Adam-Troy Castro

Writer of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Stories About Yams.

 

Another Incomprehensible Encounter with a Random Stranger

Posted on March 27th, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

Man is a social animal.

It is therefore permitted, even if we don’t know each other, to disturb my simple errand with your conversation.

I do not believe it too much to ask that if you do this, you first ensure that your overture is charming, informative, urgent, or sufficiently entertaining that it is excused of the obligation to any of those three.

Allow me to provide examples.

Charming is, “Oh! What a pretty dog!”

Informative is, “Your dog is taking a shit on that guy’s lawn.”

Urgent is, “Watch out for that dog shit!”

Entertaining is, “You know what? The average standard poodle shits enough to fill an entire Cadillac Eldorado in its lifetime.”

All of these are worthwhile interpositions.

If I do not know why you are even talking to me, you have failed in your overture.

For instance, today’s incident.

I was at the grocery store, picking up a few items for Judi.

One of those items is a rotisserie chicken.

And as I take it from the rack and bring it to the cart, you approach and boom, “BUYING A CHICKEN, EH?”

I do not imagine that this exchange can possibly get more inane, so I respond politely enough. “Um, yes.”

And you boom, “ONLY IN AMERICA!”

You left me with no choice but to reply, “Damn straight! You would never see this kind of thing happening in Belgium!”

And I’m sure you went home equally bothered.

Seriously, guy. Charming, Informative, Urgent, or Entertaining. A fine spectrum of opening gambits.

Comprehensible would be nice, too.

The Competing Dystopias of the Left and the Right

Posted on March 23rd, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook on 18 March 2018.

Story idea, one I do not have the patience to write (and which would be pointless to write, anyway, for reasons described down below):

Some magical handwaving splits the world into two alternate versions of itself, one where the left-wing gets what it wants, one where the right-wing gets where it wants.

We check back in a hundred years to see how it works out for both.

The first real problem is that you cannot write this story without turning it into a polemic for your own side, whichever side that is. Your guys will never make a mistake, the other side will make nothing but mistakes. You will almost inevitably produce your dream version of your own desired result and your nightmare version of the other side’s desired result. (Take my pictured results, below, with the accompanying grain of salt; I know.)

The second real problem is that left and right are not opposites on the spectrum, but in large part polar sides on a sphere, that will eventually meet each other the long way around. Left-wing dictatorships and right-wing dictatorships are both dictatorships, and where they actually stand in relationship to one another is largely a matter of nomenclature. There’s a reason why the left calls Nazism a right-wing nightmare and the right calls Nazism a left-wing nightmare. First, nobody wants to identify with the historical villain, and Second, Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot were all the end points of their own particular forms of devolution. They just were.

But the real problem, as I see it from the left:

If I write a story where the world on the left has universal health care and universal gun control and enforced diversity and sensitivity training and equal rights for people at all points of the sexuality spectrum and strict environmental regulations and economic justice and all that neat stuff, a world where no one is rich but no one is poor, readers on the left will only have their preconceptions enforced and readers on the right will see all that as a horrifying dystopia.

If in the same story the world on the right has no government at all and all policy decisions are made by whatever the rich feel like doing at the time, and all local communities are heavily-patrolled enclaves where armed folk take care of themselves because the government does not exist to do it for them, where folks either work or starve, where gender roles are traditional by law, where morality is absolutely Biblical, and where people can be forced to comply at gunpoint, where all countries that ever got in our faces are radioactive wastelands, then (aside from the environmental degradation being total), then again, readers on the left will only have their preconceptions enforced, and readers on the right will pretty much put it on their flags. As they did with Ayn Rand.

So what we have is not just two competing utopias but also two competing dystopias.

I honestly wish I could move into mine and leave you to yours.

But we are shackled together at the ankles, and there is no hand-waving force, and that is the problem.

More Ways For You, The Writer, To Avoid Being an Asshole

Posted on March 23rd, 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro

There are a couple of things you can do, as a struggling writer of any level of talent from dire to genius, that will mark you among your colleagues as an asshole.

There are actually way more than a couple, but these are the two I am thinking about today.

One is declaring that you can “write rings around” someone popular. Seriously. Your privilege as a writer is that you can take that hat off, and react as a reader any time you want. You want to say that so-and-so sucks, you can, and nobody will draw a direct line between that and your ego if you don’t offer up your own writing as superior example in the same thought. You think Stephen King, to name one, or JK Rowling, to name another, suck? Fine; I disagree with you, but you are welcome to present your argument. In that debate, you have the status of reader.

Just don’t put your writer hat on. Don’t say, in the same thought, that you are better, let alone much better, than the writer you’re pointing at. And especially not to present the corollary that the luminary has enjoyed the success you should know. Even if you’re right, and you’re probably not, this is something only an asshole would do.

The other thing not to do is claim that your failure, up to this point, to get a big publishing contract, is due to the conspiracy of insiders in the New York Publishing industry, where you “have to have connections” and “know somebody.” You may well BE the next Stephen King in potential, but just saying that is a spit in the face of everybody who labored over a novel and got a deal for it, and again, it’s something only an asshole would do.

These are simple warnings. Know better.

Seriously. This is not rocket science.

 
 
 

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