Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
Last week we met more hard men. Jack, meanwhile, got valuable notes for the story he was writing, learning more about Tommy and Willie’s various business enterprises and business conflicts, not to mention some of the ins and outs of being successful hard men in such troubled times.
NOT STANDARD
Selections from Arno Petty’s Intelligencer and Weekly Gleaner
#1 Recover the pleasure of sinking into a long novel.
I’ve started serializing Kicking Dogs on this site (the next chapter appears next Tuesday). This novel is just 242 pages long. Hardly more than a brochure and, ideally, it’ll leave you wishing there was more of it.
MOM and Genesis 2.0 are longer. Much longer. But ideally, again, they’ll leave you wishing there was more. (In fact more of the Magic Circles series of novels is on … Read more
The previous episode concluded with the following:
… Read moreRambo was singing Carabao’s nice song “Welcome to Thailand” between his teeth into the mike — in the process, I guessed, erasing the interview with the high-ranking police officer I had managed to get only after long negotiation. Then there were three bangs on the door, and Somsak arrived with the drinks. I decided a little Mekhong was a good thing after all.
And just at
I’m posting a new Kicking Dogs chapter every Tuesday, and an independent item every Thursday.
Let’s kick off this week’s SIDECAR post with a seven-year-old item from Jack Shackaway, my collaborator and, incidentally, the hero of my novel Kicking Dogs.
… Read moreSelling novels: What it takes
I’m probably over-reacting, but it’s already getting harder these days to take pride in thinking of yourself as a writer, since so can anybody with the price of a computer and
… Read moreIn the previous episode, Jack Shackaway was robbed at gunpoint by a pair of colorful characters. These gentlemen, name of Tommy Two-Toes and Wrong-Way Willie Wong, then bought drinks with the money they took from him till they were all legless.
In the course of events, Tommy and Willie said they had a business deal they wanted to discuss with him, and Jack said he had to go to the toilet. In fact he
The Prologue to Kicking Dogs, a novel, appeared first in the Bangkok Post Sunday supplement in the early 1990s, and again over the years in at least two regional publications.
It was once shortlisted by The Paris Review for an annual humor competition, and they asked to see more stories from me. With my usual self-promotional genius, I never got around to submitting other stuff.
Next life.
Kicking Dogs… Read more
Announcing the upcoming serialization of Kicking Dogs on this very site.
The name is Jack Shackaway, and I’m a kind of freelance journalist. You meet some interesting people when you’re a hack writer living in Bangkok.
For example, the other day I was enjoying a few drinks with a pair of dubious characters name of Tommy Two-Toes and Wrong-Way Willie Wong. Actually, it was more than a few drinks, and these gentlemen were more than just … Read more
I had positivism and the notion of eternal recurrence sussed when I was five or six years old.
Back in this boondocky town where I lived at the time, the streets were littered with horse turds from the one big white horse that pulled the garbageman’s wagon. Waste ground, of which there was plenty, tended to be covered with rubbish I guess the garbageman didn’t categorize as garbage. For example I remember patches of rhomboid glass fragments like dull gems … Read more
Today we introduce another useful expression.
Metathesiophobic catatonia (n.): paralysis induced by fear of the perception that any action, including any decision, will change the future. Those of the multiversal persuasion might decribe this as inertia brought on by terror that the slightest exercise of agency will result in the agent entering an adjacent parallel universe, forever barred from the one in which the action was performed, unable to return to a world where the decision was never taken.
And … Read more
Jack Shackaway here.
Friends have just suggested I join them on a sailing trip at the end of November. Joyous news, right? Not so. Now I have to weather the usual squall of anxieties and conflicting inclinations, maybe even a massive storm of dither.
“How soon do I have to tell you one way or the other?” I ask them.
“You’ve got a problem with free sailing trips?” they say.
The problem. Following an extended period of freelance-writerly doldrums … Read more
