Big Spoilers Ahead.  If you thought you were going to read the Best Story in the World without spoilin’, read this not.

OK.  The post before this I was still trying to work out particulars on the Best Story in the World™ and came to a point where I had to chuck a not insignificant amount of work in the trash.  Maybe to be retrieved in future for a different occasion, but it won’t work for the best story in the world.  I needed something immediately and persistently more mysterious and uncanny.

I could dig through Grimm and try to come up with modern retellings of multiple stories, several of them, and pick the one that works the best for this requirement.  But we’re real close to the wire – this event begins March 1st!  So I’m gonna hafta freestyle more.  My husband is working on a story of his own, themed around the idea of a missing person, and sometimes we like to share a theme, so he suggested I do something with that.

I decided to re-use the setting I’d developed for the Henchpuss story – a big housing project with a strong presence of organized crime – so that someday the Henchpuss story could amuse people with connections to this one.  A child went missing in this area and police sometimes harass or shake people down using that as a pretext.  Nobody thinks it’s justified – but is it?

MCs will be a guy who lives in the building and a private citizen investigating the missing child.  I like the idea of the characters from Henchpuss never leaving the building until certain dramatic points in the story, and this one can be the same.  Guy who lives in the building as PoV character, has housing despite no job, because of a disability.

I think the MC sometimes sees the girl, sometimes sees a monkey, doesn’t know if the girl sightings were hallucinating about a monkey.  Maybe the monkey ends the story with some Murders in the Rue Morgue type of shit, wearing a pretty pink dress lol.  Boy I’m tired.  Lemme see…

You know what?  I’m gonna poke at Grimm for a set amount of time and see if I spot something that could have these ideas stretched over the top of it.

The White Snake:  A servant takes a lil bite of his king’s forbidden snake dish and gains Beastmaster™ powers.  He uses them to get a favor from the king and goes on an adventure where he uses those powers to get the love of a hot princess.  But I know what it means.  To walk along the lonely street of dreams.  HERE I GO AGAIN ON MY OWN.  GOIN’ DOWN THE ONLY ROAD I’VE EVER KNOWN!  LIKE A DRIFTER I WAS BORN TO WALK ALONE…

But seriously, this isn’t too bad.  Guy gains some wisdom he can use to his advantage – secret intel about the mysteries and criminal hijinks in the project.  He uses this to accomplish goal of resolving missing person mystery, and is rewarded with a hot prince.  Actually, totally workable!

The Girl Without Hands:  A lotta divine intervention in this one.  Devil wants a maiden fair and tricks her dad into cutting off her hands because reasons.  She goes out in the world and a king falls in love and gives her silver hands.  King has to travel and Devil messes with the postal service, yadda yadda, girl is out in the wilds.  Angels help again, King finds out about wacky misunderstanding and hunts down his baby boo, angels help him, and they meet up again and live happily ever after.  Also god does exactly the kind of faith healing in this story atheoskeptitypes always complain that he can’t do.

You can really tell the Grimm Bros actually did the work they said they were doing, and documented stories from across the land – not just writing their own and ascribing them to people from such-and-such place – because they often evince very different values or attitudes about men, women, religion, etc.  I don’t like the part of Europe this story came from, wherever it was, because the story is bad religious values – piety to the patriarchy taken to the point of egregious violence, being meek as hell to get impossible rewards from heaven.  Fuck that shit a lot.

But the love in it was easily the most moving.  And the girl was the main character!  Make of that what you will.  Also the main character was disabled, to a point, so relevant..?  Angels grew her hands back tho.  God cannot tolerate cybernetics.  But those kooky kids really loved each other.  I weep.  I cry, but angels deserve to DIIIIIIIE.

The Queen Bee:  Three princes gotta wake up three hot princesses from slumber with magical bullshit.  The youngest prince is nice to animals so they help him wake up the princesses.  All three get a princess but nice boy gets the hottest one.  Too many main characters.  Three brides for three brothers.  I don’t see it.

The Goose Girl:  One of the biggest flaws in Frankenstein is classism, and possibly also racism against the Irish, but very prominently the story has repeated instances of the only worthwhile people being upper class in origin.  If the character is a servant and good and fair, it’s because they descended from “finer stock” and only became a servant through misfortune.  This story has the same trope in spades.  Princess rides far away to marry a cool prince, but her wicked servant is jealous and bullies her into giving up her princessly raiment and treasure, and having to assume the role of servant.  A cool talking horse has to get killed and with his head nailed to a wall is still able to speak, giving the king a clue that the real princess is stuck tending geese.  So he takes what he perceives as the true princess and chucks her in an oven until she confesses the situation?  Get tortured, maiden fair.  The story ends with the nasty brutish lower class girl dragged around town in an iron maiden until dead.

Leaving aside the class angle, this is a changeling story.  Characters reversed their rightful roles but were ultimately given their correct rewards.  Is my disabled boy supposed to have a cooler thing going in life, gets it back?  No.  No, this doesn’t work.  Cool magic in the original story, if terrible values and unlikable characters.

The Golden Bird:  In a kingdom ruled by a greedy asshole with three incompetent ratbag sons, the king finds out about a cool bird he wants, and sends his sons to get it.  They fuck up monumentally, with two sons ending up at the gallows and one going on a misadventure with  cool magic fox.  The fox knows everything and has ungodly superpowers, but as a fox he has bad self-esteem, so he always has a human do shit for him.  He helps the least ratbag prince go on a magic adventure to get the cool bird, but prince’s incompetence repeatedly threatens to ruin the endeavor.  In the end, the least ratbag wins everything, and releases the magic fox from a curse, and they all live happily ever after.  Except the dead incompetent ratbags.

I like this one, aside from some amount of annoyance at how the least worst prince conducted himself.  There was some sorta clever stuff happening, it’s zany, it’s action-packed, and has more detail than some of these stories, which are a bit slight.  But I don’t even think it’s worth the effort to map this one onto the story I’ve come up with.

White Snake?  But I’ve made up my mind.  I ain’t wastin’ no more time.  ‘Cuz here I go again.  Here I go AGAAAIN.

Disabled boy can’t make ends meet because his disability benes keep getting cut off.  To get by he takes work for tha Projects Godfather.  He finds out something he was not meant to know, which helps him solve the case of the missing person, and get the sexy prince.

In the fairy tale, servant boy succumbs to curiosity and eats that white snake.  I feel like the symbolism here could be taken in a sophomoric direction.  Maybe he finds out about gay stuff going on in project?  And the Godfather is like, you’re one of us now.  This would be ironic, given what the Godfather gets up to in Henchpuss.  Maybe not.

What is the equivalent of the animal whisper network, in my version?  Secret tunnels in the apartments, maybe?  Secret chatroom?  Mobchat 2.0?  Little black book of mob activities?

He uses that resource to exonerate himself from a seeming wrongdoing, gets favor of boss.  He uses that favor to just permanently excuse himself from the job.  Then he gets involved with investigator boy, and uses his secret insight to help solve the missing person case.

He finds out about people having problems throughout the project and solves them, in exchange for unspecified future favors.  Three fish, the Ant King, and raven chicks.  He feeds the last ones his own horse.  “One good turn deserves another.”

To get the hot prince, he has to do dangerous tasks.  What risk is there in investigating the missing girl?  Original tasks were:  Get ring from bottom of sea (fish helped), Pick up a bunch of grains (ants helped), Get an apple from the tree of life (ravens got it).  Then he gives Prince some apple and they live happily ever after.

What dangerous thing could he be doing that involves helping people who can pay him back, resulting in mystery solved, and wuv, twue wuv?  Lurking on a bulletin board isn’t risky.  Is it?  Crawling around in secret passages that are used by mobsters would be.

I wanted the mob princess to be gay.  Maybe first thing he does is find out she is, because.. something.  She lost her cellphone and didn’t put a lock screen on it?  No…  In the secret passage he witnesses a girl pick her pocket.  He’s suspected of crime but is able to talk the guilty girl into giving up the thing she stole, in a way that doesn’t implicate her.  He lets Princess know he’s gay and she says she owes him – unspecified promise of future assistance number one.

The whole time police are harassing the tenants.  But somebody else becomes involved:  sexy investigator man.  How do I do this?  Somebody makes MC feel like little girl might be in the building, so he risks going into the tunnels.  While he’s in there he finds out about some people in tough situations and ends up helping them, for unspecified future assistance.

Three fish:  Somebody or group of somebodies that can help him with equivalent of the first task to win the sexy prince.  What is the first task?  Maybe… convince him that answer to girl’s disappearance does have to do with the building, so he’ll keep coming back?

Ant King:  Used legions to pick up grains as second task.  In Whitesnake this was when the princess wasn’t satisfied with first feat, seeing the servant as too lowly, and asked him to do a second impossible thing.  Mmm…  ugh drawing a blank here.

Baby ravens:  Get the apple from the tree of life.  The last task, allows happy-ever-after with love interest.  Solves the mystery?

Maybe I need to decide for myself what the resolution to the mystery would be, and to what extent the supernatural should be involved.  I like the idea of referencing Rue Morgue with a monkey in the mix.  What happened to missing girl?  What happened?  What would feel satisfying as an answer to the mystery?

What happened to Laura Palmer?  Too dark.  Should be dark.  I dunno.  I don’t think Frost or Lynch knew at beginning of series.  I ain’t goin’ out like that, as they say.  Gotta do somethin’ proper.  What do I want to say about anything, if anything?

I like people being compassionate and kind; I hate cruelty and greed.  My highest values.  Anything in that?  I’d like the mob boss to live through this one so he can be killed in Henchpuss.  If girl is missing because somebody did something evil, they draw the big ace, so it can’t be the mob boss.

Something terrible should be going on.  What does it have to do with the monkey?  Who did what to whom?  Who was the girl to them?  Competing theories could happen.  Girl was chasing the monkey or lured by the monkey to some horrible person.  Obvious thing would be rape and murder, which is dire as hell.  What other motives could a freak have to disappear a baby?

Spell components?  Sacrifice to the elder gods?  That could be a competing theory, whatever turned out to be true.  A false one could be that the sexy investigator did it so he could get something out of the victim’s family.  What would be a surreal abstraction of the idea of horrible stuff befalling a child?  I think monsters are the go-to.  She was gobbled up by a monster.  Another alternate theory.

What else could work as a metaphor for that?  Transformed into an object, as being murdered to satisfy a bastard’s perversion is the apotheosis of being objectified.  Transformed into an object and destroyed.  What kind of object?  What kind of destruction?  How would it be discovered and what would come of it?  How might it be turned back upon the killer?

The monkey is a murderer in Rue Morgue.  In Argento’s Phenomena a Rue-inspired monkey kills somebody near the end of the picture.  Maybe the monkey is the killer’s familiar, but rebels and kills the killer.  Killer transformed into something a monkey could kill.  Maybe a snake.

Fairy tail-ish but not surreal enough at the moment.  Ugggggh.  Through the darkness of future past the magician longs to see…  I remember that dream where the chicken lady said she used to shed like a bonfire.  Was girl turned into a chicken?  A lil fuzzy chick?  Does killer turn into a snake when he goes to eat chicks?

This isn’t feeling best ever.  I need the best everness.  Something iconic.  Something that grabs you by the short and curlies and slaps you around.  An indelible image.  What can it be?  Hellraiser had its puzzle box, its hell priest.  Maybe an iconic villain?  Yeah, like the ghosts in Kairo, like the mumblecore hypnodracula in Cure.  If he sees you, you just know that you are going to die.  Don’t let him even know you exist.  He walks like a burning pillar, like a lightning strike that refuses to fade.

Like Frank Booth’s weird friends in Blue Velvet.  I loved that scene.  That could be like… the suspects.  The Project Godfather’s friends.  The snake is in that crew.  Get invited to the party but don’t stay til the end.  I think that’ll be Princess’s contribution – at the mob party, she’ll keep MC from having to stay til the end and get taken up into the company.  The Unseelie Host.  The Bacchantes.

Part one of the book, MC eats the Whitesnake ON HIS OWN / discovers the hidden passages.  He opens up a door into his own apartment so he can come and go through them as he pleases.  Finds out about Princess getting girl-hustled and convinces Godfather to cut him loose – can’t take the fear of working for the mob.  Anxiety disorder?  I dunt know if I should be writing a mental condition far outside of my own.  Many people have kernels of disorders and with a smidge of research can write them effectively; gonna need to give that more thought.

Anyway, in background of this part, glimpses of girl and beginning of police harassment.  Maybe it culminates with, right around time of Princess saying she owes him, connecting the police activity with his memory of seeing a girl, wondering if it’s the same.  Also, should establish the mob suspect weirdos.

Part two of book, MC finds out bout sexydude investigations.  Has to protect him from running afoul of the mob, keep him around with hint girl might be in or near building.  Keeps trying to find out more about girl leading to favors owed.  But sexydude grows frustrated.  Somewhere in here should be more red herrings about the weirdos.

Part three of book, MC &/or sexydude go to big weirdo party and have to be saved by Princess.  MC ends up alone, having to save SexyDude and solve mystery.  This all get back to the need for some kind of interesting way to mystery, to menace, to horror.  Should people be dying?  Disappearing?  Might be necessary to establish stakes for the scariness.

I think back on Killer Bob putting that one character’s soul in a doorknob.  That kinda sucked.  I wanna be surreal but I don’t want that.  It’s killin’ me.  I guess the key thing is making any given piece of nonsense feel profound or emotionally significant, or have it speak to one of the mundane emotions one doesn’t normally experience in art, which thereby acquires a profundity it doesn’t normally possess.  sdijorsiejgijreojehow do they do itwfpijprijgpoirjgi

Leonora Carrington’s writing benefits from literally being dream scenarios, as do older surrealist films.  Maybe I can just think of the whole fucken endeavor as being a dream.  Start it with “last night i dreamt of manderley again” and then delete that when i’m done with the draft.  Maybe that’ll help jailbreak my mind.

Somewhere in the building a serpent moves, made of negative space, worming its way through lives and experiences, watching for vulnerability, or gliding by indifferent, until the day that it isn’t.  Ride the snake.  The ancient snake, baby.  The snake is long.  Seven miles. rjeoijgoijrigrefRip it up and start again.

How can I think when I’m burning the candle at both ends?  Every day is work of one kind or another all day long.  I take my breaks when I can but that ends up feeling like too much, like some responsibility is falling through the cracks.  Gotta go fast like hedged hogge.

Snake eats the chicks.  Snake eats the chicks.  How do you see them.  What do you see of them.  Through the walls.  What’s it all look like.  What does it look like.  What is a snake like?  A scary snake.  Regular snake ain’t great, but they’re just an animal.  What’s a human snake like.

Maybe everybody is an animal, that’s why becoming the Beastmaster is useful.  Animal associations for the whole cast.  When MC figures out what animal you are, he gets an advantage.  Maybe he sees a young Henchpuss and figures out the catness.  Maybe the ravens are the fuckup boyz from Henchpuss story, still children in this part of the timeline.  Teens anyway.

I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire, got a cobra snake for a necktie, got a brand new house by the roadside, made out of rattlesnake hide.  Got a lil chimney there on the top, made from a human skull, Come on take a little walk with me honey and tell me who do you love?

What is the apple from the tree of life?  It’s the bomb that will bring us together.  It’s something that brings boys together at the end.  It’s a cure for poison?  When SexyDude gets snakebit?  Sounds good.

I think Angela Carter should be my guide.  I need to re-read some of the short stories from The Bloody Chamber.  Yeah, that’s good.  The downside is that those stories are explicitly fantasy, working in well-trod cultural archetypes that are a lil less accessible in a contemporary setting, without going “urban fantasy” – which is decidedly not my aim, whatever this all sounds like.

Alright let’s think, if I was going to take Carter and bend it Lynch of K. Kurosawa, how could that look?  Funny that I cannot help but think in pastiche.  A true child of the post-modern era, like all the fascists who benefited from helping the public view bigoted opinions as being valid truths, but coming from my own liberal schoolmarm / hollywood underdog story -programmed point of view.  I will say, in my defense, that I do this less on projects that are more specifically for following my own stars.  In this one, I’m trying to build to somebody else’s tastes, based on what I know he likes.

Way distracted, as usual.  Back to the point, Angela Carter but more contemporary and dream-like.  That doesn’t seem too inaccessible.  Y’know, it really still comes back to the issue, coming up on being a crisis, of not knowing how I want to depict the surreal elements of the story.

Snake mans.  The Godfather’s frank boothies.  A candy-colored clown they call the Sandman.  I think this godfather is black.  Maybe Dominican?  Just to avoid a ton of research he can be pretty amurricanized.  Villains of color can be cool, as long as that isn’t all the PoC in your story and they aren’t living down to stereotypes too badly.  I like the idea of him having grandiosity, bombast like the horror emcee characters in the Tales From the Hood movies, played by Clarence Williams and Keith David respectively.  Welcome to hell, motherfuckers!

His guys all run criminal enterprises in the project.  There are two stores in the building, let’s say the loan store and the bodega.  The loan store is a combination payday loan / loanshark operation and convenience store.  The bodega is the only place to eat something besides expired snack food stolen from the back of a semi in Chinatown.

I love naming criminals, but I’m overly tempted to call one Sheisty, like Sheisty Pete, Vincent Sheisty, John Forsythe Emanuel Sheistington the IVth.  I resist the urge.  Here are some ideas: Frederick Paz, Elvira Columbia, Don Commodore, The Disease, Salvage Sirloin, Crotchy Carolyn, Bobby Yomama, Sam Pham, Seeds Ballinger, Markethands, Gulliver Briscomb, Telly Felony, Lachrima Christy, Wretched Fitzgerald, Simone Kovacs, Zinnia Driver, Policy of Truth, Armando Ciniegas, Dario Jefferson, Rashida Mix, The Definition, Fuckbucket Gallego, Norris Lemonde, Yolanda Biggs, My Mormon Cousin, Snitchy Britches, Brittany the Witness, Cold Bicep, Salad Tongs, VHS, Hernan Bonanza, Tori Lameness, Felicia Fix, Jolene Roxbury, Sandra Impious, Nerdwad, Billy Blaster, The Hookup, Graham Torwulf, Laundromatic, Laura Suffolk, Dickvein Jackson, Sir Tossalot, Sizzle, Maryjane Datsun, Sotto Voce, Slim Delivery, Skinny Kimmy, Georgette Lewis, Mikki Maclemore, Fallon Frankenstein, Maddie Iberia, Dexter Slocum, Ivan Grigoriy, Vladi Hubcaps, Bumpin Booty, Seymour Panties, or Cristina Salmonella.  Drop more in the comments or tell me if this list has any faves.

On the other hand, Frank’s boothies may have worked better for lacking names.  I think only one of them had a name?  Maybe I just use the name for my own purposes and leave them mostly unsaid in the story.

This is all useful thought but isn’t getting over the crux of the problem.  I’m not sure what to litcherally do to evoke the kind of mystery and surreal horror my husband likes the most…  I broke down and went several rounds with an AI (deepseek) to try and boil down some lessons culled from the greats, and this is what it came up with:

“To create a Lynchian surrealism in writing, focus on immersing the reader through vivid, tactile descriptions that make the surreal feel tangible and immediate.  Let the surreal elements operate as symbols of a deeper truth, but resist explaining that truth, allowing them to function with their own internal logic.  Anchor these elements in the characters’ emotions—their fears, desires, and traumas—so the surreal feels like an extension of their inner worlds.  Finally, leave the metaphysics unresolved, presenting the surreal as glimpses of a larger, incomprehensible reality.  This approach makes the surreal feel more real by being vivid, symbolic, emotionally charged, and ultimately unknowable.”

I could ask it to make that more concise (I’d already asked it to make it more concise, but you can keep going with that stuff), but it’s important for me to understand and contemplate it.  I’m not giving you the whole back conversation, but suffice it to say, this wasn’t just me asking “hey whatcha think about david lynch” and pressing go.  I gradually ratcheted down what I was most bothered by, most trying to find a way past.  Basically, what do I literally do on the page to communicate surrealism, without it coming off trite, lightweight, like some fantasy.

First part – take advantage of medium to include sensations you wouldn’t have in a movie, just vividly felt, immersive writing.  Resist explanation – to do this I need to know what the truth is for myself before i present the illusion.  Focus on emotional realities, intense feelings people can have in the mundane world, as motive for their entry points into the surreal….   … . . .. . .    Yeah, I’ve had a similar thought before, but it was escaping me as I beat my brains against the keyboard.

Alright.  The reality is … The housing project is a spiritual puzzle box, a trap that lets supernatural forces feed on different aspects of human souls.  The supernatural parasites don’t understand themselves any more than they are understood by the hosts – operate like animals on instinct, despite powers of speech etc.  I could come up with classes of spirits like the angelic hosts.

first sphere:  seraphim cherubim thrones.  closest to the greater reality above the puzzle box.second choir:  dominions virtues powers.  enforce the will of higher powers or operate the functions of the box.third sphere:  principalities archangels angels.  i wonder why there’s a lower tier of archangels and the highest of angels are also called archangels.  that’s like there being local priests called cardinals, or infantry squad leaders called generals.  gotta dig up pseudodionysius and bust his chops.

Why is the box there?  Machines naturally emerge from the spirit world like crystals from chemistry like organisms evolving to fill vacant niches in biomes.  A giant stepped on the earth, and from its burning footprint emerged complexity.  A throne made the shape, cherubs buzz above the fire like flies, seraphs connect the giant to every footstep it has made.  Virtues became the machinery of the box, powers prevent anyone from escaping into the spirit world, and dominions interpret the will of the seraph to rule over lesser spirits.  Archangels go between dominions and angels, which are the main run of parasites, principalities rule over mortal institutions, clans, gangs, etc.

What does this have to do with animals?  I remember when I was researching demons for The Septagram I also researched angels.  As the goetian demons in the story were supposed to be fallen angels, and I’d noticed that the descriptions of some of those demons were quite close to the depictions of some angels, I assigned former angelic ranks to the demons that appeared in that novel.  All that’s to say, I know angels as classically depicted sometimes have animals aspects – six wings, three faces where one is a bull and one is an eagle, that kind of shit.

Maybe all humans are animals, like, in their souls.  Henchpuss is really a kind of cat man, the foolish boys are ravens, somebody else is fish, somebody else is the ant king.  I dunno.  Is this something that all people have before they even come into the box, or something that develops once you’re there?  Is the little girl actually becoming the monkey?

The angels are parasites.  Some would just exist invisibly causing problems for people, or have weird manifestations like stickers notifying people of debts owed or repossessions, drugs that replenish themselves just when you were most desperate, light fixtures in weird locations that burn your eyes.  The archangels and principalities would be more human-like – the Godfather, the owner of the loan store, the owner of the bodega.  Is Princess half angel?

So the snake is a snake is a snake.  Maybe he’s actually a dominion – seraphs have a serpentine aspect, their go-betweens could share this.  He makes human babies into their animal forms and gobbles them up.  But this should be the truth underlying some visual metaphor?  It obviously already is a visual metaphor.  Still I think I could work better with an idea of an underlying reality that will never be explained on the page.

I think this is perverse.  Usually authors will not do this kind of thinking in public, leaving a trail where nerds could track down the answers to all questions and leave people going – oh, this is unmagical as hell.  thanks, i hate it.

But fuck it, we ball…

What does it mean for a person to have an animal soul?  What does it mean for a person to have a soul?  The animals pretty much have to be metaphors for people’s souls, which might be glimpsed visually one way or another in the story, but are not true reality themselves.

This dominion angel snake just eats the souls of children for food.  Om nom.  Serving a seraph means he has more access to the world above than other members of his choir.  He’s aware of his insignificance and that of others.  Humans are nothing to him.  When he interacts at the weirdo party, he may be aloof to others present.  He should have the power to control all lesser angels with a word – the mob boss, the princess, the cockroaches in the hall.  He should have power over fire.

Bro collects souls like you do in Dark Souls – sits on em.  Do they ever digest?  Reduce to nothing?  He’s a snake full of eggs but they ain’t his babies; they’re victims having their dreams slowly digested.  God damn I’m tired.  Ugheuhfuhushdhdhgfghghghl.

I got a lot more thinking to do and not a lot of time to do it in; might come in the form of sketches, which i scan and upload later… I dunno.  Tomorrow, scene ideas.  David Lynch said if you have 70 scenes you have a movie.  We’ll see.

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Big Spoilers Ahead.  If you thought you were going to read the Best Story in the World without spoilin’, read this not.

In the post before (the post before) this, I grabbed a Grimm Bros fairy tale at random, like the Wizard of Oz core of Wild at Heart, Alice in Wonderland-ish aspect of Blue Velvet, and tried to spin it into a contemporary tale.  I turned Puss in Boots into an LGBT crime story.  Now I wanna try to infuse it with all of the things my dude likes, from other posts.  Here I go…

Not yet.  I still don’t feel ready.  OK, a big recurring thing my dude likes is a sense of mystery, but what can be mysterious in this?  In original Puss, how a cat talks could be a mystery, but the story isn’t interested in it, so it isn’t, and in my story he isn’t a cat.  Maybe a combo of little magical elements can add up to that.  I know he generally doesn’t go in for what would be called “magical realism,” more just surrealism proper.  Ugh.

Surrealism is the challenge.  To me what’s great about Lynch is the surrealism, because it carries a sense of profundity.  Something that feels special in a very undefined way.  Maybe undefinable.  Most simply, can I make it feel like a dream?  I’m gonna skim my dreamposting.  Before I do that and before I forget, one element I just came up with and might use:  Boss has a vault with some unknown treasure in it, he sometimes goes in and comes out smoking.  Is it a weird drug stockpile, or a gate to hell?  Daughter is tempted by it at the end but resists and leaves the mystery unanswered, leaves with the boys.

Alright dreamposting…  A few surreal bits.  Main one I thought might work is the boy who accidentally names the antagonist in a video game after himself, and sees that reflected in adult life.  A lot of patchwork environments of grubby weirdness.  Some perv stuff.  Celebs I do not want to include.  Characters with deformities or disabilities.  Messed up animals.  Sense of obligation to menacing paternal figure, shades of The Freshman.

Still not feeling ready.  It occurs to me Puss is kind of a wizard, and he fights a wizard during the story.  Maybe the Wizard and Henchpuss can be actual wizards, Henchpuss being a wayward apprentice that comes to kill his mentor.  “Someday you’ll be killed by an apprentice junior.”  Later on has opportunity to teach some tricks to Princess or Boss and declines to.  What would wizardry be here?  Getting away with absurd things, like our original cat?  I dunno.  Henchpuss should at minimum have prior familiarity with or knowledge of Princess and various key figures in the Underworld.

Maybe the story within a story can feel magical.  Start with Boss as kid playing video game against himself, refer back to it in ways… keep intercutting flashbacks to that, or make him rediscover game as an adult?  So that’s three magic things.  Godfather’s vault, Henchpuss+Wizard being wizards, and Boss’s save game haunting him.

Maybe just plotting things out with more details will suggest to me what the magic should be.

Opens with Marlon Graf age nine playing video game.  Accidentally names enemy with his own name.  His character has the name of his mother.  He goes ahead and plays the game, being a practical kid and unbothered by foolishness.  Some indication of the ghettoness – he lives in the projects.

Marlon’s friends Jared Henke and Colin Gordon get tangled up with a mysterious sorceress.  There’s another kid there that they don’t see the face of.  Sorceress is named Majel Billy.  She gets them tempted on some turkish delights shit.

Grown Marlon gets dragged by Jared and Colin into doing a crime.  They go to a different part of the projects from the corner where they live, and break into a guy’s apartment.  It’s just to steal his supply of Thing X, but they end up killing him.  What about the assistant?  Something in circumstances causes them to split the goods.  Jared takes the treasure, Colin takes the money, and they leave Marlon with the gun – and the understanding he’s to kill the witness.

Marlon says I didn’t even want to do this.  What am I doing here?  Assistant introduces himself, David Coter.  I didn’t want to be a victim of violent crime either.  You know, if you trust me, I could make you very wealthy.  Just don’t get me killed and I’ll let you live.  Are you sure that’s all you want?

Later Marlon gives gun to Jared, saying “you’re gonna need this to watch your ass.”

David tracks Marlon to his home.  Are you sure that’s all you want?  Dude, get out of here!  I’m going to make you rich, because you saved my life.  If being rich is crimes, please don’t.  You won’t have to do a thing.  What can I say to make you go away?  Gimme those cool boots.

Jared comes by Marlon’s pissed, “Somebody got the loot!  The sorceress is going to be big mad.  Watch my six.  This was your fault.”  He goes charging down to a place where he gets ambushed and killed, while trying to roll David.  Echoes of death of David’s old boss.  David sees Marlon and gestures for him to stay out of sight.

The killer congratulates him and he takes him back to Godfather and Princess to keep his head low.  “Thanks for restoring Thing X to me.  You’ve been rewarded with your life, so this is fair.  But I haven’t given anything to your boss.”  “Let him operate in the project, and we’ll make sure you don’t get hit again.”  “Deal, but I simply must meet him.”  “You will.  He’s busy guy.”

David calls Marlon.  “I had to do that, you understand?  I’m so sorry you had to see it.” “Alright but are we goddamn done yet?”  “Please let me make it up to you.  I mean, I took your cool boots.  It isn’t fair.  We aren’t even.”  “Don’t kill my other friend.  No more killing.”  “OK.  Also let me make it up to you.  I got you into the Godfather’s graces so you have a pass for at least one fuckup.”

Comes by with a gift – game cart from a pawn shop.  It has his old save on it!  You mind if I stay and watch?  Bonding.  Colin comes around and David hides in the bathroom.  Bathroom flushes and Marlon says something wrong with toilet, goes to check and Colin startles him barging in, but no David.  Did he flush himself down the toilet?

Colin says “Jared got aced because that weasel got away.  I don’t blame you, not like you’d ever been in that position before, not a bad person…  But we gotta make sure we don’t get caught.  Let’s never go anywhere near there again.  Here, have some cash monies.”

..

NEIN.

This run at the particulars is sucking.  There are some potentially funny bits, it could be reworked to be a lot more interesting.  And the fundamental plot wasn’t bad, I am very likely to use this idea in the future!  But I am realizing this will be less about mystery and horror than about action and crime, which is not going to be the best story in the world for my guy!  And I can’t bend it far enough in that direction!

Last ditch desperate new attempt tomorrow.

–

Big Spoilers Ahead.  If you thought you were going to read the Best Story in the World without spoilin’, read this not.

By the time this post escapes my queue it will be just a few days before I get started on writing the Best Story in the World™ (for my husband).  As I’m composing this like ten days ago, I’m just going through my thoughts on the story in a public way, to get blog content out of the deal as well.  I hope by the time you read this I’ll be a lot closer to having this sorted out than I do as I’m writing it.

The latest scoop is that I should be able to take a fairy tale and heavily rewrite / modernize it.  Downside, one I know he likes a lot is The Seven Ravens, and I feel like if I use the most obvious one it’ll be less thrillening.  So lemme check on some other ones…

A lot of them don’t really have the pathos to turn into a really compelling story for adults.  They’re just “here’s some wacky shit that happened.”  The ones with real stakes are probably all taken…  Well, I’m going to change this a lot anyway.  What could I do to Puss in Boots to make it feel more like compelling narrative, where the ending is earned, instead of being doled out by a magic cat upon some lucky bum?

The boy who inherited the cat should have to suffer a lot more, so his fortune at the end feels like a magical transformation, reward for a bad time.  Taken abstractly, this then becomes a story where there are two characters – one a sad mess, one with cool skills who is always trying to help the other, and is rewarded at the end with that help becoming more permanent.

It starts with the boy saying he’ll kill the cat, and the cat says naw, let me help you out.  Which is weird.  But in terms of a modern scenario, I could see that playing out in a context of war, or organized crime.  Crime is less bitter for me to contemplate, so yeah, some kind of mafia thing?

Puss opens with a business dude bequeathing his possessions to three sons, maybe I have three partners in crime kill a rival and split his possessions.  One gets the business, one gets the money, and the last gets a henchman.  He’s like, what good is a henchman?  I should kill him before he has a chance to stab me in the back.  But Hench says I didn’t like my old boss anyway.  Gimme a chance and I’ll make you phat loot.  Hench asks for some cool boots and uses a zany scheme to make money off that, idk.

Henchpuss’s first scheme was to get catch elusive partridges for a king that loved partridges, and then to lie that his boss was an earl who had bagged them as a gift.  The king gave Henchpuss gold.  This reminds me of the Count of Monte Cristo, where somebody is going to use treasure to pretend to nobility they don’t have.  I think I can come up with modern mafia equivalents.

Henchpuss keeps partridging for the Godfather until he’s ensconced in his inner sanctum.  He overhears that the Godfather and his Princess are going to the lake, and tells his Boss to go bathe in the lake.  He steals his clothes and then cries to the Godfather that Boss’s finery got jacked by banditos and he’ll catch cold in the lake.  Godfather gives Boss finery he never previously possessed, and Boss gets cozy with Princess.  This scheme is a little more outlandish, but I think I can do it.

Literally the same day Henchpuss runs ahead to a fiefdom ruled by a magician, convinces the people in the fields to front like it belongs to Boss, and tricks the magician into making himself into a conveniently edible mouse.  Godfather Princess and Boss are still spazieren gehen and roll up on the fields where the people pretend it all belongs to the boss.  By the time they get to the magician’s castle, it’s no longer the magician’s, an Henchpuss says welcome home, Boss.

Boss and Princess get Godfather’s blessing to marry, Boss inherits the Godfather’s kingdom as well, and he makes Henchpuss into his Underboss.  The end.  This is the problem, as I said earlier.  The Boss’s only moment of suffering was getting Henchpuss instead of grander prizes, and his only virtuous deed, for which he was rewarded with a kingdom, was sparing Henchpuss’s life.  Doesn’t feel earned, not to a modern audience.

I think a natural sideplot, in turning this into a mob story, would be for the Boss’s other brothers from the beginning to recur as characters who mess him up, cause big trouble…  Y’know, Henchpuss is kinda reminding me of Yojimbo, in that he farms out his magical service rather than being a boss himself.  Altho unlike Yojimbo, he has loyalty.  Maybe I could lean slightly more Yojimbo in having him fake service to the other brothers, and betray them in the end to his chosen Boss.

For some reason as I’m running through this all, I find myself thinking of the two lessons of Haitian Creole I took in DuoLingo.  Imma mange some mango ak fwomaj…  Brains are the worst.

Problem is my dude specified he isn’t interested in crime stories, back in the previous post, and that’s where I’ve gone with all this thought.  Can this be tweaked?  I think the key thing is that my husband does not relate to greed as a motivation.  He wants things to make him happy, but does not want an amount of things that would require mobster loot, so mobsterism is unrelatable.  Could I replace the greed motivator?

What does my dude even want, aside from surcease of his various pains?  What’s a relatable goal?  It’s why he likes horror – the only goal is to survive, and this is relatable, I think, to living with chronic illness.  Hm…  Survival as the goal?  Is being gangster that dangerous here?  Is there any other motive he could find relatable?  Lemme think of his fave stories again…

Cure has a cop battling a guy that kills with hypnotism.  Gotta stop bad guy, because it is your responsibility.  Mulholland Drive has wannabe starlet falling in love with amnesiac girl, trying to have a career and love, while a very fucked up secret threatens to flip it all.  Hm… not very usable.  Perfect Blue has a wannabe starlet being stalked by murderous obsessive(s) that make her question herself and reality.  um…  Silent Hill 2 has a guy get a letter from his dead wife, and he goes to meet her in their special place, only to be confronted with his dark secret in surreal survival horror circumstances.  Motive: Investigate an impossible thing of great emotional significance…

My Mafia Puss in Boots is lacking supernatural mystery.  Maybe that can suggest a better motive for the action.  Contemporary setting, mobsters doing dirt, what magic can be happening?  Maybe the gangsterism is imaginary, like PvP in a video game, and there’s some question of what’s real vs. video gameness…  Been done a lot.  Kinda tired.

But a number of stories he likes involve that “through the looking glass” other world aspect.  The one where it’s most metaphorical is Blue Velvet, but that’s also one where it works very well.  Jeffrey’s innocence at the beginning of that story is not compatible with the mobster idea.  Or is it?  Maybe the Boss is just trying to fake it til he makes it, coerced by circumstances and sheisty other brothers into criminal world.

I’m kinda liking that, but I’m still in mobland.  The whole thing is taking shape in my head – kinda baroque, but ultimately can be boiled down to a simple story – just like he prefers.  But it’s in mobland, which is not his preferred milieu.

When I do gangster content in my stories, I prefer to keep it lo-fi, janky and skanky.  Like the furry scene in Centennial Hills.  That opens the door to eccentric freaks like you’d find in Blue Velvet, which feels magical even if the supernatural isn’t invoked.  You know, I may be pondering the mafioso because of my recent experience with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.  I’m thinking, I like the idea of a mob princess in the vein of Trish Una.  Hm hm hm…

I can’t make this self-indulgent!  This MUST indulge my husband, above all!  Argghgghhgghhhghhg!

Well, it goes without saying then, that Henchpuss and Boss are going to be gay, and get together at the end of the story.  That’ll be big big husband points.  I might as well ride this Grimm Bros rocket to its natural conclusion, and switch gears at the last minute to something easier if I have no choice.

To that end, plot notions:

Henchpuss is a cool gay hustler in the criminal kingdom of Godfather.  Boss is a guy whose best friends are no-good scum that try to do a hot score by jacking Henchpuss’s boss.  What if they’re corrupt cops and Boss is just on a bad ride, like Training Day?  No, that makes Boss a cop, and I’d rather not have a protagonist cop again.

What if his best friends are undercover cops and he isn’t?  Lol.  Um… No…  OK.  No… Maybe… I can fold in the Wizard.  They should be in the Wizard’s crime family, which turns Henchpuss’s mousification of the Wizard into a betrayal of Boss’s original boss.  And maybe that crime family could be tha cops?  I feel like a crime story without cops is lacking…

But it isn’t supposed to be a crime story, not really.  Alright, so.  So let’s see.

The Wizard is a drug dealer who has done real well for himself in some limited market, like… a college campus?  Wait, I already did that in Mitosis.  Could this connect to the Mitosis Cinematic Universe?  Don’t be silly.  The Wizard is a Faginesque mystery man who has monkeyboys do crimes for him.  The brothers are monkeyboys turned onto a hot score – jack Henchpuss’s boss.  Boss didn’t know the only way to do that was to kill him.  Why wouldn’t they also kill Henchpuss?  They ask Boss to do it and he cheeses.

Henchpuss says buy me some boots and I’ll make you a bank full of money.  Boss says I’ll settle for not getting killed by rival gangs, but sure, have some boots.  Henchpuss scores some fat loot for Godfather and says it was Boss’s doing.  But mob bosses don’t usually love somebody doing crime without permission in their territory.  Let’s say.. Hm.. what can the partridges be?  What is Godfather like?

The obvious thing would be if the partridges are a vice.  Drugs, drink, weird porn, um… Guns?  Expensive watches?  Cars?  Is he on some Gone in 60 Seconds nonsense?  No, that’s cars, which my dude also finds boring.  What can Henchpuss get with nothing but boots, and impress a mob boss?  Lab-grown diamonds with fake pedigree as coming from more valuable blood mines?  Cool designer drugs?  Man…

Samurai swords?  Comic books?  Funko pops?  Used underwear?  Candy?  Expensive coffee?  Tobacco?  Fine art?  Maybe Henchcat’s starting boss was the guy who usually supplies the stuff to Godfather – but no, if he said Boss was supplying around the same time the usual supplier went dead or missing, Boss would be number one suspect.

Maybe it could be a switchback where instead of saying it was Boss, he says it was another brother.  Then when…  No, this doesn’t work either.  Unless… He says Boss stole it from other brother, and this is actually Henchcat getting revenge, while boosting his new Boss.

Mob Boss goes after other brother One.  This isn’t in Puss narrative originally.  What did come next?  Puss ensconced himself in King’s household while continuing to enrich his boss by selling this supply.  But that don’t work because Godfather would feel entitled to this supply.  Maybe Henchpuss just gives entire supply to Godfather and gets big brownie points.  He just asks permission to operate in town, promising not to hit any of Godfather’s enterprises, and it’s granted.

Henchcat overhears Princess lamenting Godfather expects her to marry so she can make male heir for family line, realizes she’s gay, and hatches scheme to have Boss do a lavender marriage to her, but doesn’t spring the deal yet.  Back at Brother Two’s place, B2’s manipulating Boss into helping him avoid mob wrath, but plans on making him take the fall for the score getting jacked, when the Wizard inquires.

Boss gets messed up and almost killed by the Wizard, Henchpuss gets Godfather to save him, and while in their graces he gets fresh finery.  Wizard disappears, killing brother Two to cover tracks.  Henchpuss discovers a clue, pretends to be Boss to get into the Wizard’s inner sanctum, and defeats him somehow.

Then he tells Boss to take credit for whacking the Wizard when Godfather asks, and Boss gets Made.  Henchpuss ends up having to do some difficult jail time but keeps advising Boss on lavender marriage scheme.  When he gets out, he gets with Boss romantically.

Godfather is biggest remaining threat to everybody’s happiness.  In Puss the King dies, bequeathing kingdom to cat owner.  How will he get taken out here?

It occurs to me that Boss is still a bozo letting Henchpuss do all the work.  What does he do to deserve it?  In this version, I think what he’s doing is being beautiful and romantically available to Henchpuss, who is the actual main character – if not the PoV character at the beginning of the story.

Godfather should pay for his misogyny and patriarchy.  Actually, let’s have this be the moment when Boss and Henchpuss get together.  Godfather finds out Princess is gay and is about to beat her or something, when Boss does his first brave thing and distracts Godfather – by kissing Henchpuss in front of him.  Godfather freaks out and goes to shoot them, leaving him open to Princess stabbing him in the back.

Boss is now Godfather and Henchpuss a consigliere.  Or are they?  I don’t get the impression they wanted to be criminals in the first place.  Maybe the gays all just take the money and run.

So there’s Puss in Boots as an LGBT crime story.  That’s pretty cool, but hardly what I was expecting.  But I suppose that means it would be unexpected to him as well, and therefore surprising or compelling.  Now to see if I can inject things from his “fave stuff” lists, reduce influence of “most hated stuff” list.

Aha!  Looking at older posts gave me some hot notions.  Commenter Ian King suggested a crumbling old gothic estate as a location, which doesn’t fit too well, but what about… a council estate?  What if the whole story including rival gangs is much more small potatoes / low rent, and the whole thing takes place in one housing project?  That fits me and my husband’s interest, as poor people, in more familiar environs – in avoiding glamorous depiction of wealth and power, of writing the world as we know it.

Then the name can just be the name of the project.

I’ve made lists of my husband’s favorite things before, for various purposes.  These were in sketchbooks, so I’m gonna try to distill and elaborate on them here, for use with my upcoming zany writing schemes…

LIKES

Movies:  Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, The Thing, Cure, The Shining, Jacob’s Ladder, Gothic, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tetsuo: Iron Man, Akira, Perfect Blue, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Session Nine, Vampyre, Tale of a Vampire, The Cat, Kairo, Night of the Living Dead, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Little Otik, Crimson Peak, Videodrome, Event Horizon

Some take-aways from that:  character-centric horror, indelible imagery, iconic qualities, if it ain’t literally the end of the world it feels like the end of the world.  dreams.  monsters.  beautiful people.  beautiful people who are monsters.  small central casts.

Stories, Books, and Comic Books:  The Metamorphosis, Fall of the House of Usher, Lost Souls, The Strange Tale of Panorama Island (both versions), My Sweet Audrina, The Necrophiliac, Hellstar Remina, The Laughing Vampire

Some take-aways from that:  gothic drama, cold-hearted beauties, violence, style, ultimate corruption.

Visual Art:  Edward Hopper, Francis Bacon, Hieronymus Bosch, Malcolm Liepke, JC Leyendecker, Stephen Gammell, Suehiro Maruo

Some take-aways from that:  That stuff is pretty varied, but a lot of it ranges from spooky to horrific, from stylish and elegant to exploding with lurid detail.

Games:  Silent Hill (best to worst 3 2 1 4), Sanitarium, The Dark Eye, The Secret World, Rule of Rose, Fallen London, Kult

Some take-aways from that:  good storytelling, it’s all horror games, an emphasis on parallel / hidden worlds.

Music: The Cure, Bauhaus, Tr/st, Drab Majesty, Qual, Joy Division, The Pixies, Fad Gadget, Grauzone, Depeche Mode

Some take-aways from that:  dark romance, frenetic agony, convulsive energy, awkward alienation, depression, laughing at one’s own depression, literary references, intellectualism.

Keep it Short:  Short stories, even so short as to be simple vignettes, like Fuan no Tane.  He always likes this better than long form fiction, which is funny, because he wants more of what he likes, right?  The best compromise if I’m shooting for longer length, I think, is to make sure each part holds up well on its own – has internal interest and its own arc.

Fashion:  Description of what characters are wearing, or other things related to their milieu or subculture – the food they eat, the things they drink, the music they listen to.  I don’t think he always needs this – many of his favorite short stories don’t get much into those details – but he likes it when it shows up.  Describing what characters are wearing, or what they look like at all, can throw a brick on your story’s pace.  I think the writers most concerned about that would be people like myself who are heavily influenced by cinema, but it’s a mistake to forget what medium you’re working in.  Sometimes people wanna know what stuff looks like, sometimes they don’t.  Gotta find your audience and play to it.  In this case, easy, it’s just one guy who I know well.

Looking back at the original notes, he specifically said he likes to see “makeovers.”  That’s tremendously gay.  I’m into it.  Not sure how well suited it will be to gothic genre fiction, if that’s what I make.  What the hell am I going to make?

Colorful Color:  My dude may be goth, but at heart he retains some element of that childhood attraction to green pterodactyls and purple dragons.  New Wave fashion, the makeup on New Romantics, the colors of Lisa Frank art.  Black paired with rainbow.  This is more a thing he is drawn to in visual art, but a reference to nifty colors in a book might go over well.

Simple Language:  I don’t think my dude is as much into this as he was when he made the older of the lists I was reading.  Since then, he has read and enjoyed The Turn of the Screw and Blood Meridian.  Though he did not read the latter in a linear fashion; he hopped around in it, reading parts at random until he was done.  He said it was what he imagined xtians get out of reading the bible – open to a random page for inspiration.  That book was a lot less about the overarching plot than the vignette and the character, I think.

Just the same, I think I know what he was getting at when he added “simple language” to the list.  We’ve both read amateur writing that tried to impress by using strange sentence structure or confusing metaphors.  Best to avoid that kind of shit, I’m sure.

Descriptions:  My husband has mixed opinions on how much description to include or not include in a story.  He has a piece of Stephen King advice memorized that he finds useful – that what’s left to a reader’s imagination is something they can make their own, actually immerse them in the story more effectively than telling them what to see.  His example was having a character step into a bar for a short scene, and only mentioning two details – like the bar being sticky or the bartender having hairy arms.  Something like that, I don’t recall specifics and didn’t feel like looking it up.

That is sound advice, but by contrast, sometimes an author wants to cast a spell, pull us more fully into their own world, and my dude has enjoyed that kind of writing a lot as well.  Since he has this flexibility, I think it might behoove me to use another metric for deciding how much and how little description to include.  Here’s a good one:  The more description you include, the more time slows down; the less, the faster it goes by.  I’ll just use description to control pace, or cover important details…

I say that, but I’ll probably just fall back on my evil ways and describe stuff however I please.  It’s a real hard habit to change – maybe those kind of changes are best left to subsequent drafts.  Looking back at the original notes, one says, “vivid description but not too dry.”  I think I tend to hit this mark with no effort.

Writing Actions:  A caution against excessive blocking.  Most of us are thinking visually, or acting out what a character does in our heads, so we feel the need to say “he put his hand on his chin” forty-seven times in a book, when one would probably suffice.  How often does it really matter if something happened on the right or left side?

Environmental Activism:  Not actual environmentalist themes, which would be an intrusion of depressing realities best left to other authors.  When my husband is looking at the work of amateur writers, the number one thing he harps on is that they do not establish what the hell is happening – the first element being where it’s happening.  They’re too eager to get into dialogue between their fun funboys, but are they in a rundown apartment or the Gobi Desert?  That shit kinda matters.

Establishing shots are a thing in cinema; descriptions of where your story opens have been de rigueur for hundreds of years for a reason.  In fair Verona where we lay our scene…  I don’t think I’m going to have a problem with this.  I don’t think like those kids.  RIP to them, but I’m different.

Identifiable, Well-Conceived Characters:  Stephen King does well enough at this most of the time, but his failures are notable.  As a boomer, he can maybe detect the subtle differences between white people with strained marriages and kids they don’t pay adequate attention to, better than we can.

Lovable Characters:  I don’t think he’s as much about this now as he used to be, but he’s still 100% not into unlikable characters, which is something a surprising amount of writers and readers are fond of.  I know he hates anything that feels twee or like it’s for babies, so even the beloved Dale Cooper is pushing it a little, sometimes.  People having likable flaws is good.

Romance Beginning or Being Renewed:  A lot of drama is wrung out of relationships going bad; he is not interested in that.  I’ll avoid it.  He does like to see a romance begin, or be reaffirmed in the course of a story.  Less depressing.

Humor:  My husband doesn’t like a lot of humor writing, but the humor in the writing he likes?  He likes it a lot.  He also tends to include elements of humor in most of his stories, at least a tiny dash here or there.  The kind of humor I’d be reaching for: Kiyoshi Kurosawa (wry, dark, feminist, humanist), David Lynch (people acting like wacky monsters, other people having gentle quirkiness, awkward situations as long as they aren’t too humiliating, parody like Invitation to Love or What did Jack Do?), parody of the banal things of life such as brand names and TV shows, breaks in tension at dramatically appropriate moments, etc.

Horror:  Typically of the surreal, science-fiction, or fantastical origin – a menace you would not encounter in real life.  Feeling disempowered in real life, he cannot relate to the power fantasies of being able to action hero your way out of danger.  He likes the Raid movies some, but not as much as me.  Horror as a genre is incredibly diverse.  On one end, there are action horror stories, where the characters survive and / or defeat the evil because they are so cool.  Not his jam.  Another expression is lurid interest in physical and psychological trauma, as one sees in “torture porn,” or edgelord films like Last House on the Left.  Also not his main interest, though occasionally there’d be some appeal in some amount of that.  Lastly, you have the disempowered character being confronted with a source of mortal fear, and doing their best to escape or survive.  That’s the stuff.  Another use of horror as a theme rather than a genre is to express a powerful feeling, as the surreal elements of a David Lynch film.

Survival Horror:  Of his favorite things, not a lot in this category.  Significantly Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo and the Silent Hill games.  What does he like about it?  I’m guessing it isn’t the “chance to return to zero, and make your way by wits and steel” like the main run of zombie genre fans, or the desire for a faceless mob you can mow down without compunction either.  Maybe there’s some allure in not having as many people around, since he has the shyness.  There’s another way that could interact with social anxiety – the circumstance gives an obvious way to bond with strangers, to overcome shyness.  If you’re a survivor, you have something in common.  But I think, broadly, this is just an extension of what he likes about horror.  It is believable and relatable to be in a circumstance you must react to, exciting when it’s a scary circumstance that is not one you would actually experience in real life.

Ambiguous or Inhuman Enemies:  This can be true in both survival horrors like Kairo and Silent Hill, and in works that include surreal horror like Twin Peaks and Lost Highway.  I haven’t seen all of the new / final season of Twin Peaks yet, but I somehow doubt that within it Lynch and Frost spelled out exactly wtf Bob and the doppelgangers were.  One has to wonder to what extent even the writers themselves left things intentionally undefined.  Spirits?  Aliens?  Alien spirits?  What does it mean to be a “magician” in that world?

While as a writer I tend to spell this shit out pretty specifically, I think I can manage the restraint to make an ambiguity work.  On the other hand, people did express some confusion about Josefina and Blasfemia, so I should tread carefully.

Suspense:  I don’t tend to instinctually think like this, as a writer – gotta force it.  Remember when I said I was going to aim to write a Dan Brown-style thriller?  I very thoroughly planned and outlined it, but didn’t get very far into writing.  Nonetheless, I can’t wait to get back to that project, because the preparation did help a lot.  The writing was very fun.  But making it suspenseful?  For this I had to make a conscious effort in my outline to include all the tips and tricks famous people like Brown and (much more importantly) Hitchcock have given on the subject.  It’s a cool way to make a story compelling.  Even cheap tricks can work well; they exist for a reason.  But I may have to take a very different approach if I want to land on David Lynch instead of John Grisham, you know what I mean?

Mystery:  Silent Hill, Mulholland Drive, Cure, these works all had a significant sense of mystery to them.  Not a whodunit among them, but still, you are led to wonder a lot, which is compelling to a guy like him.  I’m a basic bitch for stories spoonfeeding me.  Perhaps I’m a touch incurious – too assured that I understand everything I need to understand in life, and that anything outside of that domain can stay mysterious if it so desires.  But I think this’ll be a lot easier than suspense to work into any given story idea.  All I gotta do is come up with a bunch of stuff that is never shown on the page – only alluded to – and thereby invite speculation.

Should be important stuff, something you might actually care to know.  I’ve seen amateurs put a mysterious but uninteresting character in front of you, and in asking for feedback say “what do you want to know about this guy?”  Gotta make sure the answer, in my case, isn’t “not much.”

DISLIKES

Story Too Long:  He much prefers short stories to novels.  Contradiction:  He writes novels.  What’s up with that, man?  He also wants to see a lot more of the things he likes – like Silent Hill games, which turned to shit before their time.  You can’t get more of what you love without said thing going long, one way or another.  For my part, I’ll probably keep what I write on the short side for a novel, with room for a sequel.

Description Too Dry:  Too much description, or description that creates a dull, uninteresting tone.  I’m a lazy writer.  Won’t catch me penning anything like the first chapter of Mysteries of Udolfo, so I think this is not a problem.

Unnecessary Information / Overlong Exposition:  When we develop a sci-fi or fantasy setting, or an elaborate web of conspiracy or intergenerational intrigue, we tend to want to lay out all of our work on the page.  Big mistake, for any audience except the ultragork, and my dude has a low tolerance for it.  I don’t expect this’ll be a problem for me.  On the other hand, maybe J & B would’ve made more sense if I spent more than the odd short paragraph on explanation…  Contradiction:  None; he’s pretty consistent about this.

Too Much Relationship Drama:  He probably has Post-raised-by-women-who-watch-Dynasty Stress Disorder.  A lot of stories get their mileage out of ups and downs in a relationship.  Oh no, is he cheating?  Is she jealous?  Is he planning to leave her?  Will absence make these hearts grow cold?  Contradiction:  He’s OK with including one of these things, but generally is true to this principle.  It just doesn’t interest him – or me.

Too Much Conversation:  When word count is tilted toward dialogue, this is a pet peeve for him.  Especially if the dialogue is redundant or adds nothing but mild character development to the story.  Contradiction:  None; even in real life he’s pretty stoic.  Maybe he doesn’t like chatty characters because he doesn’t relate.

Graphic Sex:  A lot of people agree with this, just find it tasteless to see a lot of dirty words in print, feels better when something is left to the imagination.  Contradiction:  How much sexual content is in David Lynch films?  In books he loves?  I suppose that can hinge on how one defines “graphic.”

Judgments / Shaming:  Too easy to relate to a character who is on the spot, beloathed.  As a child he used to identify with the villains in superhero stories, like Wesley Willis assuming Batman would kick his ass.  Contradictions:  If he hates an antagonist enough, they might get some amount of this.  But even then, not for long.  He once wrote a rush limbaugh -inspired character that was mocked by a demon for like two seconds before being sent to hell.  Don’t dwell on it.

Embarrassment Comedy:  You ever notice how much comedy – especially sitcoms and Farrelly brothers movies – revolves around humiliation?  You ever been humiliated?  How you responded to that experience may be the deciding factor in whether or not this humor works for you.  Personally, I fucken despise it.  Nuke it from orbit.  My dude has expressed as much to me, and I can’t see myself writing a scenario like this, even by accident.  Incidentally, the fetish some people have for humiliation is also beyond my comprehension, except insofar as I understand any intense experience could be sexualized.  Not my cup o’ tea.  More broadly, my husband doesn’t like reading about people being embarrassed, on the spot, upset, but… Contradiction:  The sad ending of Mulholland Drive hinges in part on the social horror of humiliation.  At least we’re not expected to laugh at it.

Realistic Characters as Impediment to Story:  It might be realistic for characters to have a slow time adjusting to a fantastic circumstance, but if they’re still getting used to the idea of zombies existing when the credits are about to roll, that shit is annoying.  Real life people tend to not have bold personality traits that line up with tropes, just being a muddle of contradictions and mild feelings about things.  Archetypes and tropes exist because they help storytelling, and shouldn’t be shunned to make your guys more boring.  Contradiction:  My husband, as a writer, does tend toward understated characters that don’t hew closely to existing archetypes, and can have complex motivation.  A sort of realism can work, if it doesn’t impede the story.  I don’t think I’ll have a hard time writing characters for him, in this way at least.

Inscrutable Characters:  Not everybody has to wear their heart on their sleeve or be obvious from go, but if you haven’t made at least a false sense of the character within a few chapters of their introduction, they’re kind of a non-entity, not interesting.  The Man of Mystery can’t be too mysterious.  Contradiction:  He’s down with the antagonist from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, who seems to have amnesia throughout the picture, and has indecipherable motives.  What’s up with that, man?

References to Attractiveness:  Nobody is universally attractive.  Even if they look remarkable, different people will be struck by that differently.  I’ve only seen people with noteworthy eye color less than ten times out of thousands of people I’ve seen, and I wasn’t “arrested by their limpid pools,” hollering after them or trying to get those digits.  Some readers want a fantasy of everybody being horny for the character they identify with, but it reads like the insecurity of the author to me.  Not compelling, unrealistic in a bad way – a way that limits the narrative.  Contradictions:  My man likes the early works of Billy Martin, which have the sexy-to-everyone specialest boys in them.  I do think we’re mostly simpatico on this one and I’m not likely to transgress, but could I dip into it just a bit, for cheesy charm?

Self-Important and Self-Pitying Characters:  When the author identifies too much with the character, there’s a tendency to treat them even more preciously than we treat ourselves in real life.  At least, I’m hoping that’s the reason characters are sometimes written like this, because if they are reflecting their authors accurately, those authors are not appealing people.  It comes off like more insecurities.  Sometimes it will be a character clinging too tenaciously to the comforts of their cute little status quo.  Sometimes they’ll overreact to perceived slights and disrespect.  Sometimes they will just seem absolutely uninterested in other characters in the story.  Sometimes they’ll react to any suffering imposed by the narrative with too much sniveling and whining.  Not every character has to be stoic manjobs, but this stuff sucks.  Especially when the Universe of the story agrees with their point of view – everybody around them is unreasonable, every inconvenience they experience truly is a cosmic injustice, etc.  Contradictions:  My dude likes gothic writing, which does have a lot of self-pity on display.  But, y’know, when you’re being poisoned by your grandma and your uncle is driving you insane with snakes in the parlor so he can steal your inheritance, self-pity might be in order.  He’s clarified this for me more recently – impotent rage is the least appealing expression to him, reminiscent of incels.

Characters too Edgy:  Stories that expect you to identify with a rapist – why are there so damn many of these?  Ditto other stripes of creep.  This is easy enough to avoid.  Contradiction:  My husband likes some stories with grody MCs, altho the out for that is when the author is not asking the reader to agree with them, like EA Poe with his various murderer-narrators.

Gross-outs:  We personally know a talented new writer who loves to write about sloppy piles of guts and excrement.  My dude has a reasonable amount of respect for her, but is decidedly not on the same page for that stuff.  Contradiction:  The part in Ranpo’s Panorama Island which luridly describes the double’s sorta-fresh corpse gets a thumbs up, as does the writing of Gabrielle Wittkop, such as The Necrophiliac.  Hm.  I suppose, for horror, a good metric would be how it compares to Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (originally Brain Dead).  That is clearly grody as hell for the sake of being grody, which is a no-go.  One of our writer friend’s short stories was very much like Dead Alive, or Reanimator.

Scary Animals:  It amuses me that this was on one of the lists because he has done extensive work on at least three novels with prominent use of animals for scares.  He has complex feelings on beasties.  I do hope he gets them ready for self-publishing; they are compelling.

Children and Babies:  Something about stories involving children or babies is extremely uninteresting to my dude, which makes sense for a non-breeder, but there’s more to it than that.  He also doesn’t like most literature written for children, no matter how much it works for the masses.  That’s part of why he never had to feel the disappointment of queen terf’s heel turn the way many people close to his age do.  Even if the characters are over eighteen, if they’re “coming of age” or “figuring themselves out,” it feels like kid stuff to him.  Contradiction:  I think he’s cool with scary kids, like Damian Omen and Sadako The Ring.

Boring Settings:  He just finds certain milieus uninteresting and boring – deserts, prisons, courtrooms, corporate / professional settings, extravagance and wealth.  Contradiction:  He has a line from The Trial tattooed on his body, the joaker.  Plus gothic stories are usually set in an environment of extravagance and wealth, if a decaying one.

Overly Detailed Settings:  Can’t have so much detail that it’s hard to remember or understand.  Contemporary setting is by far the best, if sci-fi or fantasy keep jargon constrained, minimize learning required.  For my part on this project, I’m definitely using a contemporary setting.

Crime Stories:  Again, a setting or milieu he finds uninteresting.  For me, it depends on the execution and the focus.  If the characters are all competent and cool criminals executing a hojillion dollar heist, less interesting than grotty fuckups getting into trouble.  But the grotty fuckups can easily become too unlikable.  For me Pulp Fiction really pushed the limit.  I generally can’t get behind those assholes, but the actors helped a lot.  Professional charisma havers.  You do not get this benefit in print!  Of topic.  Lessee… Contradictions:  He liked The Raid movies.  Twin Peaks is a murder mystery -esqe thing.  More than one Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie has police procedural elements.

Cars / Vehicles:  Like a boring setting to him, but also connects to a general lack of interest in action.  No Fast No Furious.

Action:  He doesn’t like action adventures – he does not like scenarios that show a character’s power, because it is unrelatable to somebody with chronic feelings of disempowerment, even as wish fulfillment.  Contradiction:  He is OK with action scenarios that are more about just barely surviving, horror content or scenarios that feel like horror content.  The Raid movies are relentless action, but horrifying.  He especially liked a scene of the dude from Matheson’s I Am Legend arriving late at his fortified home, which was swarming with vampires.

Too Many Enemies:  Not sure what he meant by this one.  May have just been an extension of how he doesn’t like longer form or overly complicated stories.

Heavy Topics:  Environmentalism, war, global strife, politics, homophobia, transphobia, racism, ignorance – even in antagonists.  It’s too real; my husband goes to literature to see problems that are not affecting him IRL.  Contradiction:  I think he can tolerate traces of this, but he’s pretty consistent about it.  The villain should be scheming to steal your kidneys for Satan, not hurting you because you are gay.

From Recent Discussion With Him:  Best stories are simple at their core, which is why he favors short form.  If I do something long, the length must not come from complexity within the story, or too many side plots and characters.  Asked which David Lynch movie involved the least time-wasting foolery, he said Blue Velvet.  I bet he’d say that of Eraserhead as well, if he had thought of it.  Asked for an example of something more like novel length that didn’t waste too much time, The Haunting of Hill House was mentioned, and Frankenstein.  He emphasized that fairy tales are a good model for elemental storytelling.

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This is more notes to myself and I have no special idea on what people should comment, if anybody feels like commenting, but as you please…

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