Author: onlydavesmith

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Tips on Instructions and Directions on Advice

Because I taught high school for a long time, I had to develop skills in writing instructions. I needed students all to approach tasks like exams in a consistent way for the sake of their own achievement. Then I had to figure out how to do the impossible, which is to get teenagers to actually read and then follow the directions I had written. 

I tried to have fun with it, because why not? I would write a long list of numbered directions with the pretext of familiarizing students with their textbooks, the sort of activity that will make the eyes of the most conscientious students glaze over. Included in the list would be instructions to stand up and say, “Yes, yes, yes” and to compliment their teacher’s (my) clothing. In the next few minutes we’d have fun as they discovered the first and last numbered instructions were crucial. Instruction number one said to read ALL of the instructions before doing anything. The final instruction was to ignore ALL of the previous instructions and simply sit and wait.

There are two ways to pass this test – you could be one of those who did everything and then laughed at themselves at the end, or be the person who actually read ALL of the instructions and sat bemused as everyone did strange things. The students who truly failed the task were those who maybe pretended to read the instructions but stopped, suspecting that there would be no consequence for doing so..

Anyway, it was an interesting lesson in following instructions. So, who cares?

Anyone in writing and publishing knows that often the only way to make any money is to support other writers. Write about writing. Edit. Conduct workshops. Organize events. The work product of the dizzying number of people who do this casually (not the paid in-depth editors, and not from people like Kurt Vonnegut who know and teach by doing) is to come up with a bunch of instructions, rules of writing if you will, a grab-bag of principles and tricks that help you.

I don’t need to get into them. We’ve all seen the authorial agony aunts littering the web with punchy quips and loads of advice. And they have some applications for sure. But I’ve always wondered if following all of them just means that I come up with the same drivel as everyone else, presented in the same way, with similar characters, themes, and style.

I have only ever found one tip really useful. The hardest thing of all is to cut out all the stuff that nobody wants to read, Elmore Leonard’s “parts that people tend to skip.” Thinking about that, distancing yourself from what you write to that degree is an ability most of us never fully realize. Certainly, some successful authors (no, not naming names, as if anyone cares what I think) reach a point where they refuse to be edited any longer, their books get longer and less interesting and readers feel mostly nothing but disappointment if they ever finish them.

So, what about this little post? Which parts will readers skip? 

All of it, of course.

So with a keystroke, I ….

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Sorry. No, Really … Sorry.

Sorry.

Whoops! Here I am apologizing out of the gate, another Canadian doing what we do, a walking, talking stereotype.

Sorry again.

Because stereotypes are bad, right?

My wife and I took a trip to Italy recently. It was a wonderful place full of helpful, friendly people. And there were a lot of stereotypes walking around, right from landing at the airport. Honestly, it was perfect. The volume, the brilliantly melodic Italian, the gesticulations, the occasional strutting officiousness, so much was recognizable from frankly stereotypical depictions in mass media. 

There were many other national stereotypes at hand, of course. There were the loud – and I mean really loud – Americans, closely-shaved and sculpted blond Nordic types, as well as apologetic and dressed-for-hiking Canadians. However, the country was full of local tourists for a couple of national holidays, so, thank goodness, we were surrounded by the Italianness of the place most of the time.

We’re not supposed to use or even notice stereotypes anymore, given that they lean into racist, sexist, agist, and xenophobic ways of thought. But, there they were. Walking and talking. My writer’s brain engaged, though, as I examined my own work for stereotypes and wondered if I fell into them.

You try not to, of course. The simple trope is not something worth reading. It’s lazy and often insulting. Having said that, I found a big one in a novel I finished a few months ago, a minor character who is mostly a stereotype of a Russian brute. He’s profane, blunt, and drinks to excess. A stereotype.

But I’m keeping him. He adds something to the story and doesn’t require a lot of effort to understand his motives or actions. There are, I must say, several other Russian characters who are by no means stereotypes, fully functioning individuals, two of them major characters within a larger historical context. I also had a little bit of fun with a Prussian character and a bit with a character who was pretending to be American, a stereotype within a stereotype, in a way. But it was always a small point of contrast that served to develop a small point of character.

That’s my excuse. If the prevailing wind is from one direction, the occasional gust from another is not too important as long as it does no real damage.

And if that’s wrong, well … sorry!

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Lost at Home

I have been traveling for a couple of weeks. Italy and the UK. It’s been years, so I had to stretch my comfort zone a little, which was overdue.

From day to day and from place to place, I never woke up and wondered where I was. I always knew. Then when I came home, I woke up the first night without a clue where I was. My first thought was that I was back in Rome. Then I looked around at the darkened room and that conclusion made no sense. Everything looked wrong. 

I was, of course, in the same room I have slept for most of the last twenty-three years. I gave it a beat and then realized what was going on. My mind expected to be in a different place, an unfamiliar one, and my sleepy consciousness had trouble accommodating the fact that I was home.

I was, in a way, lost at home. If that was true, then perhaps a corollary might be that it is entirely possible that I had been comfortably in place while away, at home in unfamiliar surroundings.

Not exactly earth-shaking, transformational, or epifanous but an interesting feeling.

Because I write historical novels, getting the setting right has always been a challenge. Readers have to feel both at home and very much not. Research, lots of it, is essential. There are times, though, that research is not enough. If you’re placing people and events in Cairo, Istanbul, and Warsaw 150 years ago, you really need to read and write Arabic, Turkish, and Polish in order to be completely confident. I don’t, so I cheat.

This is where the feeling of being comfortably in place comes in. You have to give the reader enough to make them comfortable yet interested in reading more about the context and how it might affect characters and events. It’s not easy. An editor wanted me to more thoroughly describe the lower decks on a steamship in 1872, a context that was important in one chapter, and I had to reply that I had NO idea what that looked like because I had found no good sources. So, realizing that the editor was right and that the chapter needed more description of the steamship, I made it up.

Will someone catch me out? 

I hope so.

That would mean someone read it.

So, that makes me comfortable about lying. Because I’d be lost telling the truth.

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Two Journeys

I am increasingly critical of writing as I get older. While television writing has improved overall in the last few decades, a lot of screenwriting is only tolerable because it passes quickly as the director moves from one scene to the next, and the visual and aural context predominate.

Novels are different. The writing is all there is. As a result, I am increasingly discerning about what I read. I am one of those people who has no trouble not finishing a novel that isn’t going anywhere or is going somewhere I don’t care to go.

And I have discovered that going somewhere is vital for me. I want something to happen, I want to be curious, I want to be surprised, I want to be engaged in looking ahead at the consequences of conflicts and decisions. This sort of novel has a narrative landscape dominated by events and a journey of dynamic awareness.

The Big Question in this sort of novel from chapter to chapter is, “What are they going to do?”

There are a lot of people who don’t read that way. They are looking for depths of descriptions, depths of feelings, and depth of descriptions about feelings. The narrative landscape is dominated by emotion and the journey of affective awareness.

The Big Question from chapter to chapter is, “How are they going to feel?”

Of course, there’s lots of room to combine both, and good writers use characters to bridge the gap.

Writing is different from reading. I write with intent and my goal is to entertain, shock, surprise, or provoke using plot as my first, but not only, focus. The nameless reader for whom I am writing, that entity out there I am trying to satisfy because I cannot write for everyone, wants to know what happens next. They want to be shown, but they also want to participate, perhaps to see things that characters do not. I don’t mean solve a mystery, although mystery writers want to give readers the chance to do that, but rather to anticipate and then, I hope, to be pleasantly surprised even if the outcome is tragic.

And when feelings are involved, they are primarily shown by words and actions, not by pages of thoughtful description. Readers who want the other sort of novel, the one where internal dialogues and complex emotional development are paramount, won’t be satisfied by the thrust and parry of a plot-driven book. The thing is to keep them engaged by diving into the real emotional consequences of plot points and use them as motivation to drive the plot further.

Tricky stuff.

So, there are likely to be a lot of readers who don’t finish something I write because it doesn’t take a deep dive into the affective effects of all that plot.

That makes me feel bad. The question is, though, what will it make me do?

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To Be Is to Have Been

I know that I am not alone in reliving past blunders, small embarrassing mistakes in social situations that I cannot undo or get over. I re-embarrass myself repeatedly in my mind to no purpose at all. I just make myself unhappy. Did I really make that bad joke? Could I not have held that fart for just another minute?

Characters in novels make bad decisions all the time. Some of them might lead to disastrous, even traumatic results.

I can only imagine what it must be like to experience true trauma, how my memory might haunt me forever. 

I believe in neither curses nor blessings, but reliving trauma is the curse of memory.

Of course, memory is also a blessing. We remember good things, happy things, triumphs and moments of joy as well as simple contentments and feelings of well-being. Sights, sounds, and smells can be remarkable triggers to activate memories we didn’t know we had, memories that help us understand that the past has a purpose, that to be is to have been.

And every time we remember something, we bring it to life, re-experience it, re-invent it even. That last part, invention, is a link to creativity. We fill in gaps in memory out of necessity and add details that never occurred or emphasis that may not be appropriate. Memories change and memory can become a capricious, even unfaithful servant. As we age we develop the habit of helping rather than relying upon our memory.

That’s not a bad thing, though, as an imperfect memory is probably the best kind. Remembering every instant of our lives, however mundane, triumphant, or traumatising, would be nightmarish, the stuff of science fiction-horror.

The enigma of memory lies in the necessity of both remembering and forgetting. If we don’t remember, we have dementia, and we’re in serious trouble. If we can’t forget, we are reliving trauma with every breath.

Good characters in novels have backstories. Good writers let characters forget things, and remember things from a point of view, and ignore things, with an overall effect that in some contexts, they are thoroughly unreliable.

Now, perfect action-hero characters never forget. That’s dull. (See Too Good to Be True  ) Characters who forget important things are hard to believe as well. That’s frustrating.

Forgetting, though, for a writer can be a boon. Forget what you wrote last month and you can look at it with fresh eyes today. One hopes the result will not end in trauma.

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All You Need to Know in One Metaphor

Dogs have us figured out.

They not only achieve their goals, free food and shelter, they influence our behaviour to the point where we not only respond to their needs but anticipate them and prioritize their needs over our own.

And anthropologists are pretty clear about this–dogs adopted us, not we them. They worked out how to insinuate themselves into our lives and become useful in many ways, both practical and social. They took the first steps thousands of years ago, they were responsible for training us to serve their needs.

And they didn’t do it in any organized way. They needed no class-consciousness, no vanguard, and certainly no invisible hand. It just happened.

It’s sort of miraculous. Not only does a barking dog keep the lawn-care salespeople away, petting a dog lowers blood pressure and lowers stress hormones.

And the biggest miracle of all is that a dog can make eye contact with a human they have never met before from thirty metres away and make that person feel an instant connection, like to an old friend. It’s non-threatening, genuine, and lingers once the interaction is finished.

What does this have to do with anything?

A lot.

A novelist has to write a book for a person they have never met, has to anticipate a need that cannot be described, has to initiate an interaction that is positive enough that a reader will come back after chapter one and continue to do so to the end.

How the hell are we supposed to do that?

These days the oft-repeated mantras are about the importance of the first page or the narrative hook. Readers are recruited with familiar appeals (Sherlock Holmes really deserves a rest) or ridiculous mash-ups (Jane Austen meets the Marquis de Sade comes to mind), and don’t get me started about the importance of good writing and polish as if anyone needs to be told that. It all seems so tiresome. 

What’s a novelist supposed to do?

Ask a dog. They know how. 

Make eye contact with the reader.

I know. Not much help. 

But it’s a pleasing metaphor, especially because it can be interpreted to mean just about anything and yet each interpretation has to involve some kind of connection.

Of course, in some cultures eye contact is considered rude, so the metaphor isn’t perfect.

But you know that dogs got past that somehow.

The mysteries of dogs aside for the moment, did it work? 

Did we make eye contact just now?

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Too Good To Be True

If something, or someone, is too good to be true then …

You know.

Why then, are so many protagonists in best-selling novels so unbelievably good?

I have been writing a thriller, a broad sort of genre that means I am focussing a lot on a plot that is fast-paced. Characters are still important, though, especially as every thriller needs a good conflict or two and characters are our windows into all conflicts from geo-political bust-ups to a scrap between neighbours.

As I am supposed to read market-oriented thrillers because I am sort of trying to write one (it’s one of the rules you see all the time), I’ve spent some time grappling with a variety of protagonists with whom I am having some trouble.

Often, I am expected to care about a character who is presented as being rather impossibly … well, good. Rugged survivors, brooding yet humourous, tough but fair, patriotic (if they’re American but then they also have to have some kind of background in the military or love guns or both), dog loving, an imperfect parent (because that’s the only kind), insightful, thoughtful yet spontaneous, there they stand, signalling their virtue with every every line they utter, every observation they make.

Also, to my horror, authors use the word “savvy” to describe them.

Don’t get me started about that word.

Anyway, I must also point out that we are usually shown just a wee flaw that we don’t have to look too hard to see. They have a blemish or even two. Not arrogance, because arrogance does not seem to be a blemish, given its ubiquity in pop culture heroes.

My stomach is getting unsettled just thinking about them. And they crop up in the work of best-selling authors all the time. Actually, it’s probably one of the reasons the books sell so well.

What does that say about the writing problem, meaning the fact that it’s easy to write but hard to get someone to read what you’ve written?

Do my protagonists have to be so dang-nabbed good that I hate them and myself for writing them?

Self-loathing is not why we get into this game, at least not most of us. But the sort of self-loathing that sells has to be on the page, not simply a result of having written. What good is cringing dark hatred of oneself if it doesn’t bring in a royalty cheque?

I know I am being unfair. There are lots of loathsome anti-heroes, quirky unreliable narrators and fundamentally, fatally flawed protagonists out there. I am just not sure how they ever got published.

How about a protagonist who is mostly sympathetic but makes big mistakes and is conflicted all the time about hard choices? Someone who dwells in the space between the rock and the hard place and makes character-based mistakes in judgment is surely more interesting than someone who simply confidently faces problems in succession and makes the best decisions based on the information they have while punching, escaping, or otherwise outsmarting bad guys.

Naah.

Give ‘em what they want.

Troy Storm, veteran of a forgotten foreign war, PTSD survivor, runs a non-profit dog-rescue, step father to an adored eight-year-old girl whom he teaches to shoot a pistol (only in self-defence of course), partner of a savvy no-nonsense kindergarden teacher who kick-boxes to raise money for orphans in El Salvador, moonlights as personal security to visiting foreign dignitaries … .

From there it writes itself when you factor in a really bad guy.

See Bad to the Bone.

Done.

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Bad to the Bone: Social Determinants of Literary Bad guys

I am not good at evil.

My bad guys are not bad enough.

Not only are they not born bad enough, I do not make them bad enough.

But as I age, I get darker. Many writers can go truly dark and explore the monster within but the good ones stop short of evil and make the bad guy bad.

We hear words like “evil” and “monster” and “animal” from politicians who like to paint opponents, especially those driven to extreme forms of protest or even violence, in the simplest and most negative terms. The podium thumpers then signal their own virtue, as a representative of civility and decency, and put together the angry mob that will by means either of legislation or torches and pitchforks snuff out the bad guys.

Literary bad guys must be different, though. They must believe in themselves. They must be convincing characters. They have to have backstories that give us some insight into them even as we root for the protagonists.

Biological bad guys, monsters who simply obey their nature, don’t interest me.

So, if we’re making a bad guy, not simply accepting that evil exists, where do we start? Here’s a few places.

Childhood trauma. That’s a big one, as it opens the doors to all manner of compromised people who have been victimized by parents, siblings, friends, institutions, and of course, random strangers. Disney likes to kill the mothers of their characters. That’s sure to traumatize most of us, but, for some reason, Disney characters don’t become bad guys when that happens to them. It’s probably more traumatic to have a mother who hates you than one who has passed away, and it’s sure to create a better bad guy.

Adult trauma. The environment strikes again, but is more difficult to craft in a satisfying way because we have far less empathy for adults than for children. People seem to choose to be bad, which they might actually be doing, but which is not as much a challenge as character development. I also intensely dislike the characterization of anti-heroes as people who have just had an exceptionally bad day and go off an emotional cliff. It’s dull.

Desire. The root of all unhappiness is desire, we are told. It’s a good point. Desire is also the root of a lot of backstabbing, megalomania, gaslighting, and car chases. Money, Sex. Power. Powerful motivators all, but are they interesting? Mixed with some other character traits, positive and negative, and with some good backstory they can be. But they’ve been done a lot.

Individualism and collectivism. Both these ideas drive antagonists. The absurd idea that freedom is being able to do whatever you want to whenever you want to do it, and the cult of individuality that goes along with it, makes a simple canvas on which we can paint many characters. Its opposite, the equally absurd notion that the essence of goodness is to obey, to sacrifice everything for the common good, to remove individuality entirely in pursuit of the social or religious or political truth, is also an easy place to start.

Privilege. This is one of the more interesting places to go as it leads naturally to an antagonist who is convinced of their own rightness. It is no longer fashionable to say that one is privileged, but it used to be all the rage. In the days of hereditary privilege, the very point of social endeavor was to exercise privilege. Later, when privilege could be earned through the accumulation of wealth or actual achievement, it indicated the pinnacle of success, of social validation. The beauty of privilege in all its historical and contemporary forms is that it not only motivates an antagonist, it blinds them to the consequences of their actions. History is full of odious people who merely let the chips fall where they may. And let there be no doubt, they ARE bad guys.

Other social determinants, like education and income, have interesting relationships with the bad guy personality. The obscenely rich and the impossibly erudite often have little empathy for others, but lower levels of wealth and education are also relevant. Ignorance has long been the root of hatred. Poverty, and the need to overcome it, motivates a great deal of both pro and anti-social behaviour. The mad scientist (a relative rarity) is over-represented in fiction, especially movie fiction. The already-rich greedy investor (so prevalent as to appear normal) has been done to death.

And these days, social media makes everyone evil. That has to be added to the list.

So, if adding up these characteristics might make my evil characters better, I guess I should develop a new character, a bad guy for 2027, which is the earliest I might finish another novel. Here we go. Consider a biotechnology/AI research scientist, stripped of laboratory privileges because he (it has to be a man because I don’t much like men) won’t follow someone else’s rules. He’s had to go it on his own because his mother hates him (and always has) because he reminds her of his father, long dead and gone. He marries into an aristocratic family and gaslights his wife until she signs the ancient estate over to him for safe-keeping. He starts a Facebook group for white supremacists and gives them land to organize a militia. And on the way to the hospital to sign the papers committing his wife to involuntary care, he trips on the stairs, some poor kid having left a skateboard in the way. A really bad day. Boy, does he get mad.

Next stop, a plot to eliminate all the teenagers in the world by spreading a biological virus through Snapchat. And he’s just getting started.

There. A bad guy is born. 

Made, really.

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The Most UnKindest Cut

All of the best lies are those we tell ourselves.

Julius Caesar thought that his wife’s portentous dreams, the soothsayer’s babblings, and the bad weather were all nothing, that the Ides of March would come and go and he would continue on his path to absolute rule with the help of his good friends in the Senate.

Because my life and goals are rather smaller than Caesar’s, so are my lies. 

“This is happening,” I think to myself as I pass the 10,000 word mark in a new project. “It’s real.”

“No doubt about it,” I say at 20,000 words. “Voice, plot, setting FIRMLY established. Stay on course.”

“One third done,” I think at 30,000 words. “At this point it’s almost time to consider the next project as I bring this one to its inevitable conclusion.

I was at this point recently when I slowed to a crawl, writing nothing, editing bits here and there. It was then when I began to inhabit my own private way-station, a place where fictional characters wait in anxious queues shuffling from gate to narrative gate in search of a destination worth the trouble of the journey. It is a place I cannot write my way out of, where my characters go not to die, but to languish unfinished, their thoughts, their wants and fears forever unexpressed for the simple reason that they are just not making the grade.

It’s not their fault. They’re good characters. Well written, you know, with back stories and lives and voices and relationships. But something has happened that has prevented them from taking over the novel. They are not driving the action, forming their future and leaving narrative wakes that sweep readers along with them, behind just far enough to pique their interest.

And so it begins. The slaughter.

Descriptive paragraphs disappear, chapters are deleted, sub-plots evaporate, settings melt, and characters are proscribed.

“Look, with a spot I damn him,” I say to myself, except that it’s with a keystroke. Shakespeare always comes in handy when there’s deadly work to be done.

Building Rome is hard. Changing Rome is messy. 30,000 words quickly become 20,000. But when the bloody business is concluded, I am free to go new places, free to make new decisions unbeholden to old ones. I may end up in a better place.

If you think about it, if Caesar had made a few more well timed cuts, his ending might have been happier, too.

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Unbearably Ubiquitous

Humans are defined in part by their tools. We’re pretty good at the whole business, to the point that our tools sometimes occupy too large a part in our stories.

Good storytelling should not be about tools, whatever their purpose. If they take too large a role, the entire narrative can be about nothing but access to tools.

Consider the Big Two. Guns and smartphones.

First, shootin’ irons. The gun culture that pervades media, especially American television and movies, has spawned a few cliches that have become as unbearable as they are ubiquitous. Three come to mind easily. 

The first is that in any conflict, they who are simply better armed, who have greater access to firepower, win. Dull. Predictable (same as dull) and lazy. It’s as if people crave that idea that the solution to big problems is as simple as Ronald Reagan thought when he said, “We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.” 

Making no judgements about how he dehumanized millions of people and their country (of COURSE I am), that sort of simplicity is unforgivable in a fictional narrative. Even in the relatively uncomplicated good vs. bad world of Star Wars, George Lucas had the cute little Ewoks in The Return of the Jedi kick the tar out of Imperial walkers. Devoted space-opera nerds didn’t like it, but it wasn’t lazy.

The second tiresome trope is the reveal of said firepower. It has gone from a custom-built case and a three-piece rifle to a storage locker full of gun-metal black automatic assault weapons, to a full-blown walk-in closet packed with ordnance, enough to arm a small army. And directors deal with it like it’s the reveal of treasure. 

“Ooooooooooh,” we’re supposed to say when we see it. “Y-a-w-n,” is more like it.

The third is more subtle. Bad guys, good guys, everybody seems to keep a pistol on the table, and the last thing they do before leaving a room is pick it up and shove it in their waistband behind their backs. We can’t go anywhere unarmed, right, so that makes sense. Guns are tools that, in American film, no self-respecting criminal or cop can do without.

Today, now, there is a newer tool, and another cue for writers or actors and directors to follow as they make transitions. It’s the smartphone. In film, the smartphone is out everywhere – at home, in the restaurant, in the car, in the bathroom, and the last thing anyone does is to pick it up, pocket it, or tuck it somewhere.

The smartphone is the new pistol. You can’t go out without one. Losing it is almost a death sentence. A newer, bigger one is likely to get you out of jams the older ones could not. Like a pistol, the smartphone adds a layer of complexity while at the same time making things too simple. As a gun undoubtedly does, a smartphone changes a power dynamic, but does so in a different way, by providing information almost immediately. Its narrative flaw is that it can make discovering an important fact or idea far too easy. In the same way, a gun waved in someone’s face simplifies a relationship between characters to the point of boredom.

For the writer of novels, the smartphone presents huge opportunities and pitfalls. A smartphone can be wielded by anyone, even those characters for whom guns would be anathema. Now characters must be disarmed from time to time, having batteries run out or coverage unavailable just to force them to use their wits. Someone can be intimidated, stalked, even terrorized using smartphone communication, but so long as that thing is connected to a network, help is available.

An easy fix is to write historical novels. A wired telephone could not be carried out of a room in a waistband. In the 1960s, you had to leave it behind when you went out to investigate that curious heavy breathing in the back garden. Even better, in the good ol’ days telegraphs had to be hand delivered. In some places you had to tip the messenger boy. And it was one-way communication written with as few words as possible, which always introduced a pleasing ambiguity of interpretation. More fodder for the reader’s imagination and the protagonist’s perceptive powers.

Perhaps if we go further back, new possibilities might arise. More than 5000 years ago, Gilgamesh the King, fashioned by the gods to be one-third like them, builds the walls of Uruk. One sunny day (they had WAY too many of those, by the way) Goddess of love and war, Innana, is really pissed off because the temple priests have been skimming more than their share of sacrifices for themselves. Our hero Akadi, which is a name I made up just now, must summon help before the whole city is destroyed by the goddess’s wrath. He uses his cuneus to press 𒀂𒀇𒀧𒀳𒀸𒁐 into a tablet of wet clay and then throws it over the city wall. The tablet lands in the middle of a beach volleyball match between Gilgamesh and his stalwart friend Enkidu (they only play each other, as no one can beat them singly let alone when they play as a team). Anyway, Gilgamesh sweeps his long hair off of his chiselled cheekbones and reads Akadi’s dire warning.

Let the narrative begin! 

I know, my ancient Sumerian sucks. But Gilgamesh has a friend, not a gun, and wits, not a smartphone, but even if he had both and even though he is one third god, the two thirds part that is human will either save the day or not. The flow of the story, the inevitability of the resolution will come from him.

As it has been written, so shall it continue to be done. Even when 10G hits, and we’re communicating with chips that High Leader Elon has implanted in our brains for $459.99 per month ($549.99 for no commercials).