist-moms-like?  Of course I like all of the things my husband likes, if differently sometimes from how he likes them, so this isn’t directly comparable.  But it’s still trying to work under a creative constraint: Don’t do something that tickles all my peccadilloes, do something for somebody else.

I won’t have as much fun as writing my usual whack shit, but it will feel very worth doing, very worth having done it.  Because my husband is not the only guy in the world who is criminally underserved by pop culture – this could work for anybody else out there who is like him, and feels the sadness of that.

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