Adam-Troy Castro

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

 

Assume Hillary Wins. What Does Donald Trump Do Next?

Posted on October 1st, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

So let us assume for the sake of argument that the numbers hold or get better and that Hillary Clinton is elected President.

What is Trump’s next move?

He’s not gonna do what defeated Presidential nominees usually do and fade to relative silence, as, for instance, Mitt Romney did, or as the elder George Bush did. (Please note that I said “relative” silence; Al Gore and John McCain remain players on the national stage, in one case as a private citizen and in the other as an influential Senator, but in neither case do we still hang on their every word, as we did while they were running.)

Trump, a special case who doesn’t seem to live unless people are paying him rapt attention, is going to be different.

Let us put aside the way his vast criminal empire seems to be crumbling on a dozen separate fronts, right now; the trouble he’s in for the Trump University fraud, for bribery, for the now-national awareness that he routinely stiffs his creditors as a policy, the trouble he’s in for dealing with Cuba during the embargo, the trouble he’s in for his fake charity, the suit where he’s accused of the rape of a minor. It is quite possible that he ran for President to make himself too powerful to prosecute, and yes, as a defeated candidate all of that will flood in on him, from all directions. It will be an interesting time, in the Chinese sense, to be Donald Trump.

But while that’s still catching up with him, or after he squirms free, what will we expect of Schmuckgrave, the Orange Man?

He might try to get THE APPRENTICE back. And NBC might be shameless enough to give it to him. The guy made himself a hero to 40% of the country. Those are golden numbers in TV-Land. And this is really the happiest result possible.

But I think not. The fact is that, as the guru of the alt-right political movement that is even more to the right than what we get from Fox News, he’s got a demographic sewn up, and he’s likely going to use that demographic to create for himself a media juggernaut. Imagine a TV Network that is as far to the right of Fox News as Fox News is to Rachel Maddow, and imagine that it offers 24/7 bloviating from people he would hand-pick. Imagine that he has a one-hour show to weekly stand in front of people who believe in everything he says, and make the kind of speech he’s best at making: a self-aggrandizing name-calling venom hour.

I guarantee you, he’s already put out feelers. I guarantee you, he would almost prefer that future for himself. And while I don’t think he can afford to start a network – it really takes a lot more money than even he claims to have, let alone that which he does have – he can certainly find folks to fund it for him. Some bare-chested heads of state, for instance.

And aside from that?

While President-Elect Hillary Clinton puts together her administration and while President Hillary Clinton sets about the hard business of governing, defeated candidate Douchebag Tremens will continue to appear almost daily on any TV show that will have him, distorting everything she does and making every issue an exercise in claiming that the country would be so much better off if only we had elected him.

And aside from that?

Oh, I believe he will remain a canker-sore on our national landscape for quite some time. He will continue to excoriate a female comedian for remarks she made about him many years ago. He will continue to call women pigs. He will continue to cheat people. He will continue to tell us how fantastic and terrific he is, and he will not, not, take any hints to the effect that he’s overstayed his welcome.

Whether he gets elected or not, we are stuck with him. This is a given. We have a system where a guy can acquire tremendous popularity just by hating the right people, and he will remain a thorn in our sides for a long time. He will also remain a thorn in the side of the Republican Party, and as long as he remains free of consequence for his crimes, there’s no reason why he can’t run again in 2020, claiming that the inevitable national disasters that befall any administration in any four-year period would not happened if we’d allowed him, and his hair, into the White House.

So, yeah, whatever happens, it will be a while before we’re rid of Donald Trump.

On the other hand: he looks like shit, and might die. There’s always that.

Tags: , , , , | Category Commentary, Humor, Politics

On The Great Service Writers Are Done By Their Gatekeepers

Posted on September 23rd, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published in shorter form on Facebook 22 September 2015.

Wannabe writers: please hear me out on this.

As much as my heart sinks every time some gatekeeper says no to one of my stories, and as much as I inwardly rail against the communal blindness involved when some story I deeply believe in proves a hard sell, the fact of the matter is that there have been any number of times where rejections did me the best of all possible favors.

I should kiss the earth in gratitude every day that my first two attempted novels, Maelstrom and The Maze Tattoo,  never saw print. They were the promising first attempts of a proto-artist, but they were immature work, and by god they revealed more about me as the immature person I was than I would now want anyone to know. (In particular, The Maze Tattoo betrayed a twenty-two year-old’s deep insecurity about women.) Ditto, I live in daily relief that no horror magazine ever said yes to that early novelette, “Pimping the Brain Dead,” which was about what the title would lead you to believe you to believe it was about. The ghastly premise was not the problem; the sniggering emptiness that then characterized my attempts to shock was. It was the work of a man adult in years, not in outlook, and I believe it would have condemned me not only as an inauspicious debut, but for decades afterward as the early embarrassment I was unlucky enough to have hanging outside my closet.

In such cases, the frustration of not being able to sell my words steered me toward other words I was able to sell — and more importantly, gave me incentive to improve.

As much opportunity as the e-book evolution has provided many writers of worth who might have found their futures denied by the marketplace, or those like Hugh Howey and Andy Weir who first brought works of substantial value to the marketplace via self-publishing, before their success in such venues brought a previously recalcitrant publishing industry to their front doors, I fear that such anecdotes are still the exception, not the rule.

For all too many, the direct route that omits the intervention of an independent judge in the form of an editor, a gatekeeper, badly short-changes them by eliminating all incentive for maturity and growth. They don’t need to get better! Amazon will put up their crap as it is now! And so there is no incentive to learn, to correct what technical problems they have, to demand more of themselves, and become more.

For the ones I’m worried about, the decision to self-publish might well be the end of their development.

I am so, so happy that the internet marketplace did not exist when I was sending The Maze Tattoo around. Happier than I even want to tell you. My gatekeepers did me a tremendous favor in rescuing my reputation before I formed it, from the substantial damage it would have been done by that novel. It is arguable that they’re blind, as per certain of my white-elephant stories, now. But it’s also possible I am, and that they’re saving me from tremendous embarrassment by only taking my best.

Tags: , | Category Books, Life Wisdom, Writing

A Quick Word For Those Who Lecture Activists on Tone

Posted on September 18th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

If you have any elderly relatives who you love but with whom you have experienced a sometimes contentious relationship that occasionally spills out into the present day, you have experienced the following, at least once, if not frequently.

You tell them something. They say, “What?”, or mis-repeat what you just said.

You repeat yourself, louder. They say, “What?”, or mis-repeat what you just said.

You repeat yourself, even louder. This goes on for multiple repetitions, each one a little louder,  until, just to be heard, you are almost yelling.

At which point they take offense at the volume, the volume they invited you to use, and say, “Don’t yell at us!” or, “I can’t talk to you, you get out of control,” or, “I don’t like the way you’re speaking to me.”

And then it becomes an argument over your “tone.”

Now, it very well might be that frustration did show in your voice. But the fact of the matter is that the conversation did begin with you trying to be heard, and your “tone” was a function of continuing to attempt to be heard, after multiple failures.

The argument over “tone” derails completely whatever you were originally trying to communicate.

“Tone” can be just the result of having no other means of getting your message across.

And this, folks, is also why complaining about “tone” is such a blinkered thing, when you’re talking about social issues, about rhetoric coming from people who have spent generations trying to get people to listen. Talking about race alone, there were as far back as the days of slavery black leaders who wrote highly eloquent, highly civilized think-pieces, to try to get your attention. When you didn’t listen, they repeated themselves. And then others said what they had said, and then others, and others after that, going on for centuries, and if their voices became more strident, more forceful, less polite, more frustrated, angrier, and so on, it is because they saw by then that mere repetition was not working.

Think “Black Lives Matter” goes “too far?” Think feminists have gotten a little shrill? Think you’re being yelled at by gay people? Want to protest that they’re all acting a little bit angry?

That is because what you’re hearing is the part of the conversation that comes after the indoor voice proved inadequate.

Tags: , | Category Commentary, Life Wisdom, Politics, Sneaky Metaphors

 
 
 

Copyright © 2011 Adam-Troy Castro Designed by Brandy Hauman