It’s that crazy month again when everyone tries to write a novel. Since I enjoy being topical I will say a few words about a novel I tried to write. It was going to be called The Gods Above and Below and yes, most of the characters did have swords of some sort.
I was dating a girl, somewhat seriously, when all of a sudden a massive breakdown in communications led to one of those protracted Cold War break-ups. You know how that is, mostly just sad and awful and boring and then even more awful. When that proverbial dust finally cleared I found myself quietly existing in our cottage by myself with only my best friend Roast Beef (a cat) and some rats that lived in the walls to keep me company. I worked in the depressing smoke and mirrors world of SEO. I went to work and came home and ate fast food in bed. I developed a battle hardened malt liquor gut. Sleep was for the normies, so I didn’t do much of that either. I listened to the same song every day over and over again. But on the bright side I had convinced myself that I could and even should write a fantasy novel! I think I had just read Grendel by John Gardener and thought “Hey, if this guy can do Beowulf from Grendel’s perspective and be embraced by the literary world surely I can write a fantasy novel where everyone is drunk and nothing really happens!”
Oh yeah, your dude (me) was going to attempt to reinvent the Epic Fantasy Wheel by foregoing a therapist and instead dealing with his depression by creating an imaginary and likewise depressing world. This is the sad dying world in which my unpublished and unpublishable vision for The Gods Above and Below was set.
Whenever I sit down to the herculean and foolish task of trying to actually write a novel I work for the most part in two fairly played out genres. One is early twenty-something drunken bildungsroman and the other is epic (or “high”) fantasy. The thing is, I’ve been trying to write fantasy novels all my damn life. Fantasy books were my jam, a nice escape hatch from boring shit like homework and chores and reality. They were that raw shit a small-ish shy-ish kid could just consume with junkie alacrity. My first attempt to write on of my own was in 6th grade. I called it Lumin Stones and it was unsurprisingly very shitty, though my parents claimed to be big fans. At some point proto-Animorphs showed up and the main character-whose name was for some reason Derrick-sort of endorsed eugenics. Two half brothers (Derrick and Red), a girl they both have a crush on (Betsey), and the only nice Goblin in the world (Um’ilak)were the heroes. One of the villains was named Warlord Death and I mean that’s a pretty dope name. Ultimately Lumin Stones was a Sword of Shanarra rip-off which was itself a massively shameless Lord of the Rings rip-off. But hey, not bad for 6th grade. I mean I was just a tiny idiot basically. I didn’t even know about Israel and Palestine yet!
The second fantasy novel I tried my hand at was called Shafts of Light and it was about orphan gangs living in a dead city made of stone fighting each other for unclear reasons. There was a kindly gnome physician who checked in on them from time to time. It was inspired by Akira and Robert Jordan’sThe Wheel of Time. The last chapter I wrote had the main characters-now captives of some mysterious bad dude named Lieutenant Nimrod-flying on a dragon to the island where the bad guys were all gathered in some sort of fantasy mafia summit. I really felt my “riding on a dragon” prose was not very convincing, so that was that. Next was The Ballad of Five which I was writing during 9th grade. This one was about a serial killer with a face tattooed red who was being controlled by wizards to distract the populace from a northern invasion. I was the main character. I think RA Salvatore and George R.R. Martin were the guys I mostly stole from in that book. In 11th grade-no longer a person who had never had sex and therefore now a more worldly and mature writer-I began The Brothers Tellar, which was inspired by Toni Morrison’s Beloved (kind of) and the Thirty Years War and I don’t know, Robin Hood or something. That one crashed and burned around the sixty pages mark.
All that was prelude. Bullshit practice for the real deal. The real masterpiece that lived and breathed in my dome was The Gods Above and Below, which I elevator pitched to friends as “Apocalypse Now meets Lord of the Rings but also everyone is always drunk.” Happy ending are bourgeois! Even bittersweet endings are bourgeois (the bittersweet ending is Nordic style socialism to the glossy American capitalism of a “happy ending” and both are just stepping stones to Full Depressing Real-Ass Ending). I was going to write the fantasy epic that ended in crazy loopy failure. Failure was human, failure was recession proof, failure is something people can sing along to. If you are gonna add to the canon then at least keep your fiction about magical stones and enchanted swords dangerous.
I was strangely confident in this idea. This was an epic high-fantasy novel that was going to knock you on your ass, drop bombs on your moms, kick the shit from you. I was going to write the post-colonialist sword-and-sorcery epic of our times. “If you like Spivak, Said, or George R.R. Martin, this is the goddamn book for you!” is a blurb I imagined for the cover. I filled up tiny notebooks with insane ideas and long weird lines of dialogue. Halfway through the story the novel would briefly become a play, something Beckett-esque to be acted out. That is very cool, if not daring, I thought! The Paris Review would ask me about this bold move during a long two day interview in my shitty chateau.
The novel opens with a group on a quest cooking dinner a few days into their journey to destroy a Demon Lord that was recently unleashed by some shitty apostate wizard. The group on the Noble Quest is comprised of an alcoholic incompetent mage, an orphan boy (the Chosen one), a taciturn manservant, two racist and violent Elven warriors, a cowardly dwarf, a Prince in disguise, his indigenous servant named Painted Boots (this was definitely a good idea), and two knights, one sweet and one obnoxious.
In my world, the Elves had colonized this continent long ago and were pointy eared approximations of bloodthirsty and treasure-hungry Europeans from back in Ye Fucked Up Times. I said to myself, “Yes. This is what the people want. Racist Elves is the ticket.” I wrote the first chapter very quickly. It’s just the group sitting around talking and at the very end the most classically heroic figure of the group, Kurt the Darling, is bit by a snake whilst taking a shit. That’s how the reader would know I play for keeps, I thought. And I also wanted to really make sure people knew about clothes:
Fashion trends: make the world not static, but constantly changing. Because of all the cultures and the high birth rate the fashion world as well as slang and cultural attitudes and mores are in constant flux. Baggy trousers for instance, or sashes of a particular color, sleeves with dyed frilly shit.
Nights were about multiple Sugar Free Red Bulls and trying to knock out two or three pages that I wouldn’t hate in the morning. Around this time feeling the possibilities of rebirth and my own redemptive arc I tried to learn how to cook. But Burger King was easier. And there was a bar next to Burger King. One of many bars where the bartender started making me screwdrivers as soon as I walked through the doors. Bars: where everybody knows your foofy weird drinking habits.
Anyway, I had all sorts of plans for my dudes on their Quest to destroy the Demon Lord. It would more or less proceed with standard fantasy tropes until halfway through the book when it would be revealed the young boy was not actually the Chosen One, the actual Chosen One had died in a freak accident years ago (his trusty horse kicks him in the head), and that basically everything was fucked. This realization will just render everything moot and people start to go nuts because without a Chosen One you don’t have a Quest, you just have a bunch of assholes hanging out in a frontier trying not to get eaten by hyenas. That was one of my better ideas: replace wolves with hyenas. Wolves are fine, but there is not a fantasy novel in the world that doesn’t feature at least ten wolves. No wolves here. Wolves are basic, hyenas are chaos theory. Anyway, seeing as there is no more stopping the destruction of my imagined world there was then to be a great unraveling. The rest of the novel would just be about waiting for everything to go dark, plagues, the night that never ends, etc. So at this point I’m stealing from On the Beach, the book about Australians waiting for nuclear winter to reach the Southern Hemisphere.
I occasionally tried to explain all my plans to my little coterie of friends while we drank backpack booze at one of many spots in the playground archipelago of suburban San Jose. People hate my hometown, but this wasn’t the tech-boheme disruption Silicon Valley. This was the good stuff on the margins. Youngish people looking up at the stars and trying to be earnest to each other without feeling stupid. They were just happy I was writing again. Friends are nice. They are supportive of dumb ideas, always. There’s some sort of lowkey nobility in encouraging people, even if their ideas or dreams are sort of doomed or worse yet, dumb.
At some point the incompetent mage kills himself, like implodes himself with some suicide spell. The Dwarf runs away and leaves his axe, which as anyone who cared to listen to me knows is a massive taboo in my fantasy world. The absurdity and pointlessness of the quest crushes everyone. I was probably going to drop some Knight of Infinite Resignation stuff from my boy Søren Kierkegaard. The group starts to go a little crazy, and so does the world. They do a lot of fantasy peyote. The dead rise and do bizarre things. Wittgenstein’s dragon makes a cameo. Gravity becomes more of a guideline than a rule. There is a village that is dedicated to communism. One by one the company is killed. The last man standing, the taciturn manservant (his name was Roley), is hanging out with some orphaned children at the end. He curses the Gods Above and the Gods Below and us in between too. He holds his orphan friends close and my pretend earth dies. The end.
But I never got around to writing that final scene, or even most of the scenes. The architecture of my words was not so much broken as it was warped. I felt a wild ambivalence to my dialogue, which I usually find the least awful part of my attempts at prose. The real world too often felt like a crushing boot heel, and though writing helped for awhile and got my fingers unfurling some decent run-on sentences and gave me something to look forward to, ultimately this story only made me feel gross. What point was I trying to make with this dilettante deconstruction of high fantasy? That nothing matters? That good not only doesn’t but can’t prevail? That I know Wittgenstein’s name? That the overarching philosophy of the (my) world is “Bro you are fucked and so too are we all”? The place I was trying to create was a bleak and drunk world and all the characters hated each other. There was no humanity in it, no blood. Just a bunch of grumpy Dungeons and Dragon approximations arguing with each other by borrowing my internal monologue. One day I just stopped writing it. Stopping was the correct call. I soon began a new project. This one was about junior college basketball and love. I finished that one. Sort of.
I moved out of that cottage, way out. So now 3000 miles away from me there is a tiny stack of printer paper with as much of the story as I could manage printed upon it. I left it in California with my parents when I moved to Baltimore. They didn’t like it as much as Lumin Stones, which, again, I wrote as a sixth grader. That’s fine. I didn’t have the wherewithal to go through with destroying that particular world and those particular characters (except for Kurt the Darling R.I.P.). They’re suspended in fantasy purgatory, which is not such a terrible place to be considering the alternatives. I’m glad I tried and I’m glad I failed. Failure isn’t the end of the fucking world, after all.
Oh, the song I was listening to every day around this time was Kind of Like Spitting’s cover of “When I’m Gone” by Phil Ochs. It’s a really great song and I recommend it. The original is also great, obviously.
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
dededos
germansingergirl
jbbartram-illu
jacobvanloon
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
dailybridgerton
theartofmadeline