The Rewritten Word

Today I’m going to be doing an incomplete book review for No Exit by Taylor Adams.  Oddly, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” sets the tone at the start of the Amazon preview for No Exit, which seems to be some kind of horror story.  The character Darby Thorne, we are told, suffers from a terrible breakdown in her windshield wiper during a storm and cannot seem to find a freeway exit.  Well, I guess that’s one way to go literal on your title.  She has apparently been driving for miles through snow fueled by nothing more than an ibuprofen and adrenaline.  What’s worse is that we find out that Darby’s mom is suffering from pancreatic cancer, and the reason for this horrible journey is to see her mom post-surgery.  This preview is starting to look fairly bleak.

Darby is eventually lured in by a rest area that promises free coffee.  The place is inhabited by a band of stranded strangers waiting out the terrible storm that Darby calls “snowmageddon”.  Disappointingly, she finds that the “cofee” pot is misspelled and that the place has no cell reception.  This is a problem because Darby desperately wants to reply to her sister’s ominous text about their mom that simply read: “she’s okay right now.”   Luckily, a college guy named Ashley has a tip one a single bar of cell service near some terrible frozen statues outside.  After a brief (and failed) quest for cell service, Darby decides to go exploring in the cold and seems to catch a glimpse of a child’s hand inside a snow-covered van outside.  The implication is that one of the strangers inside has kidnapped a child.

The obvious culprit is a monosyllabic, pimply guy named Lars, who simply hangs around the door like a bad coat rack.  After a few more hours of conversation, Darby eliminates the other strangers as the rightful owners of the van with the child, and concludes that Lars must be the kidnapper.  The dilemma for Darby is that she can’t find an opportunity to let the others know that she suspects Lars.  But she also can’t be sure that she didn’t just imagine the child’s hand.  The preview concludes with Darby mentally circling the drain with these doubts and fears.

I was very disappointed that my heart did not stop once as the book advertised.  Perhaps this only happens after the preview portion.  But, at any rate, I could definitely see myself reading further to find out more about that awful government employee who misspelled the word coffee.  Certain things are excusable in the world, like not knowing how a microwave works or thinking that toilets flush counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere.  The improper spelling of coffee is not one of those things.  Invented in the 15^th century by Arabians and codified in the English language in 1582, long before standard modern English was fully-formed, the spelling of “coffee” has been such a ubiquitous part of the lexicon that it must really be wondered whence this government employee came from to produce such a hilariously awful misspelling of the word.

How it would end if I wrote the ending:

It is very easy to see this story going down the rabbit hole on a quixotic search for this truly deficient government employee who cannot even spell “coffee” correctly.  There are deeper questions that must be answered by any society that could produce such a flawed person.  But I think the other theme that I would want to explore is Darby’s attachment to her cell phone.  We are relentlessly told throughout the preview that she is worrying about a lack of service and her dying cell phone.  It almost seems like the other concerns are trivial.

This story desperately wants to be a comedy, but is being weighed down by dark circumstances like her mother’s cancer and the child kidnapper.  In my ending, Darby would ultimately realize that both of these things were purely fictitious imaginings that were brought on by her obsession with the Mystery Manor free to play app on her phone.  The app is based on a series of click-bubbles that show different chat options as you navigate conversations with the inhabitants of Mystery Manor.  The ultimate goal is to figure out how each of the occupants got to be in the manor, but you can purchase hint packages for $1.99 a piece in order to move you closer to the truth.  Darby was secretly playing this game as she imagined terrible things about the rest area inhabitants.  But after her phone dies, she is forced to actually look at the people around her, and promptly realizes how boring people can be without the distraction of that tiny, glowing screen.

The instant her phone died, Darby Thorne was transported back to a time before cell phones.  There was no way to call for help when the kidnapper turned his sights on the gathered storm refugees, no way to know how her mom was doing, and no way to check on the scores for the game between the Oakland A’s and the Red Sox that was happening that night.  Slowly, she is driven into madness as she must adjust to unadulterated conversation and eye contact with those around her.  As it turns out, the child in the car was a conjured image from her childhood, during which she was able to view herself through a disembodied perspective, after being horribly trapped in a white van as a prank by her sister.  Her sister had told her that awful things tended to happen to children in white vans right before shoving her in and slamming the doors.  Darby had been too young to operate the door handles intelligently and was stuck for at least an hour as her sister went about gathering other neighborhood children to come and observe.

This repressed memory serves as the anchor of her madness and the jumping off point for her meandering journey back across the greater US as she flees the reality of a sick mother.  Ultimately, Darby will be okay as she comes to accept ibuprofen as her lord and savior, first forming a cult around proper ibuprofen usage, then dissolving the cult by accident in a kerfuffle about the applicability of sales tax provisions, and finally on to writing a terrible screed to a local newspaper about how kindness is essentially dead in America and how even a cheery old grandma can just as easily be an oxycodone-pushing creep.  I suspect that just as much should be learned from Darby’s journey as not learned from Darby’s journey.

As an aside, my wife and I were driving up to Seattle a couple years ago, passing through one of those remote spans in the middle of California, when our gas indicator suddenly turned orange to say the tank was nearing empty.  Typically, you can expect about 45 or so miles as your worst-case scenario in a regular 4 door vehicle or so my phone said as I frantically researched the matter, watching exit after exit pass by with no indication of a gas station for the foreseeable distance.  The kind of tight apprehension that grips you in those kinds of circumstances seems hardly useful, and maybe it really is just some sort of vestigial holdover from the days when humans were hunted as prey.  But in that moment, there was a default kind of comfort to be had (a strange amount of hubris really) that came from knowing that my little screen could predestine exactly how many miles it would take before our gas tank finally gave up the ghost.  Even if we hadn’t made it to the nearest station, we would have known exactly how short we had come and probably could have called for service.  All of this is to say that for us, at least, there was always an exit so long as our phones were still alive and kicking.

However, I think it would only make sense to end a book titled “No Exit” by showing a web address for a site that continues the story of Darby’s drug madness.  Much like Infinite Jest upended the literary world by proposing 200 pages of footnotes, the web address would provide its own David Foster Wallace-style twist with a never ending back end on the creation.   The website would be updated daily with new sentences added to the story via computer generation and would break the mold in ways that Never-ending Story could ever dream of.  And, perhaps, this would be the most fitting way to “end” a book about a lack of exits from the burdens of technological dependency.  The story would no longer be our own, but would instead belong to the bits of code out there in the vast expanse of technical interplay.

The Review

The amazon preview for the Magnolia Story by Chip and Joanna Gaines begins with a supercilious statement in the guise of humility: “I have always been one to play it safe.”  The veil is immediately pulled back when we find out that playing it safe has nothing at all to do with the story, because we are told that the one and only Chip Gaines is really driving the ship of their marriage and that he has less care for his own bodily safety than Hunter Thompson on a twelve-drug binge in Vegas.  Well, so much for being subtle.

Soon we find out that Chip has nefariously chosen to sell all of the family’s belongings in order to buy a used houseboat from a back-alley shyster.  Joanna is about ready to divorce Chip when suddenly a mysterious television producer calls.  We are told that Chip is convinced this call was a scam, given all of his college friends who were scammed into paying $1,000s for headshots.  But this was not the case when they find out the TV producer is legit and wants to setup a high-brow HGTV show called “Fixer Upper” where Chip and Joanna can argue about wood and put more letter lights and plants into remodeled houses than you’d find in a hipster coffee shop.

And then we are transported back to their first meeting in the middle of her father’s muffler shop.  We are told that Joanna’s friends all point out a hot guy in the muffler shop that she simply must meet.  In the biggest twist ever, the hot guy is not Chip Gaines.  We are never told what comes of this hot guy as he sweeps out of the muffler shop with an air of sultry mystery, and maybe we never really want to know.  But still, you have to wonder if he didn’t go off to become a certain mysterious CEO who keeps a torture room in his apartment and delights in making bad conversation with his secretaries.

Back at the muffler shop: at some point, a goofy-seeming guy named Chip Gaines eventually engages Joanna in a nice conversation about Baylor University.  This seems enough to build a relationship on, and so they do.  There are other things that happen in this preview and I’m sure they are really very interesting things, wrapped in precision woodwork like everything that comes from Magnolia eventually is (well that and the odd horror-story involving the hay silos that Chip will buy for some dark purpose).  It is a serviceable retelling that I’m sure devolves into a gripping exposé about the shady house and materials trading business that Chip and Joanna reign over as southern kingpins.

How it would have ended if I wrote the ending:

After more than a few years at the top of HGTV’s ratings, the Gaines become increasingly challenge-oriented. Chip, disillusioned by the seemingly endless number of hipster-chic remodels, decides that his next project is going to be a massive manor in a neglected Waco neighborhood, which he will try to restore to its original form.  The project instantly turns impossible as a rival HGTV show called “America’s Most Haunted Houses” also attempts to shoot in the space at the same time.  Every few days of the remodel, the project is halted for ectoplasm inspection and abatement, which cripples the budget and nearly leads Joana to divorce.

One day, Chip makes a terrible discovery.  He never expected to find a ghost under the floorboard during the remodel, but that’s exactly what he finds!  The charming ghost introduces itself as Mr. Trumwell, a 19th century gentleman who was savagely murdered in his dining room at the unfinished age of 45.  What follows is a murder mystery across the centuries.  Chip has plenty to learn about paranormal clue gathering and Mr. Trumwell is about the best teacher he can have.

Eventually, a box buried under Baylor University’s fabled football field is unearthed and opened up to reveal a series of gnarly correspondence between Trumwell’s widow Beatrix and a huckster who specialized in selling fake gold claims, named Bandford McGee.  The letters reveal that Beatrix was conned into believing that Bandford was working on a Grand Canyon orphanage that would give the children a view to grow up with.  Unbeknownst to Trumwell, Beatrix was slowly siphoning off the family fortune to help pay for the supposed orphanage.

One day, she decides to pay a visit to McGee and insists upon meeting the children.  McGee, who is significantly more than three sheets to the wind, drunkenly admits that there were never any orphans (in her letter to him afterwards, she states “I was much distressed to become cognizant of my follies, though not as shameful for it as I should have been.  As such, I have decided that the only item left to me is this wonderful estate, which I shall donate as a bequest upon the children that your orphanage should have assisted.  My only regret is that Mr. Trumwell shall have to suffer first in order that I may inherit the estate.”).

Trumwell is surprisingly calm about this discovery and decides to join Chip on his next dozen remodel projects as a secret inspector who can see the mold and termite damage behind walls simply by passing through them.  However, Chip becomes increasingly depressed by the mortal reminder of his ghostly friend and falls into a severe depression.

“You know, Trumwell, basically everything we do is irrelevant,” Chip laments one day.  “That house I remodeled yesterday will fall into disrepair in only one generation and will need to be remodeled again in a way that completely destroys my work.  Or worse, the property will be condemned and destroyed.  There’s basically no reason to do anything.”

What follows is a 100 page, Ayn Rand-styled discourse concerning the deep, un-abiding malaise that the world finds itself in, wherein Chip and Trumwell engage in philosophical dialogue that culminates in the following exchange:

“If I can’t be certain that these awesome houses I’ve remodeled will continue on, then how can I be certain of anything?  That David Hume guy has a point.  Prediction based on observation is a limited and futile way of reconciling reality.  There is almost no point to doing anything.”

“I somewhat agree,” Trumwell says.  “But you cannot let the indeterminate infirmity of human faculties form an obstacle of your continued existence.  Just because the stucco walls will fall in and out of favor; and just because someday we will no longer be able to tell the difference between actually-distressed wood and purposefully-distressed-looking wood, doesn’t make the progress of our work any less important.  You say that everything depends upon your flawed observations of reality, but the inability to know the future is itself a gift, Chip.  You cannot measure time in ephemeral gestures by staking on it a belief in absolute permanence.  Instead, you must appreciate every remodel project as you would every smile that your children bestow upon you—not for what it will be someday, but instead for what it is in that very moment.”

Chip breaks down in a good weep, humbly thanks the now-disappearing Trumwell, and goes on to live a lovely, if ephemeral, existence.

I’ve been on hiatus for a while since my last post.  But now I’m back and ready to review small content with a big lens.  In this review of an Amazon preview, I am taking a look at Crimes Against a Book Club by Kathy Cooperman.

At the start of our Amazon preview, we are introduced to the fierce members of Annie Baker’s book club, who, like a pack of wolves, must sniff Annie out to see if she belongs.  Horrifyingly, she reveals to the group that she does not do Pilates and isn’t from La Jolla.  Things are not going well, but just when it appears that the pack is going to rip her limbs off and bath in her blood, Anne’s friend Dawn extols Annie’s virtues, including her doctorate in Chemistry from Harvard.  This seems to be enough to sate the group, though no one appears to know what exactly one does with such an education.

We soon find out that almost nobody in the group had read the book, and those who had only vaguely understood it or cared about it.  The book club is a façade, a means to disguise their petty desire to gossip.  And Annie is quite different from these ladies: while Annie gorges on the snack trays, the skinny women in the club seem to pick at their food.

And there is the little matter that one member, Crystal, is pregnant with another member’s ex’s baby (the other member would be Valerie).  Annie can’t figure this out.  It makes no sense.  Dawn is finally pushed into revealing that Dawn’s mother-in-law is besties with the ex (Walter) and Walter complained that nobody was being friendly with Crystal.

There is a sort of strained-melancholy to it all, like we are supposed to be in on some sort of joke with Annie, but the joke just never seems to surface.  Are we supposed to hate these feuding faux-socialites who have nothing in common except a preternatural urge to gather with their kind?  If so, it really seems that instead there is only a meandering pride that at least Annie is not one of these horrible people.  And maybe that’s the point, in her own sort of Holden Caufield-esque paranoia, Annie is able to define herself as at-least-not-phony, and we, the readers, are left to suspect whether what we are told is really true or whether she has painted these people in a poor light to shore-up her own self-doubt.

How it would end if I had written it:

Annie Baker eventually learned to accept the terrible book club members on their own terms and took delight in predicting their horrible reactions to the New York Times’ bestseller list books.  Annie is being infiltrated by the club members’ plastic values.  When all the ladies decide to submit try-out videos for the next season of the Bachelor, she feels like a traitor for not participating.  She knows she’s in trouble when she starts ending her nouns with “-ing” and buys a palette of Kombucha.  She must do something to disrupt the flow of the club or else face becoming permanently assimilated.

That’s when Annie has the dreadful idea of suggesting her childhood favorite, Animal Farm by George Orwell, as the next book in the rotation.  The local thrift store had a dozen second-hand copies.

At first, the other ladies didn’t want to physically touch the dusty and yellowed pages of the used books.  After Annie vouches for the book’s important political message, the club decides to give it a read.  Crystal is drawn in by the archaic drawings of animals on the cover and Dawn is amused to find out there weren’t any actual pictures inside.

Despite the fact that half the club hasn’t read the book, the Animal Farm discussion proves to be the most contentious book club meeting yet.  Crystal doesn’t quite understand why the animals threw away a perfectly good life by overthrowing the kind farmers, but soon enough she is taking a side in the contest between Napoleon and Snowball.  Dawn thinks the windmill just wasn’t built up to spec, and the others aren’t quite sure that the animals don’t all deserve to be taken to the slaughter house after learning about the hideous things these creatures do.

Later, the club falls into a rift when Walter and Crystal break up.  Half the club sees this as an opportunity to kick out their pariah and the other half has learned to love Crystal’s horrible ways.  Oddly, Annie falls in with the latter group and tries to coax Dawn into letting Crystal stay.  But Dawn isn’t having any of that and points out that Crystal was no better than the traitorous cat in Animal Farm, who was found to have voted on both sides.

All of this culminates in one grand statement by Crystal: “Maybe that pig Napoleon was right; some animals are more equal than others, just like people.”  She storms off and the book club soon after dissolves for good.

In what will be a new type of post that I am adding to the Rewwritten Word, I’m going to be taking passages from existing material (mostly using a few paragraphs from a given novel) and modifying them with different editing choices.  I want to be very clear from the outset that none of my changes are intended to make the passages strictly better.  My ego is not so great to allow me to think I will always rewrite everything for the better.

Instead, the intent is to show, as an exercise, how choices in revising your writing can affect the feel, pace, and impression on the reader.  My hope is that by looking at these choices, we can see how an editing tree can be followed so that you can think more critically about your own work, whether you are writing fiction or working on a thesis.  The writing process is as much, if not more, an editing process.

My first victim is the opening passage to The White Moll by Frank L Packard, published in 1920 and now available through project Gutenberg.  One of the things I admire about many works of this period is an emphatic need to experiment with description, simile, and fragmented sentences.  F Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, showed us that the old, tired “he said” and “she said” dialogue could be transformed into more interesting forms like “he said dully” and “she said wryly”.  The lesson to learn from this period is that you can make your characters more than robots by embracing a bit of flair and emotion in all things.

With that in mind, my changes to the opening lines of the White Moll are oddly conservative.  I approached the language with a scalpel, attempting to make the lines more efficient.  Some of the flair is lost, and the feel should be very different, perhaps more compact.  But, again, my changes are just different choices, perhaps no better and no worse.

The Opening Lines of The White Moll as Written

It was like some shadowy pantomime: The dark mouth of an alleyway thrown into murky relief by the rays of a distant street lamp…the swift, forward leap of a skulking figure…a girl’s form swaying and struggling in the man’s embrace. Then, a pantomime no longer, there came a half threatening, half triumphant oath; and then the girl’s voice, quiet, strangely contained, almost imperious:

“Now, give me back that purse, please. Instantly!” The man, already retreating into the alleyway, paused to fling back a jeering laugh.

“Say, youse’ve got yer nerve, ain’t youse!”

The girl turned her head so that the rays of the street lamp, faint as they were, fell full upon her, disclosing a sweet, oval face, out of which the dark eyes gazed steadily at the man.

And suddenly the man leaned forward, staring for an instant, and then his hand went awkwardly to touch his cap.

“De White Moll!” he mumbled deferentially. He pulled the peak of his cap down over his eyes in a sort of shame-faced way, as though to avoid recognition, and, stepping nearer, returned the purse.

“‘Scuse me, miss,” he said uneasily. “I didn’t know it was youse—honest to Gawd, I didn’t! ‘Scuse me, miss. Good-night!”

For a moment the girl stood there motionless, looking down the alleyway after the retreating figure. From somewhere in the distance came the rumble of an elevated train. It drowned out the pound of the man’s speeding footsteps; it died away itself—and now there was no other sound. A pucker, strangely wistful, curiously perturbed, came and furrowed her forehead into little wrinkles, and then she turned and walked slowly on along the deserted street.

The White Moll! She shook her head a little. The attack had not unnerved her. Why should it? It was simply that the man had not recognized her at first in the darkness. The White Moll here at night in one of the loneliest, as well as one of the most vicious and abandoned, quarters of New York, was as safe and inviolate as—as—She shook her head again. Her mind did not instantly suggest a comparison that seemed wholly adequate. The pucker deepened, but the sensitive, delicately chiseled lips parted now in a smile. Well, she was safer here than anywhere else in the world, that was all.

My Rewrite of The White Moll

It was like some scene out of a cheap dime novel: The yawning mouth of an alleyway thrown into murky relief by the rays of a distant street lamp…the swift, forward leap of a skulking figure…a smallish girl reeling and struggling in an oafish man’s embrace. Then, the girl’s voice, quiet, strangely contained, broke the cold dewy air:

“Now, give me back that purse…please!”

The man, already retreating into the alleyway, paused to fling back a jeering laugh.

“Say, you got nerve, ain’t you!”

The girl turned so that the rays of the street lamp, faint as they were, fell full upon her face, displaying a sweet, oval portrait, out of which her dark eyes gazed steadily at the man.

And suddenly the man started walking back to her, a all the while awkwardly tugging at his cap as though everything in the world might make more sense if the cap was positioned correctly.

“De White Moll!” he mumbled deferentially, as he pulled the peak of his cap down over his eyes, as though to avoid further recognition, and, stepping even nearer still, returned the purse.

“‘Scuse me, miss,” he said uneasily. “I didn’t know it was youse—honest to Gawd, I didn’t! ‘Scuse me, miss. Good-night!”

For a moment the girl stood there motionless, looking down the alleyway after the retreating figure. From somewhere in the distance came the rumble of a tired old train. It drowned out the patter of the man’s speeding footsteps as he retreated with the little dignity left to a failed thief. A curious twitch furrowed her forehead into little wrinkles, and then she turned and walked slowly on along the now deserted street.

The White Moll! She shook her head a little. The attack had not unnerved her. Why should it? It was simply that the man had not recognized her at first in the darkness. The White Moll here at night in the loneliest, and most vicious, quarter in New York, was nevertheless as inviolate as—as—She shook her head again. Her mind did not instantly suggest a comparison that seemed wholly adequate. The twitch deepened, but the delicately chiseled lips parted now in a smile. Well, she was safer here than anywhere else in the world, that was all.

Incomplete Book Review: Red Sparrow

On a lark, I decided to read the Amazon preview of Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews.  First of all, I was not only completely disappointed in the fact that there were no red sparrows (nor sparrows of any shade for that matter) by the end of the preview, but I was also somewhat intrigued. SDR (Super Divey Refusnik[1]?) Nathaniel Nash is in Moscow and it is predictably cold.  In fact, if Moscow is ever described as even slightly warm in any novelization that touches upon it, it would only be stated in order to clue you in on the idea that you are really in an alternative universe Moscow.  Luckily, we get past the first page without a reference to Vodka.

By the end of the second page, we have so many acronyms that it is impossible to say what is actually happening (are the SVR at war with the FSB?  Maybe SDR Nathan is a part of the CIA, but is he a part of MARBLE’s fight against the KGB?  Maybe the FSB has always been at war with Eastasia).

Page 7 is not included in this preview, which is to say that page 7 is classified, but it is classified at such an utterly low level of classification that you need only shell out $8.99 for the Kindle version to access it.  There is, however, no knowing just what rights to privacy you cede in the act of downloading the full version.  In fact, it is entirely possible that the whole Kindle download is really just a communist plot to infiltrate your little black and white screen with advertisements for Lada Priora vehicles[2]…

Eventually things happen to the main character, Nate Nash.  He has an inexplicably clandestine meeting with someone named MARBLE and is afraid of some cars (perhaps nicely equipped Lada Prioras).  After a few meaningless chases, he is forced to order a beet soup for no good reason.  In the next chapter, we are introduced to Vanya Egorov, a KGB agent who takes orders directly from Putin.  It turns out this Vanya guy knows everything about Nate Nash already and wants to stop him from selling secrets or investigating Chechen drug deals or…something.  It’s not entirely clear, but does it need to be?  This Red Sparrow preview teaches the most venerable lesson that spy stories are best when you have no idea what is happening.

Finally, as a side note, this is one of those odd previews that really has something like 100 pages included via skipping 2-3 pages, that way, if you want to read it for free, you can, but you will likely find the circuitous plot to be even more cloudy (or maybe not).  However, my review will stop at the end of chapter 2 in order to ensure the integrity of this incomplete review process (if there is any at this point).

How it Would Have Ended if I’d Written It

Nate Nash is on the run from the FSBSDRSVRFKGB, which is now a combined super unit of acronymical[3] proportions.  The acronym society soon finds itself under the direct control of Putin himself, who decides to publicly behead Vanya for his incompetent search for Nate Nash.  Nate, for his part, has fled the country for the only logical place: Irvine, California, the safest place on the planet.  He buys a condo, settles down, and starts a dentistry practice in what almost seems like a Rockwell painting ending until his primal need for skullduggery rises to the surface.  After receiving a cryptic message from MARBLE, he heads back to the land of the Kremlin[4] in order to find out whether there were Chechen drug dealers after all.

He finds out that the entire network of Chechens is supported by exports of oxycontin to Florida, where they are handed out like candy on Halloween.  This was the real plot all along: reinforcing American stupidity by making prescription drugs readily available, all the while blaming the Chechens as the convenient fall-people.

Meanwhile, Putin has begun injecting a supreme blend of vodka directly via his veins, rendering him fabulous for shirtless photos.  In fact, Putin becomes so talented at looking good shirtless that he starts a second career posing for romance novel covers.  He dissolves the acronym society, renounces his spy days, and decides to start a plastic life living in an inch-for-inch recreation of the Kardashian mansion built on a prime stretch of Moscow hillsides.  Some question whether it is a façade, and, in the meantime, Vanya’s sons plot to kill Putin with the help of a now oxycotin-addicted Nate Nash.

In a stunning twist, their plot is completely crushed and they are all sent to spend the rest of their days in a Siberian gulag.

But Putin has by this point changed his ways completely, and has become obsessed with his new reality TV show that follows his pursuits into the Moscow night life, “Putin on Putin”.  During a memorable episode, one of his cadre members (Bodgan Smirnov) snubs him by failing to nod in his direction while walking into the Red Sparrow nightclub.  He should have been offended, but given that Putin had recently begun dating Bodgan’s ex-girlfriend, there was only a mild detente, composed entirely of awkward eyebrow ticks and whispers in the bathroom stalls while the camera crews try futilely to get in on the action.  Meanwhile, there is tension about who is taking which seat in the limo on the way back to the mansion for the after party.

In the end, Putin is forced to choose between following his true love and joining his cadre’s trip to Paris.  But, in a nod to the “The Lady, or the Tiger?”, we never know which of the two he chooses, and the reader is left forever unsatisfied.

[1] Go ahead, look up this word.  It is an actual word that is commonly used to increase one’s score in Scrabble, though the internet cannot seem to find its meaning anywhere.  Perhaps it has no meaning.  There is a very similar word “Refusenik” that actually refers to Jewish resistors in Soviet Russia.  The similarity to the actual plot of this preview is almost too similar to deny, and the fact that the author did not in fact have that meaning in mind can only be further proof that it must be true.

[2] This is a Russian car that is surprisingly competitive with its Japanese and American counterparts, and I’m sure these come standard with dash cams built in.  The latter is a popular option in Russia these days given all the corrupt law enforcement officials.

[3] This freshly made-up term is highly justified within the context of this review.  For instance, how else would you describe something that has acronym-like characteristics without using the utterly tasteless and culturally unsound attachment of “like.”  In fact, I think this very footnote establishes the case that “ical” should be attachable to any noun.  As a way of showing this point: spaceical, footballical, deathical, underwearical, shoeical.  It slots in very easily into the English language and makes so much sense that you really have to wonder how we’ve bumbled around without this word technology up to this point.

[4] A common misconception is that the Kremlin is a Tetris-inspired building with cool Aladdin-like spires, but actually the peach building that represents iconic Russia is actually St. Basil’s.

Incomplete Book Review: The Choice by Nicholas Sparks

The beginning of this preview greets us with the characters Matt and Travis, who seem to be caught in a premeditated malaise as they attempt to install a spa in the heat of the sun.  There is no indication that either is aware, or remotely concerned, about OSHA safety recommendations, and nothing in their description lends itself to interpreting proper back harnesses are in place.  As such, despite the hope that two more friends will arrive to ease the burden, we can already see that each of these fools is in for a chiropractic episode.  W find out that Matt is suspicious that Travis has lied to him about actually asking the friends to join.  When the third friend Joe finally arrives, the spa is already in place, and though the author lends nothing to the description of Matt’s reaction that could remotely be interpreted as seething anger, I’m going to guess as much here.

Joe’s horrible children are in tow (note, for accuracy’s sake, the children are nowhere described as horrible, but it is implied in that they are the spawn of Joe, who himself is a massive twit) in addition to Allison and Megan (who seem to have nothing to contribute to this preview).  Doubled over in pain, Matt can only spare an irate glare at Travis when he learns that Travis has betrayed him by telling Joe to come at 5pm, which is far beyond the regulated time allotment for spa installment.

There is a bit of a row concerning Matt’s aversion to his father-in-law’s stories about prostate cancer, and for this Nicholas Sparks can be forgiven for sparing us the details.  Somehow Matt’s wife Liz is involved in this mix of characters, though how and why is never addressed; she seems to simply show up and have vague conversations with the Alison woman.

We are finally left with the following observation by Matt that seems to act as the theme of this intro: “His life, he sometimes thought, resembled a beer commercial.”  In his deathly agony from moving the spa, Matt must simply sit back and observe, like a horribly aware comatose victim, as his friends and their awful kids run around in the backyard.  We can only guess at the dark thoughts that linger in the wake of the great spa betrayal.

Overall, this preview conveys an intentionally-dulled version of mediocrity.  Like a pair of socks that have faded in color but don’t yet have holes in them, this story does the job and no more.  Sparks never cuts deeper into Matt’s emotions and never questions the meaning of his tedious existence.  You get the feeling that the spa is a broken metaphor for something even Sparks does not fully grasp, as if he is electing to have the reader stand in as his interpreter, and hopefully give him direction on a way forward in a world that is at times so banal that you can only ever see the obvious and direct meaning in things.

How it would end if I had written it

As the days pass, Matt is thrown deeper and deeper into pain as the spa moving has caused him great nerve damage.  At a dinner party one night, after being propped up by Liz and loaded with hydrocodone, Matt impresses his guests with a vegetable cutting performance.  Travis is especially wowed, and a little suspicious that Matt is able to be so nimble in spite of his supposed pain.  Little does Travis know that Matt has been taking internet courses in knife sharpening.

Eventually, Matt’s birthday rolls around and Travis gets the awful idea of renting out an adult-sized bounce house.  Even though Liz had tries to talk him out of the idea, Travis insists that Matt’s pain is fake and that the allure of a bounce house will coax him out of bed and back into full ambulation.  Meanwhile, Joe has decided to rent a keg for the party, unaware of Travis’ plans that conflict with this decision from a moral perspective.  The keg is ultimately very grand with a four-set of old bath legs propping up what could be a cask if it were not made of a sad kind plastic or vinyl.  Instead of inspiring more beer commercial moments, the keg acts as a grand unifier to the anemic white people who show up to Matt’s birthday.  Various theories surrounding the genesis of the unusual keg are thrown around, and eventually it is decided that a podcast must be started in the keg’s honor, as the group of Travis, Alison, Megan, and Joe search for answers.

One day, an email from a guy in Muscatine, Illinois confirms that he had once seen a very similar keg on the deck of an old pirate ship that had been repurposed to be a party boat.  Alison is skeptical at first, but then she hunts down an archived photo of a newspaper clipping that mentions a man named Jeff “Blackbeard” Burns, who appears to be wearing a necklace that appears to be composed of rave-style glow-sticks.  After multiple interviews with locals, who can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the pirate ship, Alison and Megan decide to train with a deep sea diver, and finally take the plunge to the bottom of the Mississippi River, where they find an anchor that seems too gnarly to belong to anything.

Many weeks pass with more and more seemingly meaningless and tangential discoveries.  It seems like they are on the cusp of finding the truth; if only they could find “Blackbeard” Burns, all of their questions might be answered.

But they eventually discover that the search itself is the answer that they are actually looking for, and that life is an endless procession of looking, a yearning that will never be quite right if the actual truth is ever found, because in the darkness everything is infinite and nothing is settled.

I was originally going to make this post about villains. I even threw a Google search or two at the topic and found out that there are a good number of places that are straight up named villain-this-or-that (Villains Vintage Clothing, not too far from me, and Villains Tavern in LA). But the spark just wasn’t there. The villains post will happen…some day.

So, instead I want to write about vignettes or episodes, by which I mean to reference those little bits of plot that may begin and end within 1 to 3 chapters. A good example of this would the mines of Moria episode in the Lord of the Rings. The characters in that portion of the book enter in to a sort of time capsule amidst the fallen ruins of a dwarven kingdom.

While there is an overall attachment to the rest of the story, that attachment is tenuous at best, but the very fact that it is remote, contained, and possibly irrelevant is what allows the episode to break the banality of a linear plot progression. Whether it’s Harry Potter fighting a troll, Luke Skywalker ingratiating himself to a group of e-woks, or Katniss Everdeen fighting off a gaggle of tracker jackers, these help to disrupt the plot and keep everyone involved interested (note that I did not restrict this to “readers” as I think authors can be just as bored by an A to B plot progression).

Dickens’ Wine Shop

So the question then is: how does one go about designing a good vignette? Well, first think about your setting. The vignette should have an identity within your universe and help reinforce how this universe is conveyed. For instance, in the e-wok example above, we can see a few ways that this links into the feeling of a very alien universe where even the teddy bears can be deadly. In a Dickensian setting, the vignette will form around a rag and bottle shop or the like to convey how truly grey and sooty the Victorian cities were at that time; or there may be an episode about a man who runs a pawn shop for human limbs to show how ridiculous the setting is.

The second piece is deciding whether the vignette will be a scene in the life of an existing character or a scene created/populated around one or more confined characters. The advantage of the former is that you can flesh out one of your characters by showing (for example) that he or she is a hoarder, has a secret cosplay hobby, or simply loves skydiving in a flying squirrel suit. The vignette for that character can also be a good tool for foreshadowing or metaphor (eg items in the hoard pile can serve as clues to a later mystery or the skydiving may be a prelude to a character’s abrupt fall within society).

On the other hand, the advantage of creating new characters for your vignette is that you can make them as ridiculous as you like without feeling like you need to do upkeep. They also give you back-pocket characters that you can bring up when least expected. In example, we have Sirius Black, who seemingly disappears after the end of the third Potter book, only to make appearances later on down the line. Dickens I really find myself letting go when I create these one-off characters, giving them strange accents, hobbling insanity, peculiar outfits, etc.

However you position your vignette, remember that the most important thing is to keep everyone engaged. You can write the most technically-superb book or movie, but that won’t matter if the audience falls asleep during the first act.