I’m running a contest.

I want you to take an author photo of yourself. You know — an author photo, the photo that is meant to go in the back of the book? Or the one that exists on the author’s website, Twitter, and other marketing materials?

Author photos can be classy, great, compelling, curious, funny.

But some of them can be a little bit awkward.

(The hand under the chin, for instance: a classic awkward author look.)

So! I thought, HA HA HA let’s do that.

I’ll run a contest whereupon you take a truly awkward author photo, and then we all applaud and have a good time and further, I give out some prizes. Because, mmmm, sweet sweet prizes.

The best, most awkward(ly hilarious) photo, will be decided by all of you with a vote.

And the winner there will get:

One terribleminds t-shirt (either Certified Penmonkey or Art Harder).

And one terribleminds mug (either Certified Penmonkey or Art Harder).

(Merch visible here.)

Then, I’ll pick two other random winners to get a brand new set of terribleminds Post-It notes, which at the top say: #amwritingmotherfuckers (no image yet — still tinkering with the font and design — but I’m sure it’ll be cool and even if it’s not WHATEVER IT’S FREE).

Send your awkward author photos to me at: terribleminds at gmail dot com.

Make sure the subject says: [Awkward Author Photo Submission]

You have one week for the contest — due Wednesday, September 24th, noon EST. You can take them with whatever camera you so choose — and the photos can be awkward, weird, horrible, twisted. (Please don’t send me anything super-gross.) You can’t use someone else’s photo; gotta be your own. Have fun with it.

All your shots will go into one Flickr album and I’ll link to it here next week.

I will open this to international folks, but: international winners pay their own shipping.

One entry per person. Multiple entries disqualifies you.

Snap your shots.

Send ’em in.

Any questions? Shoot ’em in the comments.

“You Know, I Wanna Write A Book Someday.”

They say this to you with this wistful gleam in their eye, as if writing is just a hobby, like it’s just some distant silliness that they’ll get to when they manage to win the lottery. A worse (the worst, even) version of this is: I have a book in me.

Your response: “I don’t come down to your job and tell you, ‘I wanna be a janitor someday.’ You have a book in you? Well, you better do what I did, which is take a long hard squat in front of a computer or a notebook and force that story out, because that’s the only way this thing gets written. I don’t just have one book in me. I have hundreds. I have thousands. I am large, I contain multitudes. Whole libraries where every book has my name on its spine, motherfucker. Don’t write a book someday, write a book today. That’s what I did.”

Then, drop the mic. Right on their foot.

“Gosh, I Wish I Had Time To Write.”

Here, the person offers a little elbow-elbow poke-poke-poke suggestion that writing is this little side table, this luxury of the wealthy or perennially lazy. The translation is: “Oh, sorry, I have a lot more important things to do, but when I get some free time, I’m sure I’ll write a book or maybe take up decoupage. Could be I can catch up on some of my favorite shows, too, while I’m doing nothing else at all in any way important.”

Your response: “You do have the time to write. You have 24 hours in your day and I have 24 hours in my day. Oh, what’s that? You have a job and kids and important things to do? Yeah, because nobody else has those — that’s just you, holding up the American economy and the nuclear family single-handedly. Hey! Guess what? Everybody has shit to do. Kids, dogs, jobs, second jobs, flower beds to weed, checks to write, groceries, Facebook, porn, cooking, cleaning, sleeping, fucking. We’re all living life one minute at a time. It’s not that you don’t have time to write. It’s that you do not consider it important enough to give it time. But I do. I carve little bits of meat and skin off the day’s flesh and I use every part of the animal. I use the time I take to write. Fifteen minutes here. A half-hour there. A lunch break. That’s how shit gets written.”

Then, whack ’em in the forehead with a calculator watch. Bop.

“Hey! You Can Write My Idea.”

Because your ideas are dumb and this person’s ideas are great! They’re the architect. You’re the builder. You can be the diligent wordmonkey, and they can be the idea factory — and together, you can form a New York Times bestselling super-team!

Your response: “Hey, can I also chew your food for you? Maybe you’ll let me defecate your poop, too. I love to work other people’s jobs. You’re the boss. I’m basically just a transcriptionist — a stenographer for your brilliance. Or, or, maybe I have a whole head full of my own ideas, and if you want someone to write yours, then here’s a weird fucker of an idea: move those wriggling little sausage links you call ‘fingers’ and put your unmitigated genius on paper your-own-damn-self.”

Then, press a pen into their hand and trap said pen into said hand with an entire roll of duct tape.

“You Should Write My Life Story.”

Sometimes this comes from a noble place, sometimes it comes from a gravely Narcissistic one. But the point is, these people feel they have lived a life not just worth living, but worth everybody else reading about. Of course, it’s almost never true. It’s never, “I shot Hitler on the deck of the sinking Titanic.” It’s not, “Here’s how I saved an orphanage from a pack of sentient cyborg dingos during a four-week trip across the Australian Outback.” Sometimes it’s “I worked hard and accomplished things and raised a family on minimum wage.” And trust me — that’s great. Amazing, and you should be proud and everyone should be proud of you. But unless you also saved your family from a Terminator, it’s probably not the stuff of a stellar biography. Worse is when it’s just some upper-middle-class shit who thinks they have something vital to share regarding shopping habits or diversified investments or Beverly Hills real estate.

Your response: “Oooh, bad news. I would. I would! But the Authorial Council won’t let me write your life story until your life has effectively ended. For your story to live, you must die.”

Then, kill them. As they gurgle their last breath, whisper at them, “I don’t make the rules.”

“I Don’t Read.”

Never, ever, ever tell a writer this. Just don’t do it. Don’t tell an architect you don’t enter buildings. Don’t tell an arborist, “I totally hate trees. And nature in general. When I see trees, I cut them down just so I don’t have to look at their dumb tree faces and their stupid asshole branches anymore.” I mean, really, you don’t read? It’s just — whhh — what is wrong with you?

Your response: “You should start, because reading is fucking fundamental.”

Then, hand them your favorite book. Taser them until they read it all the way through.

“You Must Be Rich.”

Ha ha ha ha. Ha. Hahaha. … aaaahh hahaha.

Your response: *laugh so hard you barf*

Alternate response: “Yes, I am wealthy as fuck. Which is why I look like a feral hobo that just wandered in from the woods. It takes a lot of money to look this bewildered and disheveled. I don’t wear pants because pants cost too little. No pants are worthy enough when it comes to containing the valuable gemstones that I have pube-dazzled into and onto my genital region. Seriously, do you want to see my crotch emeralds? You heard me. Author money is awesome.”

Then, steal their wallet.

“Has Your Book Been Made Into A Movie Yet?”

For some reason, some portion of the population will always associate creative legitimacy with CAN I WATCH THIS ON MY TELEVISION AT SOME POINT? If it’s not on a screen with Tom Cruise acting in it, it basically doesn’t ping their radar. The suggestion here being that books are basically just food pellets that go into the giant trundling hamster that controls all of Hollywood. “FEED TEDDY HOLLYWOOD MORE BOOKS. THE BEAST HAS REJECTED THIS TOME AND THUS IT IS NOT WORTHY. THRUST IT INTO THE SEPTIC TANK WHERE IT BELONGS FOR IT CONTAINS NO ENTERTAINMENT TO NOURISH AMERICAN MINDS.”

Your response: “Yes, it has. Have you heard of a little movie called: The Avengers?”

Then, hit them in the crotchbasket with Thor’s Mjolnir. Film it on your iPhone.

“Will You Read My Novel?”

This is an honest outreach by an author who desperately needs someone to read his novel. It’s not meant to be malicious. Writers are addle-headed, desperate creatures and we want to find community and understanding and acceptance and some sense of if this thing we spent a lot of time writing is worth the ink cartridge we used to print it. (Hint: probably not. Ink cartridges cost more than most novel advances, I think.) Just the same: yeah, no, sorry, not today.

Your response: “I apologize, I do, but no, I will not read your fucking novel. I understand why you want me to, and I appreciate you coming to me with it. But reading your novel also means critiquing your novel and that would take time away from my own work. I’m a writer, not an editor, and specifically not your editor and frankly, who’s to say that anything I’d offer you would be worth a good goddamn anyway? Plus there are legal issues if I read your novel and it ends up being somehow close to something I wrote or want to write in the future and — it’s just a Bitey Ewok of a situation. But you should be really proud of yourself for writing a novel, and you should definitely go hire an editor or join a smart and compassionate critique group or find an online beta reader. I, sadly, am not your huckleberry.”

Then, shake their hand. Give ’em a hug if they’re willing. Because writing a novel — more to the point, finishing a novel — is hard business and they fought the Word War and deserve big-ups.

“Do You Know Stephen King?”

*sigh*

Your response: “Yep! We’re in a couple cooking classes together. Man, that guy makes one helluva goulash. Or should I say, ghoulash, ha ha ha, like, ghoul? G-H-O-U-L? Because he’s a horror writer, get it? Aaaaaanyway. Actually, we do this thing monthly called Orgy Thursdays, where every third Thursday it’s me, Kingy, Gaiman, Danielle Steele, the ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Harold Pinter, and we get together and — you know, it’s not always like, an actual orgy or whatever, sometimes we just go out and hunt humans for sport? But sometimes it’s an orgy. It’s cool. We all know each other. And we can communicate telepathically because we’ve all consumed one another’s blood. Chancellor Atwood of the Authorial Council decrees it must be so.”

Then, bludgeon them with a copy of King’s Insomnia.

“We’re Out Of Coffee.”

Coffee. Or booze. Or tea. Or whatever your writerly drink of choice is. 

Your response: *gnash teeth, wail, begin setting small fires, birth a clot of live screaming squirrels, fire lasers from eyes, hover above the city until you release a telekinetic wave of destruction the likes of which no one has never ever seen before*

Then, kneel down in the wreckage and open your mouth until someone pours coffee into it.

Bonus: “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”

That tired old question. I get it, because people look at you and think it’s impossible for one brain to contain such weird ideas — ideas interesting and strange enough to commit to paper. Still — understand if you’re gonna ask this that we’ve been asked it approximately 457 times before.

Your response: “The question isn’t, where do you get your ideas.” Then, grab them by the collar, get real close until they can smell your old coffee breath and hiss at them: “The real question is, how do we make them stop?”

Then, punch yourself in the face screaming, “MAKE THEM STOP OH GOD THESE IDEAS WON’T LEAVE ME ALONE I AM JUST AN ANTENNA FOR THE MUSE’S GROTESQUE FREQUENCY.”

* * *

The Gonzo Writing E-Book Bundle:

Seven books. Twenty bucks.

Yesterday, I said a thing about #GamerGate and dinosaurs and extinction. And, in a video last night in support of the Pixel Project’s Read For Pixels endeavor (which is about addressing and stopping violence against women, and which you can watch now), I noted how something like #GamerGate reminds me of what happens to yellowjacket wasps as autumn rolls on. As the cooler months rise to replace the heat of summer, wasps start to get fucking pissed because, as it turns out, they’re facing death. Winter is coming, just like in Westeros, and the wasps know that food will become scarce and their time on this earth may be limited. As such: they become more aggressive. They’re likelier to swarm and sting.

The response I received from this was —

Well, it was m… mixed?

Okay, to put it politely, I received some total wackypants responses, and I got some emails that were… let’s go with “less than nice.” I received a lot of response from folks who may or may not have been actual humans and who may or may not have been avatars of an anti-agenda agenda (?!), or who may have been anonymous sock-puppets or trolls or who-the-sweet-fuck-knows.

But — but! — some of you appeared to crave actual discussion.

And, further, some of you claim a legitimate purpose, which is to cease corruption in game development and games journalism, which is all very nice and official-sounding, and certainly is reasonable enough. And I like reasonable things! I really do!

It’s just…

*sigh*

I want you to understand why this is going to be hard for you.

Let’s say you have a letter you want me to read.

It’s written on nice paper. Elegant calligraphy.

You say, “These are my wishes and my beliefs,” and you confirm that this letter is very official, very smart, very wise, and it contains a great many good ideas for the future. Okay. Excellent.

Except, then you place the letter on a pedestal.

And that pedestal is surrounded by four miles of diseased animal feces in every direction. I’m talking a major swampland of creature dooky. Fly-flecked, stenchy, diarrhea. And you say, “To go and read my very reasonable ideas, you will need to wade through a four-mile radius of animal waste,” you say. I, of course, make a wrinkled, upset face, because I don’t feel like hiking through Uncle E.Coli’s Taco Bell Animal Waste Extravaganza to get to your point, but okay, fine. As I churn through the muck and slurry, I am pelted by shitballs from hidden malefactors. Then, when I finally get to the pedestal, I lift your letter off the stone only to discover that stapled to it is a dozen other “letters,” and these are by no means as eloquent or as pointed as yours. Some are written in crayon. Others penned with smudges of the crapmire I just waded through to get here.

You say, “But GamerGate is about bias in journalism.”

But that guy over there? He thinks it’s about getting bias out of game reviews, which is a mostly silly idea. That guy over there wants to remove agendas from game journalism (haha what), whereas over there is another person who wants agendas out of game development (oh, god, really?). One dude says he wants bias out of journalism but what he really means is that he wants journalists with whom he disagrees to shut up because they said not-nice stuff about a game he loves and if there’s one thing we can’t abide it’s people disliking what we love or digging what we hate. Then there’s that other guy who thinks there’s some kind of 9/11 Truther-Birther-Evolution-Big-Pharma-style conspiracy going on, and then there’s that weirdo shouting at the ceiling fan about SJWs and femi-nazis and he’s foaming about Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian and threatening Leigh Alexander and basically that guy’s covered in his own rage-barf.

As I said in my MRA post, “Being interested in white linen bedsheets doesn’t mean you join the KKK.” You cannot be a part of GamerGate without acknowledging that a lot of this thing is really super-gross. All that horrible stuff — the harassment, the nastiness, the lies — get staple-gunned to your cause. You can’t separate them.

Maybe you have good things to say.

Maybe you have noble ideals, here.

But you can’t maintain that nobility while supporting a cause that has simultaneously helped to further abuse. It makes you complicit.

You can’t be part of the solution while also being part of the problem.

Could be that this movement genuinely has a pure heart.

That pure heart, though, is encased in a body of rotten meat.

Right now, at this very moment, there is an exchange going on in my Twitter feed. I’m not partaking — I’m just linked in (not LinkedIn because ew who uses that thing) because of yesterday’s post. And in this conversation, feminism has been attacked for its “rampant oppressive dehumanizing misandry.” Another tweet conjures up the phrase, “another thin-skinned faux-liberal pussie [sic]…” Only then to add, with a flair of the truly melodramatic: “welcome to the downfall of the usa.” Sarkeesian and Quinn are being called “bullies” – with a further correction of, “shaming artists into changing their work is bullying.” The conversation isn’t uniformly toxic — but more and more folks just keep jumping in, and the ugliness pervades. You cannot escape the ugliness in this.

One very charming brony (wait, really?) said:

“One day, they’ll prove people like you are cheap, retarded and dickless fucking scumshit. Die in a pit of fire, you fucking fag”

Hunh. (Looking at rest of his feed — talking about killing feminists, sooooo, okay then.)

It’s very hard to extract real value from this without getting mired in all the rest.

Anyway. My advice, which you will not take:

If you really believe that there’s an ethical debate to have, don’t have it in this hashtag. You’re poisoning your own efforts. Write smart, compassionate pleas for your own agenda (and by the way — you can’t be anti-agenda because that’s an agenda). Stop jumping in with the same 20-30 toxic voices. Vote with your dollar. Don’t be an asshole. Support blogs and voices that are ethical, intelligent, compassionate. Don’t use your voice to rob others of theirs. If you don’t like Sarkeesian, Quinn, anybody — ignore them. Don’t like a game? Don’t buy it. Like a game? Buy it and write a review (and not an ‘objective’ review because, really, those don’t exist in a meaningful way).

#GamerGate is stuck in the mire of its own nastiness.

Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way we can be sure.

Links:

Vox.com: A good GamerGate primer.

#GameOverGate: ZQ stealthily susses out the true origins of #GamerGate

Tabletop game designer David Hill (who I’ve worked with in the past, if you feel that such transparency is important here) does a good run down (better said than me in this post, really) about the problems that come with associating your cause with #GamerGate

Jennifer Hale (FemShep, voice of) says in this post: “I myself would love to see more equal representation of women in games, more empowered roles. Let’s remove gender from casting everywhere we can and play around with it. Let’s do the same with race. Let’s go on and create the next level. We can’t do that right now. I’m nervous about what this piece of the community is going to do to me for speaking up about anything, and that’s not OK. We can’t do anything until we deal with that.”

The Escapist’s Jim Sterling on GamerGate and corruption.

The end.

And no way in Hell am I turning on comments. Pssh. Pfft. Ha ha ha no.

I imagine that when the meteors were coming, and the volcanos were sharting great globs of lava into the sky and onto the ground, and mammals were conspiring to survive the pyroclasm, the dinosaurs were probably pretty pissed off. They had been phased out by nature — they saw that the world was changing and that they couldn’t survive in it anymore. They probably started a hashtag. Like, #meteorgate or #nomoreextinction or something. Carving them on trees and rocks with saurian claw. And they probably filled these hashtags with a lot of anti-mammal rhetoric. Then they stood around yelling at the sky, shaking their tiny fists or swishing their spiky tails in rage, hoping it would change what was coming. Hoping it would stop the meteors from popping their big dumb dinosaur heads like grapes. Hoping the lava would not cook them from the feet up. Hoping that this whole “mammal” thing was just a glitch, a gimmick, a short and forgettable chapter in the Big Book about How Dinosaurs Are Fucking Awesome.

And then some of the dinosaurs became birds and flew away while the rest of the dinosaurs ate hot meteor and died. Or something. I don’t really know precisely what killed the dinosaurs — Dino Flu, or Arrogance, or a Free U2 Album — but I do know that the world was eventually done with them and had moved on. Evolution and change are hard to deal with.

That brings us to #GamerGate.

If you don’t know what it is — *whistles* — oh, man, it’s fun. And you should read that word, “fun,” with all the quiet connotation of taking a bath with a plugged-in toaster. Here’s an article at WaPo about it. GamerGate seems to be a beast with many, many heads — some want ethical responsibility in games journalism, some want agendas and so-called political correctness out of their game reviews, some want that out of their games.

Thing is, all these heads lead to one common monster, and it is a beast whose hide is thick with the grease of misogyny, sexism, prejudice against… well, anybody who doesn’t live on Heteronormative White Dude Mountain. Mostly, it reads like they want social relevance out of their games. Or, worst, they just anybody who isn’t like them to shut up and stop talking.

It’s an ugly thing, this beast.

It is is, in fact, a dinosaur.

Because GamerGate feels like the rantings and ravings of a dying, wretched, angry species. All this seems to rise up from a fruiting, fungal corner of pop culture — mushrooms tended in the dark of their expectations and experiences, fertilized by great heaps of horseshit.

I said as much on Twitter last night and I received…

Well, let’s go with a lot of responses.

Some asserted GamerGate was a good thing and it was anti-prejudice and actually was itself the target of misogyny and racism and also truth — and then you go ahead and click the hashtags (#GamerGate or #notyourshield) and you find it full of misogyny and racism. Like, I don’t mean in the charitable sense — well, if you poke around, this might be a little bit sketchy — no, I mean like, I just got face-punched by a shit-shellacked fist clutching a handful of foul ideas that had been shoved up some jerk’s nether-hole. Down that rabbit hole is a thick, malodorous treacle of nasty business. Or you go and watch some of the Truther-like conspiracy videos. Or you read some of the blog posts (which suspiciously read like they were torn out of an MRA playbook and then rewritten just slightly, like some kind of gamer-version of Mad Libs.) I looked at all the responders to my tweets last night and, almost hilariously, they appeared to all be dudes. And when you looked at their Twitter feeds, you saw their social media existence just brining — marinating, even — in this septic nastiness of racist and sexist and prejudiced rhetoric. They claim lies and toxicity on the other side (despite having their own claims refuted again and again, like the no police reports were filed ‘fact,’ which is of course not at all a fact, jerks).

*shudder*

Forget it, Jake — it’s Troll Town.

(I also found this world populated with that least pleasant of not-Baldwin-brothers, Adam Baldwin, who I used to think was bad-ass until he started opening his mouth on social media.)

This graphic is what some in GamerGate purport to support.

Of course, the last two paragraphs conflict with one another, don’t they? And despite any message of nobody should be harassed, that’s exactly what’s happening. All over this thing is harassment and horribleness. It’ll take about four seconds to see that. One or two clicks in and it’s like —

Blink, blink, holy shit.

(Oh, and news flash: you’re against agendas? What do you think GamerGate is?)

(Spoiler alert: it’s an agenda.)

If you associate with GamerGate — you’re associating with all the toxicity that comes with it. Even if you’re not like that and you think there’s something valuable at the heart of this, guess what? This thing is deeply, grotesquely shitty. You can’t roll around in it and keep clean. You’re going to have all that feces and venom and overall awfulness spackling your every inch. You can’t support this without supporting bad people saying bad things. Talks like a troll, walks like a troll?

C’mon.

You know what? Don’t be a dinosaur. Grow wings, man. Join the birds, or hang out with the mammals. The ground is shifting. The meteors are coming. You can survive this — you can adapt and start to realize that there are other people in this world. You can start to figure out that other worldviews besides your own not only exist, but actually — gasp — have merit. At the bare minimum, you can figure out that if you don’t want to see these things in your games, you can not play those games. You don’t have to play Depression Quest or Gone Home. You don’t have to go watch Anita Sarkeesian’s videos — and, if you do, you don’t have to agree with them. (Related: good article on her at The Verge, with the money quote being: “One of the most radical things you can do is to actually believe women when they talk about their experiences.”) You want more literal game reviews unmarked by any bias or agenda? Go start a review blog. Or read some of the review blogs that basically already do this.

And then, y’know? Shut up. Because you don’t own games. You don’t own this space. The lock is busted. The door is open. The mammals are calling from inside the house, motherfuckers. The birds are flying. This space is evolving, dear dinosaur. As it should. As all artforms should. It doesn’t take away the games you have. It brings new games to the table. New voices. Voices by people who are long under-represented, speaking to audiences who have long been under-served. You can’t stop that. You shouldn’t want to stop that, because that’s something assholes want. We should want everyone to be allowed to make games that speak to their experiences — whether it’s depression or sexism or LGBT issues. We should yearn for a game industry that has room for people who don’t just want Assassin’s Creed 14 or Call of Duty: Mortal Kombat III. Just as we should yearn for films and comics and books to be able to explore both popcorn pop culture fun alongside far meatier and more meaningful territory.

We should be cheering folks like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Leigh Alexander. We should be championing if not their voices (though I do), then at the least their right to have those voices and use them in this industry. We should be asking for greater diversity in big games and little games and all the games journalism that surrounds it. (And this is where someone says, oh oh oh but you champion their voices but not my voice, to which I respond, if the use of your voice is used only to shut others out, then no, I do not need to tolerate your intolerance. Game over, man. Game over.)

You stand in the way, you’re gonna catch a face full of meteor.

And, frankly, if that’s the case, then you fucking deserve it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go hang out with the birds and mammals.

(For added ranty-pants fun, check out Greg Costikyan’s rant on the subject. It’s by no means perfect, but its anger is pure, its message is righteous.)

(And noooo way am I turning comments on. I don’t think the SPAM OUBLIETTE is prepared.)

Last week’s challenge is quite relevant, sooooooo —

Make with the clicky clicky.

Now, I misled you a wee tiny bit, because last week I was all ha ha ha oh you should write the first half of a story. Except now, because I’m a jerk, I’m changing the rules.

The rules are: you’re still going to continue a story from last week’s.

But you’re not going to finish not. Not yet.

You’re going to write the middle 500 words.

So: pick a story written by someone else from last week’s challenge.

Then, add your own 500 words onto it to continue the tale.

Post the entire story so far at your site (~1000 words).

Then, next week a third writer will actually finish the tale.

DUN DUN DUN.

*crash of thunder*

So: to reiterate?

Pick a story.

Not your own.

Write another 500 words.

Don’t finish it.

Got it?

Good.

Continue the story!

Due by next Friday, noon EST.

Unemployment has ravaged the U.S. economy. One of those struggling is Benjamin Cade, an expert in cognition and abstract literature. Without income, he joins the millions defaulting on their loans—in his case, the money he borrowed to finance his degrees.  Using advances in cognitive science and chemical therapy, Ben’s debtors can reclaim their property—his education. The government calls the process “Repossession Therapy,” and it is administered by the Homeland Renewal Project. 

But Ben has no intention of losing his mind without a fight, so he begins teaching in a municipal park, distributing his knowledge before it’s gone in a race against ignorance. And somewhere in Ben’s confusing takedown, Chimpanzee arrives. Its iconography appears spray-painted and wheat-pasted around town. Young people in rubber chimpanzee masks start massive protests. As Ben slowly loses himself, the Chimpanzee movement seems to grow. And when Homeland Security takes an interest, Ben finds himself at the center of a storm that may not even be real. What is Chimpanzee? Who created it? What does it want?

And is there even enough of Ben left to find out?

1)   Repossessing an education isn’t as science fictional as you’d think.

One of the key premises in Chimpanzee is that you can have your education repossessed. It’s not as inelegant as men with bats showing up to take back your Prius in the middle of the night–it involves a bit more science, some therapy, and a whole bunch of drugs–but still. The economy has gone so bad in Chimpanzee that taking back someone’s education becomes profitable–you can sell their memories on the black market, or Pharma companies will buy them for their never-ending R&D. With everybody unemployed, all those degrees have lost their competitive, employing edge. Taking a few back might just help out some folks at the top of the ladder.

But the idea isn’t as far-flung as you’d think–or as I thought. Researchers at the University of California in San Diego have successfully erased and re-created memories in genetically modified rats]. Using pulses of light, no less. It’s just a coincidence that I tossed around so many light metaphors in the book, but we can pretend that I was forecasting this process all along.

2)   Asheville, N.C. makes a great Ground Zero for the New Depression.

I began writing Chimpanzee in 2009, just before the release of my first book, Noise. That first book was largely influenced by all the time I’d spent living and growing up in Texas, but by 2009, I was living in Asheville, N.C., where I taught at a couple of different universities in the region. Asheville survived some hard times of its own after the Civil War, so it made a great backdrop for a story about the New Depression. Its compact downtown, walkable cultural districts, and re-purposed industrial depots are not only picturesque, they’d also make for great stomping grounds should the shit hit the fan. Asheville’s up in the Blue Ridge mountains, so you won’t get hordes of people looking for food or work, it gets plenty of fresh water from the Swannanoa and French Broad Rivers, and it’s decidedly a beer-loving arts city . . . so you can stay drunk and entertained through the hard times. The city in Chimpanzee isn’t a direct copy of Asheville, but it’s close enough to give you an idea what to expect.

3)   When you write what you know, it writes back . . .

Writing gurus will tell you to write what you know. And that’s largely a good idea–I do it in my own work all the time, ripping off my own memories and experiences for the sake of my characters. But what they don’t tell you is that depending on what you write that shit can get real. Chimpanzee is about the cognitive disassembly of a man who has fallen prey to the collapse of the U.S. economy. Without work, he can’t pay his loans, which makes him subject to Repossession Therapy and mandatory public service in the Homeland Renewal Project. For a guy who spent his life studying theories of the mind and attempting to understand the very nature of art, losing his ability to fully reason is tantamount to losing any reason to even exist. I studied the same courses as my character Ben–earned the same degrees and worked the same jobs. I even shared some of the experiences he remembers with his wife with my own in the real world.

So when you build yourself a fictional simulacrum, be careful how much time you spending thinking about taking it apart. After all l’appel du vide, and all that. You’re better off writing yourself a happy and fulfilling life as a basket weaver in the Caribbean.

4)   Open, public education isn’t anything new . . .

I thought I was pretty clever when I decided to let Ben create a free, open-air university in Chimpanzee. After all, he didn’t have anything better to do. They were repossessing his education, so he might as well give it away to as many people as he could before he fully reverted to something more . . . well, simian. I was even delighted to watch the Occupy movement spring up in 2011–I was working as the administrative editor of Studies in the Novel on the campus of the University of North Texas, and I used to take breaks from collating literary criticism to stand at the window and watch the Denton Occupy chapter gather in groups to teach each other about economics, politics, footbag (they needed some breaks, after all) . . . whatever they were interested in. It told me that there was some honesty to my chimpanzee movement in the novel.

But then I learned that while I was patting myself on the back, there were others in the world doing the same thing, and to much more meaningful effect. Like Rajesh Kumar Sharma, who opened a school under a bridge in New Delhi to teach the city’s poorest children]. His school is cooler than mine.

5)   Neither are subversive U.S. economies . . .

While I’m outing myself for being Not That Clever, I might as well point out that the subversive economy in Chimpanzee isn’t all that revolutionary either. See, in the book, if you’re out of money, you can trade goods and services for an underground currency: SHAREs. You can swap these with other folks who’ve bought into the SHARE registry, circumventing the useless American dollar and avoiding the tax man (for a while, at least). The idea seemed pretty cool to me, and it made sense, especially given the Hard Times we all started going through in 2008, which haunted the country all throughout the drafting of the book.

And it was a good idea. Especially to the people who were actually creating and using their own currencies.] The next time you’re dreaming up ideas to add content and depth to your stories, be sure to go track down some real-world analogs. Necessity is the mother of invention, so save yourself some brain cells and go see what the people in the trenches are already doing.

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Darin holds a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Theory. He has taught courses on writing and literature at several universities and has served in a variety of editorial capacities at a number of independent presses and journals. He lives in Texas with his wife, where he dreams of empty places. Chimpanzee is his second novel.

Darin Bradley: Website

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