What Fresh Threat

I haven't been to Pasadena, never seen its wide palm-lined streets, or smelled its faint ocean tang braided with exhaust fumes and jasmine, or heard its low night cry of someone preyed upon…

…so how can I write about it?

Fittingly, her body was found in the weeds. A warm early spring evening. Some abandoned lot the penultimate resting place for a woman abandoned. She amounted to nothing to no one, yet the howls of grief echoing from the hills the night they found her corpse proved—at least—the urban coyotes cared.

Rubber-stamped by ruinous Anubis. 

I've never lost anyone. This is but a tale, spun from a terrible daydream, wrapped in crepuscular fool's gold. Yet what difference does it make? If I feel the loss, the awful drop of the lower gut, the ponderous bell of my own heart a-swing in the cage of my chest, the testicular cinch, who is to say I haven't felt loss?

Who dares tell me I cannot write of it? Will anyone challenge the wisdom of the purple desert sage, of the jackal-headed gods? 

Sacred rage and word games; we're all deplorable.

She was neither old nor young, had worn a white summer dress with a peach hibiscus print, had nicotine stains on her left index and middle fingers, wore her chestnut hair in a ponytail, bore week-old bruises on her legs. Her left ear was disfigured, as if it had been partially melted. Her crow's feet were tan and deep. Lukewarm semen seeped from her torn vagina. They found her wadded panties in the bed of a dry creek.

From El Monte. Telluride. Sedona. Sioux Falls. Parched places are places, and the branch work of all our pasts won't readily be untangled. How you dream of a place can sometimes be better than the place.

Night is coming. Stars are tentative in a sky half-dark. Something is trying to break through; a judgment pursues itself. A long ways east a tawdry, deficient scion implodes like a festering gourd, and America struggles to catch its breath. Look west at the snake of red lights, heading for the city, a crawling neon belly in a thirsty valley. City of tenuous angels. Specters on Mulholland. Centers not held. The embers of the long gone sun are dying. Who kicked this last campfire? What fresh threat, what tan carcinogen, imperils us anew?

Rough beast? She was nothing to me. 

So why, why, why do I weep?

Endless Joke, Infinite Jest, Interminable Gag

Well, this is embarrassing. What on earth happened to all those posts between mid-September and now, you ask? Huh? Oh, that's right, I didn't write them. My excuse? None, really, other than the fact I've been very busy (so, nothing new there) and I went and published another book.

Ah... what's that? Yeah, I said a book. You forgive me? Good. Let's go get muffins. Huh? You hate muffins? Yeah, so do I. Whatevs, we'll improvise.

Back to the book. I was so caught up in the esoteric, arcane world of formatting for epublishing and uploading to scarily-named nuclear meatgrinders that I damn well forgot to mention anything on the blog I set up to showcase such announcements in the first place. Can you spell "imbecile"? Yeah, of course you can, it was a rhetorical question.

A couple of things: the book is called Endless Joke. The more astute of you will notice its visual and titular resemblance to a certain famous tome by David Foster Wallace. And for the less astute, ahem, pay attention to the title of this post. Okay, I'm actually surprised no one has taken me to task on the almost inconceivable hubris it must have taken for me to place my snarky book of essays on a continuum that begins with Shakespeare and includes the complex and challenging Infinite Jest. In my defence, I did it in a spirit of bathos, in an attack of self-deprecation on a par with the scene in Trainspotting where Renton can no longer contain within his carefully constructed walls of denial and insouciance the truth of what it is to be Scottish. So, as everyone in the UK would put it, I'm taking the piss. Out of myself more than anyone, it must be said. Now, don't get me wrong: although I harbour a reluctant appreciation for arrogance, I'm personally not all that predisposed to it. I mean, here's the rub: I'm good but I'm nowhere near that fucking good.

Anyway, it took me four years to read Infinite Jest. Yes, I said "years". Just saying. It's possibly one of the most aptly named books ever written. Not that it isn't brilliant. In some ways, it's too brilliant, leaves everyone in its awkward, golden wake.

Endless Joke, however, is far from endless; in fact, it's quite short. Twenty nine quick chapters dug from the seams of Indies Unlimited and this very blog, a paean to and a diatribe against the current book-industry climate in which random vowels seem to get arbitrarily attached to existing words (when this extends to proper names, do I go with iDavid or eDavid?) and all of us have had to learn not only how to be writers, but how to be publishers, editors, designers, typesetters, formatters, advertisers and publicists. With that in mind, it's a hybrid of writer's manual and (pop) cultural commentary, medium-heavy on the snark but also informative, sweet and gleaming with a lifetime's love of the language.

Okay, I've rambled enough for now. I'll talk some more about it later, maybe. For now, give it a go, see what you think, and please don't hesitate to give me feedback. I love feedback. I crave it. I need it. Like zombies need brains. Like ageing mitochondria need serious protection from marauding free radicals. Huh? Never mind, shut up.

Armless and Legless

Our wonderful interwebs are full of blogs and writing websites that showcase an endless procession of writing advice and tips. We’ve discussed the pros and cons here on Indies Unlimited many times, so I don’t want to go over old ground. While planning the content of this post in the quiet small hours, however, it seemed like a good idea at the time to take a slightly skewed, bizarro-world look at writing tips using our trusty list format. Now, it seems… well, slightly stupid. But since I didn’t have a backup, here it is, anyway: a new kind of list. Twenty Five Writing Tips That Probably Suck. Seriously, though, I’m not wasting anyone’s time: loosely hidden within this apparent drivel are some actual decent tips, once they’re extricated and unpacked. You’ll see.

1. Understatement is absolutely essential. Without it, you’re dead in the water. In fact, there’s no hope whatsoever.

2. Avoid semicolons; they’re just not necessary.

3. The complete avoidance of passive clauses is very much advised by me.

4. Weather ewe think your aloud two ore knot … always rely on you’re spellchecker.

5. Eschew ostentatious verbosity, and exhibit an overall predisposition toward a paucity of embellishment.

6. Eighty-six dialect unless yer lugholes are mint, yo.

7. If you inject opinion, I think you should be struck from the author’s list, skewered on a buck elk’s rack during rutting season, and parboiled in liquefied hamster entrails.

8. Over-explaining can lead to a kind of paralysis on the part of the reader, during which their mental processes become overloaded and, in a classic demonstration of diminishing returns, become less able to absorb the full import of your writing, which behooves you to restrict exposition to a minimum, when all is said and done.

9. Entre nous, while foreign languages are awesome, au courant bon mots may appear excessive if they become de rigeur, and may even invite schadenfreude, so caveat emptor, and try to avoid this type of mea culpa or faux pas, comprende?

10. Omit, pare and cull entirely redundant, superfluous and needless words.

11. Pay great attention, to how you use punctuation.

12. As I once thought-spoke to that gelatinous glob of alien protoplasm from Arcturus over a pint of fermented gerbil spleens, write what you know!

13. Do not use commas, to bracket phrases, that are essential to a sentence’s meaning.

14. Never let someone else edit edit your own work; it’s you’re baby, and besides, you don’t know wear they’ve been.

15. Stop!! Think about the overuse of exclamation points!!

16. Make hay while the iron’s hot and don’t mix your metaphors.

17. My impression is that it’s probably not the best idea to be sort of vague about stuff.

18. Make sure your grammar works good.

19. Always finish what you

20. Do not construct gobsmackingly awkward adverbs.

21. Do not misuse apostrophe’s.

22. In dialogue, be sure the reader knows who’s speaking, said the Dalai Lama.

23. Avoid tired clichés like the plague. When you notice one in your writing, hone in on your target and deep six it with extreme prejudice.

24. A while back, right over there someplace, I was talking to some guy about this one: be specific with details.

25. As Orwell once said, only to immediately break his own rule: “never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” George, dude, you were awesome and stuff, but isn’t “figure of speech” itself a, um, figure of speech?

I kid, of course. Orwell knew what he was talking about. Otherwise, how else would he have teamed up with that Rickenbacker dude to invent popcorn? And now, as a treat for wading through my inanities, here’s another guy who actually knew what he was talking about, so much so that he once said “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” Exactly. Now he’s the type of guy you need to listen to. Not me, him. Sadism and cockroaches notwithstanding.

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on June 1st, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.