10.6.07

hideous

some ideas have been formulating in this big brain of mine ever since i wrote my rant on misogyny last week. these ideas have been battling for attention between my studying and the left over ideas from my now long deleted novel, giants.

when a writer has good ideas, it's hard to let them go when they don't exactly work out, and that's what happened to
giants. there are still a lot of good ideas left over from the book that i want to use, but for the most part, i'm going to have to let them go. that's the toughest part about writing: making decisions. sometimes you just have to cut loose good ideas even though it may hurt a heck of a lot to see them go. i have to learn to get over it. it's pretty much the only way i'll ever be able to write something new. i'm pretty much there now. so this leaves some room for some new ideas to come about.

first up is
hideous, which is the working title for my next book. it's going to take a closer look at single male culture in out society. i came up with a few ideas for the title of the book, but eventually i ended up with hideous just for the sheer immensity of possibilities it entails, all the while being nothing more than a three syllable word.

hideous will basically be a stripped down version of everything i'd written in the past, incorporating parts of another failed novel, zero sum, with new ideas and story arcs. misogyny will be the main theme, but a secondary aspect of a stripped down nature will take effect. everything from the writing to the eventual characters will be stripped bare. i'm hoping to rid my writing of this constant problem of being too artsy. hideous is a dirty topic so i don't want fluttering prose, if you know what i mean. i want the writing to be more like machine-gun fire. simple. direct. just. like. this. maybe not exactly like that, but you get what i mean.

i don't really intend on pulling any punches this time around either. there are a lot of things that i'd write in the past but get rid of at the last moment. i'm my own worst censor sometimes and i cop out a lot when it comes to writing. too much sometimes.

hideous will hopefully be a braver attempt. it's going to have to be considering the salacious nature of the topic. it's the dark and dirty sides of men that really scare people. and i'm not talking about killers or rapists or child molesters (although they are plenty scary). what i'm talking about are psychopaths. psychopaths in the truest sense of the word: without empathy or remorse.

you see psychopaths everywhere these days. they're at your work place, they date your sisters they may even be a drinking buddy. they're everywhere, these self-serving, emotionally walled up individuals. and when it comes down to it, they blame everyone but themselves, particularly women.

so what have i got so far? well, i have a half a dozen characters that are all dressed up with nowhere to go. these characters are fully developed, but the plot isn't. at this point, i've been throwing around various ideas, debating everything from where to locate the book to what perspective it should be written from.

what i do know is that it will be focused on three men: billy, elton and norm. one's a romantic, another is a jealous monster, and the third is a bona fide psychopath. hopefully i can put a fresh take on these characters. for example, the jealous monster is not the type of jealousy you think. it's not about being jealous of another guy. far from it.

there are a couple of female characters but i debated whether to bother to give them names or even physically describe them. because really, to these three men, it doesn't matter who the women are: it's women in general they have hang ups with. women and themselves. i thought that might be an interesting twist, to make all the women in the novel indistinguishable, to make them the "every woman." but then i thought about it some more and i figured i'd probably come across as a misogynist myself, which is not what i'm trying to portray. but hey, if i'm not going to pull punches, those punches would have to eventually be directed at myself, yes? i've always found that kind of writing interesting. when the author is willing to make himself look like a fool, it's sometimes a good thing. we'll see.

ultimately, i suppose, i will give have a principle female character, because it just wouldn't work without a central emotional pivot point. at any rate, i'll be posting excerpts on this site as they come about. more later...