Archives (page 439 of 452)

March 22, 2011 / 32 Comments

Jumpstarting A Stalled Novel

You whip the old nag with a coat hanger.

“Move, you dang horse!” you shout, frothing over with piss and vinegar. You kick it. You pitch pebbles at its head. You hook cables to a car battery and stick ’em up its equine nether quarters and jam some voltage deep into the beast. And still it doth not move. Not a whinny. Not a tail-flick. You nicker at it. You pull your hair. You mumble something about this is why cars replaced you dipshits. You give up and stomp off.

Are you done? With your little poopy-pants hissy-shit-fit over there?

First, that’s not a horse. It’s not even a dead horse. It’s just a bundle of old blankets. You’re embarrassing yourself. Everyone can see what you’re doing. Plus, your underwear is showing. Tighty-whiteys? Really? With your name and the day of the week stitched in the hemming? For shame.

Second, that bundle of old blankets is a stand-in for something else. Come on, don’t lie. You’re a desperate novelist (or screenwriter or transmedia cyborg) and that heap of smelly fabric is a representation — a living emblem — of your stalled-out story. The old nag just won’t move and you think, “Well, you can just nuzzle my turgid teat, you stubborn old coot of a tale.” You lay blame upon it, heaping sins atop the pile the way they used to fill up old goats with present sins. But it’s not the story’s fault. It’s your fault. The story doesn’t exist outside you. Your characters don’t do things you don’t want despite what so many writers will tell you. It’s all you. That hill of nasty blankets will only move if you pick them up and move them. It’s your story. You have authorial agency.

Your story has stalled out because you stalled out. You are the reason that yet another unfinished novel will get shoved into the teetering tower of forgotten stories, reverse-Jenga-style.

And I’m here to jumpstart your heart-shaped derriere and shove your brain back into the game.

Your manuscript needs a cranked-up jolt of adrenalin. For that, I got a buncha tips to jam into your aorta. The first bunch is all about you as a writer and changing your habits. The second batch is about things you can do inside the story to kick free the story scree and get the whole thing moving again.

Think of this as a narrative laxative.

Flip It, Switch It

Sometimes, our brains get vaporlock. We’re idiots, us writers. A gaggle — nay, a mighty parliament — of OCD assholes. A handful of “stupid writer tricks” will go a long way into fooling yourself into overcoming your own tangled web of foolish fuck-brained folly. Here’s one: make a change as to your writing habits. Maybe for a day. Maybe for a week. Do you normally write in your office? Go write at the dining room table. Or at a Starbucks. Or at a Hungarian bathhouse. Do you write in the morning? Write at night. If you write on a laptop, switch to a desktop, or an iPad, or write a chapter long-hand. Sometimes, jostling your habits shakes loose some of the bad juju that’s gumming up the novel.

Discover Your Incubation Chamber

I have three primary incubation chambers: the shower, the lawn-mower, and outside taking a walk. No, these are not the places that I secretly masturbate. Sure, you could diddle your happy buttons on a riding mower, but dang, man, I have a push mower. Plus, I don’t need the squirrels judging me. No, an incubation chamber is my fancy made-up term for “a place you go or a practice you undertake where you can zone out and think.” In other words, you need to find time to let the story incubate. Take time. Bandy some shit around. Play the “what if?” game. “What if my protagonist became his own grandfather and then committed suicide inside Hitler’s bunker?” A good place to incubate stories? Right before bed. Set your brain like a slow-cooker. Introduce a problem or question, then go to sleep. Low and slow like beef brisket, bitches.

No Author Is An Island, Dumbass

Don’t internalize. Contact somebody. Call ’em. Write ’em. Just have a chat to discuss. Creativity lives on agitation. Call up a writer buddy and tell her the problem and see if you can’t work through it. Doesn’t have to be a writer, either. Any conversation can free it. Surely you have friends? You’re not just some mournful cave troll, right? Who do you normally call with your problems? If you were to call somebody and say, “Hey, okay, so. Ahhh, here’s the deal. I have four dead strippers. I am goosed to the nines on mescaline. This isn’t my shirt. And I think I’m on the Disneyworld monorail. What do I do?” — who would that person be? Identify them. Whoever it is that would help you with four stripper corpses is also the same person who can help you talk through your novel’s plot problems. Frankly, put that dude on your payroll, but quick.

A Little Dab Will Do You

Dear sweet chemical intervention. Hey, I’m not advocating illicit substances, but I do think that sometimes a mildly modified state of perception can be a win for a writer. It can be the machete to cut down through all the built-up bullshit inside your story. Caffeine is good to get the pistons firing. Liquor is good not necessarily during writing, but I’m not averse to a little responsible drinking after-hours where you can jot some notes down in a notebook or puzzle out some story problems in conversation with a buddy while under the influence of some adult beverages. Exercising releases other powerful chemicals, too, which can be good. Maybe take a little St. John’s Wort? Or eat a piece of chocolate for Chrissakes. Just a little stimulant. Bzzt. Zzzzt. Zap. No meth, though. I mean, seriously. You ever see a meth-head? Ghouls.

Write A Masturbatory Love Letter

You loved this idea once upon a time. You adored the book. I know you did, because we made fun of you on the playground. “You and the novel, sittin’ in the tree. H-A-N-D-J-O-B. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the Tijuana donkey show.” I think that’s how the rhyme goes. Anyway. This sounds super stupid, but bear with me: you need to fall back in love with the novel again. Write a letter. Or an email. Or a goddamn postcard, I don’t care. Start reminding yourself the things you loved about this book. Jot down why you wanted to write the thing in the first goddamn place. Surprise, surprise: you’ll find old reasons, yes, but you’ll discover some new reasons to love it all over again.

Envision The Cover

This? The epitome of shallow, but fuck it. I know, blah blah blah, you’re writing the book because you love the story, but sometimes you can’t help but look forward and get geeked while imagining some silly future shit. “On my wedding day, angels will descend from heaven and bring with them seven harpsichords.” “When my son is born, a wise shaman baboon will proclaim him the chosen one to rule the jungle.” “The first time I have sex, the hooker I nail will have two vaginas, and one of those vaginas will dispense chocolate coins.” So, hey, if what gets you going is looking forward and thinking, “Man, this book is going to look bitching on the shelves at Your Favorite Indie Bookstore,” then do that.

Boom Goes The Dynamite

Blow something up. (In the story.) Plunge the plunger. Light the fuse. Stephen King did this in The Stand, by the way, to jump start that stalled novel. He couldn’t quite figure out how to move the story forward and felt that the characters were… well, lost. So, in the second act he blew up the Free Zone with dynamite. Now, you don’t need to rely on an actual explosion in the text. “Explosion” is just another way of saying “Some properly dramatic shit that shakes everything up.” A murder. A breakup. The assassination of Santa Claus. The next Biblical deluge. The appearance of a cyborg orangutan from the future.

Feng Shui That Motherfucker

Feng Shui is probably bullshit. “This room has no flow. The chi is getting all gummed up in my heating vents. I need a mirror on that wall. I need something red on the opposing wall. In the corner? A duck carved from lava rock. In the other corner? Tom Arnold. And from the ceiling fan we must hang ribbons woven of my own chest hair and dyed with the blood of the infidel.” Still, there’s something there that’s altogether less mystical. “Hey, the arrangement of this room isn’t right; things feel off.” That can happen in the novel. So, rearrange some stuff. Start the novel at a different point. Change the flow. Move the timeline around — Chapter 5 is now Chapter 2. May require a little rewriting to bridge it, but just some minor rearrangement can feel productive. Rewriting and readjustment can be good voodoo.

Flip It, Switch It: Part II: Revenge Of The Switch-Faced Flippenator

Another flip, another switch. Change the point-of-view. Change the tense. Maybe you’re writing in third-person but it feels like you’d write it more easily in the first. Or, could be that writing past-tense isn’t as urgent as what you’d get out of the present. Yeah, sure, this requires rewriting, but, uhh, shut up. Nobody said this shit wasn’t work. Look at it this way: sometimes you gotta break something to fix something.

Turn Left And Take A Narrative Day Trip

Deviate. Deviate big. Start writing in a different direction. Pick a new character to follow. Explore some untold aspect of the storyworld. Create a sub-plot out of thin air involving submarines and the Christmas gifting habits of human-squid hybrids. See that door ahead? Forget it. Turn left and kick a hole in the wall. Walk through that. No, you may not use this stuff. Or maybe it’ll open up the novel in the same way that knocking down a wall in your house might open up a room. You gotta try something.

Shut Up And Put Your Back Into It

Alternately, if none of the above crap works, just shut up and do the time. Write through it. Flail about like a beached carp on your keyboard. Vomit words. Make shit up. Spasm. Smash together sentences with the grace and aplomb of a drunken moose. Writing isn’t magic. The end result may feel that way, but it’s just putting one word in front of the other. Do that until you feel the novel find its groove. It’ll happen. I swear. You might even go back and look at those vibrating word-spasms and think, “That was actually better than I thought. I expected literature on par with the holy books penned by a tribe of trilobites, but this is at least on the level of what a headless chicken could manage if you stuck a fountain pen in his neck stump.” There’s this feeling in exercise where you hit the wall but then, if you keep pushing past it, you suddenly get a surge of go-juice again. This is like that. Keep writing until you’re out of the dark and into the light.

Oh, and stop whining about it.

Howabout you, word nerds? What tricks do you use to fool your brain into lubricating the arthritic joints of that sluggish nag you call a manuscript? Share and share alike.

March 21, 2011 / 57 Comments

The Care And Feeding Of Your Favorite Authors

Mmm. The $0.99 e-book kerfuffle continues, and continues. And also: continues.

Some required reading, before I yammer.

Zoe Winters asks, “Does low-balling attract the wrong kind of reader?”

Cat Valente points out that if you’re willing to plunk down $5.99 for a latte, you should be willing to shell out more than a piddly buck on an e-published novel.

And finally, sticking the landing, Scalzi makes the electronic publishing BINGO card.

Go on. Go, read those.

I’ll wait.

Back already? Excellent. Here, have a cookie and a coconut water.

So. Do I think that, at its core, a buck is too cheap for novel-length fiction? I do.

Do I think that self-publishers saw the larger prices put forth by big publishers and decided to counterbalance too dramatically with a race-to-the-bottom price? I do.

Do I think that $0.99 represents something of a slippery slope for book values? Do I think readers are accustomed to, even in the cheapest used book format, paying more than a buck for fiction? Do I think that publishing is a totally different ball-game than the music industry and that ultimately you can’t compare the two meaningfully in part because musicians have other ways of earning out while writers have only one, which is the value of their words, and nobody long-term can sustain bottoming-out story values? Do I think that alpacas are part of a giant fuzzy-headed pyramid scheme?

I do.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Really, this is inside baseball. I’m sure readers at some level are aware of this and have an opinion, but the larger readership does not yet understand it. My mother doesn’t know about it, and my mother is a voracious reader. None of the authors she reads price their books like that. Frankly, they may never. Will we start to see Jodi Picoult and Stephen King throwing around $0.99 e-books? I’m not sold on that.

What this is about is that it’s hard out there for a ~~pimp~~ writer.

I don’t have stats, but from what I can tell, it’s getting harder to make a living as a writer. The money is down. The work isn’t there. Part of it is the recession, but it goes deeper: the Internet democritized content and creation but it also softened the value of that content. Maybe it’s a supply and demand thing. The marketplace is flooded with storytellers. At this point we’re like wandering troubadours. We swarm your town. You throw us your bread-scraps and we move on. Maybe it’s an illusion. Maybe we’re all floating around on yachts and I just didn’t realize it.

It may be true that you consider a dollar a reasonable price point for fiction. It may be true that you don’t feel any responsibility to the marketplace now or in the future.

But hopefully, it’s not true that you don’t care about authors. Authors are awesome. Batshit crazy, maybe. Functional alcoholics, most certainly. But they’re fulfilling a critical task that mankind has needed filled since forever: they’re telling stories. And that’s some pretty nifty shit.

Here’s what I’m exhorting. I’m asking that you take care of your authors. Think of them, perhaps, as little whisky-guzzling Tamagotchi. They require care and feeding lest they wither and die in a cubicle farm.

If you find an author you like, support them.

What does this mean?

It means, if they have other books? Buy ’em. Now. Right away. It means, get on social media and say, “Hey, this book, this author? Some hot shit right here.” Ultimately, it means you’re spreading the word and trying to keep it so that they can buy things like food and mortgages and Bourbon. See an author at a con? Buy him a drink. Does the author have a Cafepress store? Buy something from it. Or donate on his donate button. Become a fan. Expect good storytelling in return. This is doubly true if you’re buying books at a bottom-dollar price. You do that and you like what you got out of the deal, then it’s up to you to make sure they don’t starve in a gutter somewhere while wasting away from ~~a Bourbonless life~~ tuberculosis.

Writers are part of your creative ecosystem. Don’t damage that ecosystem. Give back to it. I know that writers need you. I hope that it turns out that you need writers, too.

This has been a public service announcement from the Bourbon Distilleries of America.

March 18, 2011 / 62 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: Baby Pulp

And we’re back.

Once again, with last week’s challenge (The Hotel), you crazy emmereffers came out of the woodwork and did up some amazingly cool stuff. And, once again, it’s time to re-up the stash. I mean, re-up the flash fiction challenge. Ready for another go?

Okay, so, as you may know, the wife and I are expecting our first progeny — Der Wendigspawn — in the next few months. Which means my life has become suddenly and swiftly baby-focused. Everything is crib-nursery-Pooh-poo-bottle-milk-breast-how-many-centimeters-dilated-diaper-Nuk-Bjorn-Boppy-headasplode. On this subject I’ve been commiserating with fellow expectant father-dude, Anthony “Pulptone” Schiavino. We half-joke that, come summer, people are going to see us online at 3AM, drunk, delirious, feeding our respective infants. We will be the protagonists in some crazy baby-related stories.

Then, he said this:

“…there needs to be flash fiction pulp based around babies. Lord only knows what people would come up with.“

Oh, snap.

And a flash fiction challenge was born.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it:

BABY PULP FLASH FICTION.

It must be baby-centered.

It must be pulp. Pulp is, of course, a kind of lurid, cheap, fastly-produced genre fiction. Men’s Adventure! Noir! Space opera! Superhero! Detective! And so on, and so forth. So, in other words: baby noir! Baby superhero! Baby space opera! Baby adventure! Detective baby!

Baby Pulp.

And that’s it.

Please, no porny baby stories. I just — I mean — c’mon, no. These tales don’t need to be in good taste, but I don’t want any visits from PedoBear, you hear me?

Once again, you have 1000 words.

You have one week (let’s say next Friday, 9AM EST).

Post at your own blogs, drop a link in your blog to here, and drop a link to your blogged fiction in the comments below. Then at the end of the week I’ll tally it all up right here in this post.

Now get that pacifier out of your mouth. It’s time to fill the flash fiction diapers.

BOOM.

[EDIT, Friday 3/25/11: So, this week I’m going to not compile the links — feels like the links found in the comments work okay for most people. Plus, it gets erm, unusually time-consuming to compile all those links. Between baby class Thursday night and trying to hit Friday morning’s writing deadline, it’s a bit of a time-kill for what may be dubious value. That said, if you would rather I continue to compile them, drop a comment below and let me know. If it’s something you prefer, I’ll make sure to revive the practice with next week’s challenge.]

March 17, 2011 / 8 Comments

“Sequelitis” (A Visit From The Mighty Russel D. McLean)

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am not Chuck Wendig.

Chuck Wendig is in this box here [points to large wooden box wrapped in chains. The box shifts as though something is struggling to get out]. But don’t worry. I’ve left him a couple of airholes.

I think.

Anyway, my name is Russel D McLean. If you have any trouble understanding me, don’t worry. That’s because I’m Scottish. I’m also a writer – author of two noir novels, the second of which, THE LOST SISTER, has just been released upon your United States. In celebration I’m doing a series of invasions of other author’s blogs in a manic attempt to shill… uh, I mean spread the beautiful word.

Anyway, while Chuck’s locked away I figured I’d talk a little about sequels. Because, ya know, the new book is kind of a sequel (or at least the second in a sequence that started with THE GOOD SON) and I found myself thinking a lot about what that meant.

A sequel has to achieve a lot of stuff. It has to pull in new readers while pleasing old ones. It has to remain true to established facts while giving something new. It has to stand on its own and yet acknowledge the past.

It has to do something different.

Oh, yes. That’s the one that most people forget. While it’s considered the safe action to rehash old glories – see National Treasure 2, The Mummy 2 etc etc – what you wind up doing is boring people. Because while people think they want the same experience, what the really need is that same sense of excitement and unpredictability they got the first time round. It’s just tougher to put that into words than it is to say, “more of the same please”.

Why is THE GODFATHER PART II considered a perfect sequel? It expands upon and gives new life and new perspective on the first movie while still telling its own perfectly logical narrative. You could see GFII on its own, conceivably, and catch up to this world without having seen the original. Sure, some of the grandeur would be lost, but you wouldn’t be so confused as to throw the movie away and then batter your head against a brick wall until your brains dribbled out your ears.

Sequels.

They’re tough.

And not just when it comes to movies.

With THE LOST SISTER – which is a novel, not a movie* – I wanted to tell two stories. First there is the story that stands on its own. The one about the missing girl. Mary Furst, a girl who has no apparent reason to run away, is missing. There are questions about her disappearance, facts that don’t add up. As Our Hero – J McNee – digs into her life, he uncovers some very uncomfortable truths.

That’s my A story. And sure it could have been enough to hold the book by itself. After all, we established our hero in book 1 and if you want, you can keep a series character static. Many people enjoy that kind of thing. Some writers do it wonderfully. Robert B Parker kept Spencer is stasis for decades. Lee Child rarely changes Reacher or gives us any more about him than we need to know.

But I’m not that kind of writer. I need to let my characters change. Be affected by events. So THE LOST SISTER became a chance for me to explore my central character and find more about what makes him tick. I wanted him to confront some of his own choices over the course of the book, to see things in the case that made him question his own ideals and motivations. I wanted there to be something different in his outlook by the end of the book. In short, I wanted to tell a different kind of story with the same characters. Because otherwise… what’s the point? It’s like eating lukewarm leftovers. There’s something in there you recognise, but really it’s not the same.

I also wanted to explore the supporting cast and to see how they reacted in different situations. People I hadn’t expected to see again. Susan Bright, for example, who was supposed to be a throwaway character in THE GOOD SON and became something far more important. And David Burns, local “businessman” who is one of my favourite characters to write for: a man who does bad things for what he believes to be all the right reasons.

THE LOST SISTER changes all of these characters by the end of the book. Not all of them get to “learn” from their experiences, of course. I think we’re all lucky that I’m not God. Because as cruel as He can (allegedly) be, I think I’d be even worse in charge, winding folks up just see how they’d react. But then that’s the job of a writer – wind those characters up and watch them go!

Word so far on THE LOST SISTER – both at home and now in the US – has been positive. I like to think that it’s a good sequel, that it does more than rehash former glories, that it changes things for our characters, that it presents with new challenges and new situations. I’ll tell you what, I had a bloody ball writing it.

The Lost Sister is out now from St Martin’s/Minotaur as shiny hardcover or e-book.

*At least, not yet, if any prospective producers out there are listening…

— THE LOST SISTER at Amazon, and B&N

Russel D. McLean is an author, reviewer and general miscreant from Dundee, Scotland. You can read more about him here, at his website and author page. Click the pic to follow him on Twitter.

March 17, 2011 / 57 Comments

The Old Dog Ain’t Got Long

On the X-ray, they looked like coins of various denominations scattered throughout his lungs. A penny here. Two dimes. A fat nickel. Tumors, the vet said. A lot of them.

I didn’t really take him in expecting a diagnosis of that nature. Cancer? Jesus. I took him in because his hip problems were worsening. He wasn’t making it up the steps as much. As a shepherd dog, he likes to be with the herd, with his peeps, and now with wobbly hips he couldn’t be with us as much. Was no longer as easy to slumber near me as I do my morning writing or come upstairs and sleep by our door at night. It frustrated him and so he’d sit at the bottom of the steps and bark at us.

“Hey. Hey! Hey. Hey. HEY. I want to come up there but I can’t and so I’m saying hey.”

I noticed that his barks were hoarse. Like they didn’t have enough air to them. Plus, at night he’d sometimes make these unproductive gagging noises. Not quite coughs. A persistent hairball.

And then, the panting. Not always, not even often, but sometimes he’d pant fast and shallow.

Vet said, let’s X-ray.

And so, lung cancer.

Fuck cancer, of course.

Fuck cancer right in its canker-sore-encircled ass.

I am tired of cancer stealing away the ones I love.

Some day, cancer, I suspect we will do battle.

The old shepherd — a Belgian shepherd, or Groenendael — is 13, now. Not a young buck by any means. Knew that one day sooner than later the time would come that something would befall him. It’s part of the deal when you get a dog. Not like getting a parrot. Parrots might as well be vampires for as long as you’ll have them. You buy a pup, though, you know that time is ticking down. Faster than you’d ever like. It’s like George Carlin says: life is just a series of dogs.

I got Yaga when I was in college. He was just a fuzzy little knucklehead back then. I had no idea the terror he would be as a puppy or how woefully unprepared I was to handle a dog of his needs. We’d always had dogs growing up, but I didn’t take care of them by myself. So, it came and went that I instilled a lot of bad habits in him not really knowing any better. He got shut of most of those habits by the time he was maybe three years old, and as I grew up I guess so did he. I wasn’t a great owner, but I got better at it. Made mistakes, but I guess none bad enough to diminish the old boy’s boundless enthusiasm and sweet, doofusy love he offers to anybody who walks in the door. Even now with hip problems and lung cancer and god-knows-what-else wrong with him (Lupus? Dogbola?) he seems without compunction or fear. Most times he wags his tail and still has that vacant, goggle-eyed look he’s so good at giving. Like, you know, this one.

I’ve recited this litany before, but I repeat it because it continues to astound:

He should be dead by now.

He’s eaten table legs, linoleum, a Playstation controller. He ate an audio tape and so I had to leash him to a stop sign while out for a walk and pull a whole reel of audio tape from his butt with makeshift paper towel gloves (my neighbors watched). He ate a big box of rat poison. He ate dark chocolate truffles and threw it up on my heating vents in winter (so when the heat came on, you first smelled hot chocolate and, seconds later, hot bile). He had a cancerous growth on his paw. He had Lyme Disease, but only showed sickness when he started taking the Lyme meds. He was attacked by a bull elk, thrown up again and again against a chain link fence by the elk’s prodigious antlers. He saved me from a fire in my double-wide trailer.

Heck, just a couple weeks ago he fell down the steps. Tried climbing up, couldn’t, and rolled back down.

Was utterly unfazed.

He constantly bangs his head into countertops and table-corners.

Again, unfazed.

He’s a tough cookie, but I don’t think this is one battle he can win.

Age is a tireless opponent, especially when cancer is its weapon.

The vet doesn’t know how long he’s got. He refused to speculate because, while the tumors look bad, the dog barely shows any signs of being affected. Could be weeks. Could be months. Could even be days. The hope is that he’ll go slow and peacefully. No cancer is pleasant, but sometimes lung cancer affords its victims the luxury of dying in their sleep. But if it gets bad, we’ll have to take him somewhere. Growing up on the farm, my father always did the euthanizing himself. A lot of our dogs met their end at the end of a gun. Sounds barbaric, and maybe it was, but that’s life on a farm. It was rare to see my father cry, but talking about dogs past was one way to make that happen.

As many have said wisely, it would be a poor effort to mourn the old boy before he’s gone, and so we have taken to spoiling him with tons of treats and foods which would normally be a luxury. The vet said we were good to have him groomed, too, so he’s now all pretty, which is why everyone always calls him “her.”

“She’s so beautiful!” people say.

And I say yes, yes he is.

March 16, 2011 / 36 Comments

Do You Speak The Ancient Baby Language?

And so our intrepid heroes descended into the dank, rank dungeon — the portcullis before them shuddering and shedding rust as it rose into the stone. Down below, they heard the gibbers and wails of… babies. Human babies, hungry for attention, their glistening teeth emerging from pink gums hungry for the blood and souls of heroes! Our two protagonists knew that this day would not be won easily; the babies were armed with Binkies, Boppies, and Bjorns, the wretched weapons of goblin children.

— From The Heroic Cycle Of Der Wendighaus, Book 72, Tenet 17

This past weekend, we went to Babies R’ Us.

The horror. The horror.

First and foremost, let me express my utterest disappointment that you cannot, despite the name of the store, procure any actual babies in this place. I figured, hey, we’ll pick up a baby for rent or purchase, we’ll see how we like it. We’ll train and practice on this baby so that when we finally expel our own into the world, we’ll have a little practice. Nope. They do not rent or sell babies at the inaptly-named Babies R’ Us.

Second and nextmost, let me express my complete amazement and jaw-dangling astonishment at the sheer wealth of baby goods for sale (“wealth” being a bit of a double entendre here given the cost of many items). You walk in there and it’s like, “Here, presented for your edification, are seven thousand strollers.” I don’t believe that adults have as much choice in automobiles as they do strollers for their children. Or car seats. Or carriers. Or bouncy things. Or formula. Or, or, or.

I feel like I’m an explorer trying desperately — and failing with equal desperation — to understand an alien culture. Boppy? Bjorn? “Have you checked out Badger Basket? What about My First Nuk? Foogo! Fuzzibunz? You probably need butt paste. I love my Bumbo!”

I just want to throttle someone and be like, “FOR GOD’S SAKE SPEAK ENGLISH OR I WILL SLAP THE PACIFIER OUTTA YOUR MOUTH.” Like babies aren’t going to be complicated enough, now I need a translator just to figure out what crucial products will help keep my progeny alive and not utterly ruin him as a human being? Can’t I just wash the baby in a tin pail? Can’t I rig up something with duct tape to keep the little tyke upright? Is it really unethical to feed him breast milk from a Super Soaker? Were there always Babies R’ Us installations throughout time and space? Did travelers on the Oregon Trail stop at the Babies R’ Us along the way? “You have killed a buffalo. Your baby requires a Bumbo. You have died of dysentery.”

What would the pilgrims have done if the Indians hadn’t already set up a store at Plymouth Rock?

Up until walking into that store, I figured I at least had a primate’s understanding of how to take care of my young. Feed him. Put him to sleep. Don’t try to shove rocks into his soft spot. Make sure to bathe him once every six months so that he doesn’t build up some kind of exoskeleton composed of calcified baby grime. But walking in there, you’re suddenly confronted with a wall — an actual wall — of bottle options. Big bottles, little bottles, various nipple attachments, some help with Colic, others give your baby the strength of five angry chimps, AHHHHH *head asplode*

Every piece of baby minutiae — every object one could ever imagine buying for your infant — comes in a thousand varieties. Choose the wrong one, and your child may grow up a con-man, a serial killer, or worst of all, a politician. It’s a whole lunatic industry. A churning hell-beast belching diaper-scented steam and leaving behind a crass rime of baby powder like the ashes of the dead. And this shit ain’t cheap, either. We spent a little while testing out “gliders” — aka the future’s version of a “rocking chair” — and of course, the lower-end cheaper gliders felt like you were sitting on a concrete drain embankment studded with broken abalone shells. The moment you sit in one of the gliders that’s actually comfortable you note, “Oh, this glider is $5,000 dollars. And it doesn’t come with an ottoman. Or arm-rests. Or the actual chair. It just comes with a little baggy full of screws, and then I have to special order the rest, and coupons don’t work on special orders and AHHHHH” *head asplode*

Me, I actually liked their one rocking chair. Seriously. It was comfortable as heck. Firm back. Snug. Good even rocking motion. I told the wife, “I like this one.” She stared at me like I’d grown a dick for a nose.

We got to the store early, and it was nice and quiet. But an hour later, the place was overrun by wailing, keening crowds of mothers-to-be and families checking items off of registries.

Oh, and everything for boys either has a football or a monkey on it. First, I never owned a football as a child. I want something with baseballs, goddamnit. Second, I love monkeys. I do. But ten minutes in that store, dang, I’m over monkeys. Done with primates. It took us forever and a day just to find one crib set with woodland creatures on it (owl, fox, bear, Snooki). And given that they were having a weekend sale, we decided to go ahead and procure some of that set — including this cute li’l lamp that we’d seen on Amazon before — and of course we get the lamp home and it’s crooked. Like, really crooked. So, back it goes.

Still, we managed to get out with our lives and, more importantly, our sanity intact. But next week we have to go back to return to the lamp. Once more, into the dungeon.

Maybe by then we’ll have hired a translator.