The Ethics of the Truth

As I mentioned in my last post I'm a little uncomfortable talking about true crime cases. There are myriad issues when discussing true crime since these cases deal with real people and so they can have far-reaching effects. Not just on the perpetrator, but on their victims, the victim's families, even the perpetrator's families.

As I've said, it makes me uncomfortable when true crime commentators talk about criminals like monsters who should be locked up forever. But, my issue is not just about opinions - after all, a simple "the opinions within are my own" disclaimer is all you need there... no, my issue is the way we present the facts in these cases. But, that seems odd doesn't it? After all, we're talking about facts and truth, right? Sure, facts can be inaccurate, but if everything is presented as honestly as possible what's the problem with sharing the truth? Well, that's what I want to talk about.

Honesty is a Virtue, I believe that wholeheartedly. It's important not to lie or cheat. However, when it comes to honesty a lot of people make the mistake of believing that honesty is the same thing as telling the truth. But this isn't the case. For one of my favourite examples, because I find it quite funny, there are occasionally signs you see reporting common crimes in an area: "vandalism banned in this area", "diving off this bridge is prohibited", "bags have been stolen in this area", that kind of thing...
But on such signs they usually end with the phrase "if you have any information, please call this number", and the number for security or management or whatever. It always makes me chuckle, because I think it would be funny to call them up and say "Lima is the capital of Peru", or "Sharks have two penises", or whatever other fun fact comes to mind. After all, it's information! They asked if I have any information, and I do, I know a lot of information.

Obviously, I wouldn't actually waste anyone's time like that, but the point is that everything I said is "information", it's all true. They really should say "if you have any relevant information". I still think it's funny because I'm a pedant like that, but even though they don't write "relevant information", we all know they don't have to... because it's already commonly understood etiquette. You don't tell everyone everything that you know to be true. If you did, every conversation would take months.

So, we don't need to tell everyone everything, but what if they ask you, specifically? What if you know the answer to a question, but choose not to answer, that's lying, right? 

I don't think so. To me, honesty isn't about telling the truth it's about not trying to trick someone, or mislead them. If someone asks you something that you don't want to tell them, you don't need to lie, but you don't need to tell them the truth either. Obviously, if you let them you believe that you didn't know, that's a form of dishonesty, but that's solved by answering with a simpler truth:
"I'm not going to tell you that", "I'm afraid that's a secret", "it's not my story to tell", "I'm not at liberty to say", or in some cases even "that's a personal question, and I'm insulted you'd even ask!"
You're not lying, you're being clear that you have the answer, but you're not going to give it to you.

[Editor's Note: We'll leave discussions of coercion and force for later, but there's no ethical issues in dishonesty for your own safety. It's a sad but common fact that sexual and religious minorities, even majority-passing ethnic minorities, often lie to protect themselves from persecution and I see no issue there, but we're talking more about the basics of honesty and ethics, in this instance.]

But, if we don't have to tell the whole truth, then that means that we are making a choice regarding what we choose to share - which truths we choose to tell. It's not usually a huge drama, in every conversation you decide on stuff that's relevant, or something you think friends will find funny or amusing. That said, even in a simple conversation amongst friends, you will choose what you won't talk about. You're deciding which truths a person should hear, and that's not even 'censorship', so much as a pragmatic decision to use one's time more effectively. But, even that has its inherent bias. You're more likely to talk to friends about that wild night of drugs than, say, your parents. You're less likely to tell that dirty joke to your kids than, for instance, your partner. That's alright, since you're presenting yourself as you want to be seen, that's alright... but it would be less alright if you did it for someone else. And, we do occasionally do that. Especially if you don't like someone, you may be inclined to tell people about the nasty things you've seen them do or heard them say.
That's obviously not nice, but it's not exactly honest... I'm not saying it's "wrong" to spread gossip, but just as we pick and choose how we present ourselves, we also pick and choose how we present others. If you're talking about how much of an arsehole your boss is, you're more likely to talk about how much work they expect of you, as opposed to them buying you present for Christmas, just to keep your story straight. It's not exactly lying, but it's dishonest in a way, since it can unfairly present a person if you refuse to acknowledge other, relevant information.

So, how does this relate to True Crime? Well... even if we just look at homicide, according to the World Health Organization, in the year 2019, there were approximately 475,000 murders across the globe. In just one year. That's over 1,000 a day, it's almost one every minute. We can't talk about every single one, especially considering that true crime can include violent crimes with survivors, kidnapping, torture...
But, we don't, do we? True Crime doesn't simply discuss every single crime there is. People pick and choose particular crimes, the ones that resonate with them. This bothers me for two reasons.

Firstly, it has the potential to misrepresent the reality of what crime is. Like, for example, True Crime tends to have a few "subgenres": There's Historical Crimes; Missing Persons cases can be their own beast; Serial Killers is a big one; White-Collar Crimes have their own style, often focusing on the legal system; there's also Wrongful Convictions; & of course Unsolved Mysteries just to name a few.

But, as diverse as this is, this diversity doesn't actually represent crime accurately.

Do you know how many crimes go 'unsolved' every year? Most of them. In America in 2022, 63% of reported crimes haven't had a conviction, almost two-thirds went unsolved. Yet, "Unsolved Mysteries" only represents a minority of the True Crime spectrum. And, if you don't follow that particular genre, the majority of cases you hear about will be solved, because these are stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, and if you don't catch the killer, the story doesn't have an ending.

But even if you realize that fact, you may be more fascinated by the goriest, the rawest, and the more disturbing cases. In that case, as I alluded to in my last post, I believe that's what leads people to believing that the solution is a larger and more powerful police force, a less forgiving prison system and a greater reliance upon the death penalty. On My Favourite Murder, "just lock them away" and "why'd them let them out?" are common refrains, despite the fact that the police force is not always a force for justice, let alone a force for law or effective crime control, and when police are given more power, they usually start by locking up even more minorities. But, if your experience of crime is the "worst of the worst", then it makes sense that you'd think cops need all the help they can get.

It's actually a study that I'm very familiar with, narratology. See, we use stories all the time, human brains are satisfied by stories, because they're neat. They package everything up nice and tidy. There's a beginning, a middle and an end, there's a message in there, a hero and a villain. The problem is that life isn't tidy. Some stories aren't neat, so when we package up stories for a general audience, we often sand off the edges. Crime stories come pre-packaged with a villain, the criminal, so by the fundamentals of story-telling, the ones stopping them (the cops) become the heroes. In an odd (but in my eyes undeniable) kind of way, most true crime is a form of copaganda, pro-police propaganda that spreads the false narrative that cops are always a force for good, and they can do no wrong.

Secondly... (yeah, this was a list of two things, but that last item went long so let me remind you), the other reason why true crime bothers me is the way that it tacitly objectifies real people. I don't think that people "own" true stories - in fact, the News exists purely because people can't claim ownership of the truth... it's actually a modern issue with the news that because investigative journalism costs money, a lot of news programs instead choose to aggregate and regurgitate news from other news sources, turning the news media into one grand ouroboros that's constantly feeding off itself.
Anyway... the point is that even if something happens to you, you don't own that story, and that's understandable. However, what's less understandable is that even though it's your story - and it's about you - you lose all control of your story. It's something I came to understand after reading the fascinating novel An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire. Whilst it's a fictional story, it's about a regular woman, who loses her sister in an isolated incident of murder, but her grief is exacerbated when the media starts intruding into her life, questioning her, suspecting her and her friends, and even starts using her sister as a symbol of domestic violence. It's a fascinating story, but it brings up a very clear point. Even though this is her sister, her family, thousands of people claim this murder for themselves. They decide that this story is their story, monopolizing on their own grief, whilst ignoring the real victim who is refused the chance to move on from her grief because even her own memory of her sister is being twisted by the media. It's fictional, but there's a lot of truth there. For me, the most affecting chapter was when a group of feminists organizes a protest in the dead woman's honour, and starts parading around with her name and face plastered on their protest signs. The main character desperately calls up the journalists she's spoken to, asking if she can stop it. She's against domestic violence she just doesn't want her sister to become some martyr to a political cause, but the journalists tell her that she doesn't have the authority to stop a protest, it's their decision, all she can do is give them a quote... but she realizes she can't risk that since the story is so big she either has to endorse it or be villainized in the press for being against it.

The point is, whilst she doesn't own the story, people are still telling her story for her. She doesn't even want to tell her story, she wants people to leave her and her family alone, but she's denied that because someone decided that this crime was a story worth telling. Someone decided that this story belongs to Australia.

Y'know, it's thankfully died down now, but there used to be a lot of talk about cultural appropriation, taking something from another culture. Now, cultural appropriation doesn't actually exist, it can't, because cultures don't own things, culture is inherently memetic, it's not "property". However, when people talk about cultural appropriation, the actual cause of concern isn't theft, or appropriation, it's objectification. It's treating a culture as an object, to be used. But culture comes from people, by nature it's subjective, it's experience, it's history... by objectifying a culture, you dehumanize it and commodify it.
The same is true of stories. Nobody can own stories, especially true stories. However, as much as we wish we could consider true stories, such as true crime, like a narrative with characters and plot points and story structure, but that objectifies and commodifies a real tragedy.

You can share a true crime story, that's not inherently dishonest or even immoral, but it requires a deft hand because no matter how much it feels like a story, it's not a story it's the truth. The truth can be messy, it can be incomplete, it can be biased, and it may not always tell you everything. But more than anything, I think it's important to ask ourselves, is this my story to tell?

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and I guess I did end up talking a bit about the ethics of storytelling after all, but this was just a small part of it, I'll probably work on a much larger discussion in the future. For now, I hope you've enjoyed this, the last post of the second-last Halloween Countdown of this blog.
I wish you all a safe and fun Halloween tomorrow and until next time--if you're going to share a horror story this Halloween, make sure it's a good one.

Fiction in Flux: A Cautionary Tale of Criminal Publishing

Some of you may be confused about the post the day before yesterday, and rightly so, it was a fictional story that I wrote called Harpy Hunt. I love posting fiction for my Halloween Countdown, whenever I get the chance to write it, and I will usually try to post something relating to the theme. Although even I admit that I often will just post an unrelated horror story that I think you'll enjoy, whether that be posting Reaper, a three-part dark superhero story during my "Forgotten Fear" Countdown, or posting Howl, a horror story about being caught alone in the woods, during my "Sickness" Countdown, or posting The Facts in the Case of Patient S., a creepy poem that I wrote the year of my "Failure" Countdown.

But at least in these, and every other case, I was posting a horror story. The day before yesterday, what I posted was, for all intents and purposes, an action story; a sword and sandal story about trying to save children from monsters. So, what does that have to do with my Halloween Countdown?

Well, odd though it seems, I picked the story specifically for this countdown, not for the story within the page, but for the story without.

See, I was contracted to write that story ten years ago, in March 2014, for a small-time publisher known as Mythix Studios, as part of an anthology series known as Flux Fiction. I know the exact month because I still have a copy of the contract scanned onto my computer. Despite writing, and submitting, that story I was never paid. Now, I don't think Mythix Studios exists anymore, so you may not find them, but the person who owned, and is responsible for it is: Philip Lee McCall II
I'll gladly name and shame, he's an (admittedly small) public figure in the writing community, but he is a public figure, and it is a fact that he never paid me for my work. See, this was one of the first few stories I ever wrote for a publisher, and so I was to be underpaid—just $25 for a 5,000 word story—at the very least I was expecting US$ as McCall (who likes to use the abbreviation PLMII) was based in Florida at the time, but still even with an exchange rate leaving me with around AU$40, that's a woeful underpayment. But, I was young and foolish and I agreed to it, so as much as I find such underpayment insulting these days, I still agreed to it, and I am owed US$25
Now, this story was never published, if you look for Harpy Hunt you won't find it anywhere because the second Flux-Fiction anthology was never finished, but that doesn't matter, because like I said, I still have the contract. The contract is clear that I was to be paid, and I quote:

"Payment will be tendered to Author via PAYPAL and the transaction will be completed once the Work has been considered finalized and ready for print."

The work was considered finalized, I sent the work in and confirmed with McCall that no further work was required by me. The work was ready for print. It doesn't matter that the work wasn't published, in fact that's immaterial to me for this particular contract because all royalties went to the publisher anyway. I wasn't paying to get published, I was being paid to submit a completed work, and even though I clearly did, I wasn't paid a single red penny for my efforts.

Now, you're well within your rights to think "are you really this upset about twenty-five bucks?"
The answer is, no... it's not about the $25. I still hold McCall accountable for this petty theft, and will do so until he pays me what I am owed, is about the principle. But the reason I'm so upset is threefold.

Firstly, it's not about me... my story was never published, but my friends' stories were. If you google "Flux Fiction" and "Philip Lee McCall", you'll see that some books were published by Mythix in that series. I won't name names, but I heard about PLMII at the time through some mutual friends after their stories were accepted and published through McCall, and was encouraged to put myself out there. But even though their works were published they weren't paid either.
Philip Lee McCall II stole their work, made his profit, and never paid them for their work despite being contractually obligated to do so by a contract that he wrote! I can tell he wrote it himself, because he misspelled his own email address as "fluxfictrion@gmail.com" (I'm pretty sure this, and the correctly spelled version, are abandoned, so don't bother using it...). As far as I know, he never paid any writers for their work. Whilst I have no proof of that, I do have proof he stole work at least twice, and I'm not so generous as to assume we're the only ones.

Secondly, the reason why I'm so upset is that Philip Lee McCall II is just one example of the thousands of similar examples of small-time criminals that exist in the small-time publishing world. If you're not a writer yourself, let me assure you that there are millions of young writers out there, just starting out and eager to get their foot in the door. And waiting just beyond that door are millions of predators just waiting to feed on them.
These are young writers, and more often than not they lack confidence about their work. They don't yet know how good they are, and so they undervalue themselves, they undervalue their art and more importantly (for this discussion anyway), they undervalue their work.

Writing is an art form. We also have to consider art like a product (because Capitalism) but whether or not writing is just a fun hobby for you, a side-gig, trying to get a few ideas published or a job you want to do full-time, Writing is Work.
Yes, I have fun doing it, but how disgusting is this society that when I tell my fellow writers that writing is work, they say "oh, it's not work, I have fun doing it"—just because something doesn't feel like obligatory self-flagellation that you put yourself through out of fear of homelessness, that doesn't mean it's not fucking work. It takes time, it takes energy, it takes effort. I love doing these Halloween Countdowns, but after writing thirteen posts in thirteen days, I need to take a fucking break.
For fuck's sake - having sex is an awful lot of fun, I sure as hell love doing that too, but there's a reason most people are sweaty and out of breath afterwards - that also takes effort, energy and time!

[Editor's Note: It also bears taking into account, Sex Work is also Work, and Sex Workers require Workers Rights, but as much as that's an important topic, it's not the topic we're discussing today.]

Now this is some bullshit, but I was lucky insofar as that my story was never published (although, when contracted for work that I completed, I am still entitled to be paid). But, others are not so lucky. People like my friends, who had their work stolen and published against their will.
So, today, I am going to present 5 RULES for every writer, yes even (and especially) you newbies out there, who want to get started writing, but also don't want to get scammed... in fact, even those of you who do want to get scammed, because you allow this crap in the first place. Let me explain with this:

1. "For Exposure" is a Scam
Some people think that if they just get their work out their, it will improve their reputation as a professional writers. The reality is: writers who don't get paid, get a reputation as writers that aren't worth paying. Publishers that want to see some of your previous work want proof that they aren't wasting their money. If someone else didn't spend money on you, why should they?
Now if you're more of a "hobbyist" type, and you want to get your name out there but don't care about getting paid, there are millions of healthy ways of doing that without legitimizing scammers who will steal your work. create a blog on Blogger.com, just like I've done here; create a profile in AO3, FictionPress, Wattpad, WritersCafe, or Writing.com; hell, create a YouTube channel, and read your stories aloud. These are just half a dozen of the hundreds of ways you can post your story online without giving scammers money.

2. Never Pay to be Published.
I gets even worse than being unpaid. I've seen publishers that ask for a "submission fee". Remember what I said, Writing is Work. You don't pay for the privilege of a job interview, so why would you pay to submit your work to be considered for publication? I've seen some people argue that this is necessary for an 'editing fee' or to pay judges in certain writing contests or worse, that they're supporting a smaller publisher who can't afford to pay higher rates. This is just ridiculous. The reality is: If they can't afford to pay their judges, editors or prize money, they can't afford to pay you. You're a writer, not an investor, if a publisher can't afford to pay you, it's not your job to support a struggling business.
What really frustrates me about pay-to-play publisher scams, is that I have seen some "for exposure" scams, use their existence to legitimize their own scam. They call themselves a "free opportunity" with "no submission fee". This just normalizes a disgusting practice, and I offer every one of those scammers a "free opportunity" to eat shit and die.

3. Pay should start at 5 cents a word (at time of writing).

There are different pay rates, sure, and unless and until we do something about Capitalism, Elitism & Inflation, it's a sad reality that isn't going away any time soon. But, a lot of publishers have taken advantage of inflation to keep pay rates as low as they were in the 1950s. You might think 5¢ high, but it isn't, it's well below a semi-pro rate. Do you know what professional writers are paid?
According to the Australian Society of Authors, a fair rate (professional) rate for creative writing is approximately $1.03 a word. When I started, I thought eight cents a word was a professional rate, but it isn't. Semi-pro rates, by definition, are half that, they start at 50¢ a word. So, asking for 5¢ per word isn't asking too much. 
And yes, some writing may lose some value if it's outdated, or it's being published for a second time, or if you're writing it for charity, maybe it's a discounted rate. But always start at 5¢, so you recognize that half a cent is one-tenth of what your words are worth. If a publisher can't pay that, then they don't want your stories.

4. Literary Agents only get Paid if they sell your Work.
Maybe you're not small-time, maybe you actually have a few stories out there and you're looking for an agent to take you that next step towards getting your manuscript published. That's excellent, but you're not free from scams either. According to Penguin Random House an agent will take a percentage of the deal sales in exchange for their work earning the book deal, so their money comes from your profit, not from your pocket. The phrase they use is "money flows towards the author" - Just like a river, it may slow, it may stop, but it will never flow backwards unless there's something very wrong with the universe.
Even if you seem to be working for what appears to be a legitimate publisher, several scammers will deliberately pretend to work for a trusted name so that they can take advantage of that trust, to swindle you. So, you need to be cautious out there.

5. If you've been Scammed, you're a Victim, not a Villain.
I am giving you all of this advice not because I think you're stupid, or because it's your responsibility to stay vigilant. As far as I'm concerned, these people are criminals, and the law is simply ill-equipped to handle them on this scale. But, if you will, or already have, fallen victim to these scams just as I have in the past, you need to know that it's not your fault, it's theirs. Scammers take advantage of positive human compunctions towards empathy, hope and trust.
Whilst I will always promote the benefits of a healthy dose of skepticism, you're not a failure for wanting to trust someone, they're a failure for abusing that trust. Most importantly, don't be ashamed of what you've done, because you have nothing to be ashamed of, and they have everything to gain from shame keeping you silent.

I was lucky that all I lost was $25 (even though, as far as I'm concerned, that story was worth at least $250), and whilst it shouldn't be your responsibility, almost nobody is going to protect you and we bear the weight of it on our own backs, especially so long as this culture is complicit in letting publishers underpay them for their work and perpetuate scams as legitimate business.
If nothing else, I'm here to tell you that you deserve a lot more than what's being offered.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and remember, this post is not meant to incite hatred or violence, merely education. I don't want anyone to "cancel", harass, or in any way abuse Philip Lee McCall II - he owes me 25 bucks, that's not worth an internet hate mob. Not that I even have enough followers for that kind of thing, but even if this could somehow explode into something much bigger, I am officially stating that I don't want it to.
He is just one small part of perpetuating a culture that exploits young writers. If you want to abuse and harass someone... well, don't. What's wrong with you? But, if you want to cancel someone, then let's cancel these scammers... but only in so far as cancel means "report their activities to the relevant authorities, and warn fellow writers to steer clear of them".

That would be a better use of your time, and it would mean a lot more to me than $25.
...but I still do want my money, Phil, and so do my friends. Come on. Pay up.

Heroes, Villains and Criminals

I have been talking a lot about what crime means to me as a philosopher and a social commentator, but today I want to talk about what it means as a writer. Crime comes up a lot in fiction, and not just when you're writing crime fiction...

Comedies may involve indecent exposure, drug use and "slapstick" assault.

A disturbing number of Romance stories feature stalking & sexual assault.
Traditionally, Slasher Horror starts with drug use and underaged sex.

Superhero action stories often rely upon vigilantism, torture and grievous bodily harm.
Although less popular, Western movies still love their gun-slinging outlaws.

And all of this is before we discuss the particular genres that are just about crime: Swashbuckling Pirate Adventure, Bank Heist Thrillers, Murder Mystery Whodunnits, International Espionage Thrillers...

Basically, unless you're exclusively writing early-childhood children's books (and sometimes, even then) as a writer, it's only a matter of time before you're likely to be writing about crime in one form or another. What I find fascinating is the way that crime, despite being, y'know... bad, isn't exclusively the domain of villains. I'm not saying I agree with the Hays Code, and that all crime should be depicted in a negative light, but it's fascinating to me the arbitrary way it is often depicted.

So many heroes are thieves, thanks to good old Robin Hood setting the standard that, so long as the rich guy doesn't deserve his money, he's fair game. Murder is also fair game, but usually only if it's quick... victims of heroes usually drop dead, they rarely strangle people. But animal abuse? Hell no, if you hurt an animal, you're evil, through and through.

Dangerous driving is usually a pulse-pounding action scene, since that's a car chase, nothing wrong with a good car chase. Torture, that can be pretty villainous, but more often than not heroes use it if "the ends justify the means" (even though in reality, torture doesn't work for gathering information). Terrorism? Well, that's pretty entirely villainous; in fact "terrorist" is synonymous with "bad guy" in a lot of action movies.

It may seem arbitrary, and that's because it is... arbitrary just means "determined by an arbiter" and an arbiter is any human making a judgement. In fact, I've noticed that when it comes to crime in fiction, a crime is judged not by whether it's cruel or kind, easy or difficult not even if it's good or evil, it's always about if it's presented as fair. Theft is unfair, unless the person doesn't deserve their money. Murder is fair, if the bad guys are also trying to kill you. Even Arson, Blackmail, Kidnapping & Stalking can be the actions of a hero, if you present it as a balanced response to some antagonistic injustice.

That's why animal cruelty, child abuse and sexual assault are so universally villainous - there's not much to really balance that scale since children and animals are already at a disadvantage and because nobody deserves to be sexually assaulted...

[Editor's Note: It bears pointing out that child abuse and animal cruelty have been depicted as heroic in cases where the hero is a child or an animal, themselves. Also, comedies, and several other films, seem to find the sexual harassment and rape of men justifiable for multiple reasons regarding gender politics that I'm not going into, but if not triggered by such discussions, you will find the following videos informative.]

So, if you're a writer, that's the lesson for you, here. See, there's a common, inaccurate claim regarding fiction-writing that "you should always make your main characters likeable". But in my experience, this isn't true at all—it's not about likeability, legality or even morality, it's about understandability, people need to understand why your character does the things they do. Even if they do some of the worst things imaginable, if readers can understand the reason why they did it, they can not only forgive it, but in some cases justify it. One of the easiest ways to do this is by making the scales of justice within your story clear, explicit and balanced, but you can even make a character act unfairly, if you can show that circumstances beyond them are forcing them to act in a rational manner.

I wasn't planning on this, but this actually ties back to my post about crime as sin, because this too is based upon cognitive bias. But, not the Sunk Cost, rather this is a kind of self-serving bias, in particular, Fundamental Attribution Error. For the sake of this post I will be referring to Fundamental Attribution Error simply as Attribution Error, but please take note that this is a personal choice that I'm making, but it may be confusing in other contexts, as there are many forms of Attribution Error, or Bias.

Attribution Error, simply put, is the cognitive mistake of attributing good actions or consequences that we (or our in-group) do on us simply being good people who do good things - the theory refers to these as "dispositional, or personality, factors"; but attributing bad actions or consequences to external factors beyond our control - the theory refers to these as "situational and environmental factors"

However, this is self-serving because we tend to do the opposite for others or members of an outgroup, and this bias is exacerbated when prior bias already exists (i.e. someone you don't like).
That's the theory, in practice it looks like this:

Let's say that several people take part in a somewhat difficult test.
If you and yours Succeed, you're likely attribute that to you being smart and earning it.
If them and theirs Succeed, you're likely to attribute it to them studying more, or getting lucky.
If you and yours Fail, you're likely to attribute that to not enough study time, or an unfair test.
If them and theirs Fail, you're likely to attribute that to them being stupid and not trying.

This happens more often than we'd like to admit. In fact, my favourite example is bumping into someone. If you accidentally bump into someone, it's because you were distracted. If someone else bumps into you, it's because they weren't watching where they were going.
The reality is, you weren't watching where you were going, because you were distracted.
And they also were distracted, which is why they weren't watching where they were going.
The reality is, we are all affected by multiple personal and situational factors, but we're more likely to give a charitable interpretation to our own actions, and an uncharitable one for others.

The reason this matters in fiction is twofold. Firstly, because that's how you game the system - by providing irrefutable, environmental factors as to why your character does bad things, you can sneak your main character backwards along this cognitive bias and into a reader's in-group. They're likely to do this anyway, by the nature of being granted access to their perspective (which I'm pretty sure relates to another cognitive bias, but I'm not going to research that right now because this is meant to be a post about writing, not psychology... even though I admit there's a lot of overlap when creating characters).

[Editor's Note: I couldn't help myself. Whilst admittedly my research was lacking, I did find a connection between empathizing with Point-of-View Characters, and the psychological and emotional drive, called Belongingness. Basically, when reading a book from another perspective, we have an inherent desire to belong to their group. It can be counteracted by strong enmity and pre-existing negative biases, but unless they are uncharacteristically strong, the desire to belong can break down those barriers. I'd argue this is the reason why bigots complain so much when feminine, queer and/or non-white characters are given prominence in fiction is because they recognize that it encourages empathy and it's a powerful force, but this editor's note is long enough, and that could be an entire blog post unto itself.]

Secondly, I think that this means the writer bears great responsibility when it comes to representation in stories. As I've said, and I will continue to say throughout this Countdown, criminals are not inherently evil people. I'm not concerned that stories depict crime, I love those stories because crime is rife with drama and drama is what makes some stories so deeply fascinating. But, we have the capacity to decide who people empathize with, who is good and bad, and more than ever I think that writers need to be conscious of that reality. It's too early for me to divulge, since it's an idea I had only a month or so ago, but I've been ruminating upon the idea of "authorial ethics". There's already study regarding ethics in journalism and there's some regressive discussion of ethics in media portrayals of violence and sex. I wonder if it would be beneficial to have a more definitive concept of ethics in fiction. I'm not actually sure if it's possible, since if it were too strict, it would be tantamount to censorship, but that's not my goal.
See, the point is, if you are a writer you have the power the decide, simply by putting words to a page, who has the right to be a hero, who has the qualities of a villain, who deserves to be considered a peer, who's in your in-group, who's in your outgroup, and what actions make the world a better place, and what makes it worse. I'm not prepared to tell you what you should and shouldn't do, but I can say without reservation: As a writer, you are responsible for the words that you write, and if you don't take that responsibility seriously, you can do more harm than good.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and I really think a "the true crime here is..." preface would be suitable, something about using words to do harm or not taking responsibility for your fiction, but I already used that cliche in a prior post, and I don't want to be here repeating myself. That's not really a fiction responsibility thing, so much as a mild compulsive tendency to avoid repetition whenever possible.
Until Next Time, what do you think? What crimes do you find interesting in fiction, and would you be interested in a discussion in regard to "authorial ethics"? Let me know in the comments below, and I'll see you tomorrow wherein I'm going to share an old story I wrote with you, as well as the story behind it...

A Literary Analysis of ChatGPT3.5

I've said plenty enough times throughout this countdown that robots cannot be creative, that they cannot replace the human mind when it comes to some creative tasks, such as drawing, acting and writing.
"But wait," I hear you say "A.I. can write. Heck, I can ask ChatGPT to write me a poem about 'a monster that's lonely because it killed everyone', and it will do it - look!"

In shadows deep, where moonlight fades,
A lonely monster, in solitude wades.
It's heart heavy with a dreadful cost,
For in its wake, all lives were lost.

A creature born of darkness and night,
It brought an end to the world's light.
But in its solitude, it weeps and moans,
A lonely monster with empty thrones.

No solace found in its reign of fear,
For loneliness is the cost it holds dear.
In the silence of its desolate domain,
The lonely monster is left with pain.

- ChatGPT3.5, prompted by Matthew A.J. Anderson

But my response is twofold, dear reader. Firstly, that wasn't the A.I. being creative, that was ME being creative. I gave it the prompt, based on an idea that I thought was cool. I was the creative one, not the A.I.
Secondly, I don't think that's very good... I can understand why someone would be impressed by that, especially if you're not a writer or a poet yourself, but that's not a good poem. I'm not saying that ChatGPT3.5 can't ever be used for writing - some editing could probably improve a short poem like this, to fix the meter so that it doesn't skip jankily through iambic tetrameter and make the word choices stronger, with a bolder finish. But, as it is, this is not a good poem.
In fact, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. I've actually done some preliminary research to prove that ChatGPT3.5 is a bad writer.

I'm a published author, and in my time I've also beta-read, critiqued and edited dozens of stories. So, I decided that I would get ChatGPT3.5 to write me fiction, and I would critique and analyze it. I wanted a large sample size, but one small enough that one person could critique it, so I asked it ChatGPT3.5 for drabbles - stories of exactly 100 words. I had initially planned on asking for 100 stories, but the website started to slow down a little, and I figured that 25 was still enough that I could get some fun percentages out of my data.

So, my method was, I simply asked ChatGPT3.5 "do you know what a drabble is?" When it responded saying that it did, I prompted it by saying: "Write me one"
And it did. I then said "write me another", and I repeated that same prompt another 23 times. I didn't want to give ChatGPT3.5 any influence from me, because that would influence the output. I just wanted it to write me a story, based on its own programming/machine-learning of how best to do that. Also, ChatGPT3.5 didn't give these titles, so I will refer to them by their number (in the order ChatGPT3.5 generated them for me).

Then, I decided to analyze these stories, but I wasn't sure how best to do that, so I asked ChatGPT3.5 for a rubric based on a high-school teacher's creative writing assignment. I felt this was the fairest way to find a rubric, since ChatGPT3.5 had provided its own standards for judgement.
ChatGPT3.5's rubric said that papers ought to be graded on at least four criteria (paraphrased):
"context/creativity" - did the student come up with their own story idea, and write it in a way that brought that idea across clearly?
"sequence/structure" - was the story written with a beginning, middle and end, and did the structure support the story being told?
"poetry/proficiency" did the student display an astute use of vocabulary and poetic devices to express their story effectively?
I decided to evenly weight these, with a potential of 0-3 points, based on how well it met that criterion:
(0) Did not meet standard.
(1) Met Standard, technically.
(2) Met Standard, skillfully.
(3) Met Standard, excellently.

Now, yes, that's only three criteria, but the fourth criterion was "spelling/grammar", and I didn't think that was a relevant measure, since ChatGPT3.5 was a robot trained to perfect spelling and grammar, also that's not relevant to this test. I want to know if ChatGPT3.5 can write a good story, not if it can write a good sentence. So, I replaced that criterion with one of my own "Did I like it?"
this is highly subjective, so I weighted this one with only 1 point:
(0) I did not enjoy the story.
(1) I did enjoy the story.

This meant that each story could be graded on a score between 0 and 10. I also analyzed each of the stories for their theme and provided notes based on my analysis, but we'll get to that after the data. So, let's start with the numbers.

Here's my data, and I'll discuss it in detail in just a moment:

Themes/Morals	Like?	C/C	S/S	P/P	Ttl	Notes
Love, eternal	N	1	3	2	6	fine structure, kinda dull
Destiny/Fantasy, eternal	N	2	1	1	4	rushed
Beauty in Chaos/Power of Art	N	1	1	2	4	resolution out of nowhere
True Stories > Fiction	Y	3	3	2	9	cool.
The Cosmic Frontier	N	2	1	1	4	our first man, nameless
Beauty in Chaos	N	1	1	1	3	first repeat
???... "Kindness of Strangers"?	N	2	2	1	5	good conflict, no theme
Beauty in Nature (I think)	N	1	1	1	3	kinda meaningless
Beauty in Nature	N	2	1	1	3	repeat, again.
Beauty in Chaos	N	1	1	1	4	10 copied 3's homework
Power of Art	N	1	1	1	3	all tell, little show
Love, Boundless	N	2	1	2	5	good idea, bad ending
Great Work reaps Great Reward	N	1	1	1	3	nameless dude 2
Beauty in Chaos	N	0	1	1	2	fucked the moral up
Beauty in Chaos	N	2	1	3	6	cute, but dull
???... "Books are Cool" I think?	N	0	1	1	2	totally meaningless
Let Go of Desire	N	3	1	2	6	thanks, I hate it
Beauty in Chaos	N	1	1	1	3	computers love nature, I guess
(spiritual) Beauty in Chaos	N	1	1	1	3	a machine's view of spirituality
???... "Free your Dreams"?	N	0	1	0	1	ugh, you fail
Beauty in Chaos	N	2	1	1	4	PLAGIARISM! - instant fail.
Beauty in Chaos	N	1	1	1	3	bored of these...
Love, boundless	N	1	1	2	5	"nature's wedding"? cute
Some Treasure should be Secret	N	2	1	2	5	Take the Gem!
Embrace Change	N	2	1	2	4	bleurgh...
AVERAGE	Y .04%	1.4	1.2	1.36	4

Across the board, ChatGPT3.5 was technically proficient, but nothing was truly impressive. Based on my analysis, ChatGPT3.5 scored an average of 4/10.

For Content & Creativity, it scored 1.4 - below average; this was lowered mostly because the stories tended to be very basic, using very broad themes. The most common theme was "Enjoying Life's Beauty", with 48% of stories featuring it, with the most common subcategory "Finding Beauty in Chaos" for 32% of all stories. And 12% having the basic "Enjoy Nature's Beauty" message.
The second most-common theme was "Love, Eternal", with  12% of all stories featuring love stories with the moral that "love will last forever".
There were also quite a few stories where the moral was about the power of art. I don't lump them together since it was varied enough to be distinct, but there were stories about "The power of stories", "arising community from art", even one I didn't understand whose meaning appeared to be "huh, ain't books neat?"
Actually, if I compiled all the stories where the meaning was hard to grasp, or asinine, that's actually the second-most common theme, with 16% of stories having no real purpose, as far as I could tell.

For Sequence & Structure, it averaged out at 1.2, the lowest score overall, mostly because although technically proficient, it used the EXACT SAME structure every time:
Introduce character in the middle of a scene. One thing happens. Character has an epiphany. Conclude with character's epiphany.
Yes, that technically fulfils the brief, but there wasn't a single variation. No in medias res; No action; No drama; All Tell, No Show; No dialogue - okay that's a lie, there was a single line of dialogue in Drabble 20, but that was also my least-favourite story, scoring the lowest at just 1/10, and the only other dialogue was in Drabble 02, which scored 4/10, so maybe it's better to avoid dialogue... But this was a drag to read. I was genuinely surprised, I knew that I might get some repeats, and I thought I'd find the strings pulling the puppet, that I'd be able to identify the basic templates of the stories. I didn't realize it would only have one template.
In fact, repetition is the name of the game.
If you like female representation, you might appreciate that 76% of the "main characters" in these stories were female (or, at least, identified with feminine pronouns). However, what's less impressive is that 36% of the main characters were named "Sarah". And, when it comes to repetition, well, we'll discuss that when we get to the Case Study.

For Poetry & Proficiency, it averaged out at 1.36, with some evocative imagery and good use of vocabulary... sometimes. Most of the time, it was incredibly repetitious. Drabbles 06, 09, 10, 13, 16, 18, 20 & 21 all began with the line "In the heart of...", which became annoying after the third time. 6 of the stories took place in a city, 5 of them were described as "bustling". 5 of the stories took place on the edge of the ocean, 5 took place in a forest, 3 in a library. It was all so samey.
I will say though, I was impressed with some of the more unique locations: One took place in outer space, another on a ship in a storm, one was in a desert, one was on a mountaintop monastery and one was on a remote island. However, each one of these, despite their unique locals, weren't as interesting. I don't know how ChatGPT3.5 writes stories (and neither does it, but you'd know that if you've read my previous posts) But I wonder if it has more tenuous connections in its neural network for these more esoteric locations - perhaps it has less of them in its dataset, so it has to link them to a more generic theme or moral, like "finding beauty in chaos" for the tenth time.

But okay, let's look at the Case studies. I'm only looking at a few of these, in particular the ones with very high or very low scores.

Let's start with my favourite story:

Drabble 04
The old bookstore on the corner held secrets within its dusty shelves. Clara, an avid reader, ventured inside on a rainy afternoon. She pulled a weathered book from the shelf and blew off the dust.
As she opened it, a tiny slip of paper fell out. It was a handwritten note, a love letter from a bygone era. Clara's heart ached reading the tender words of affection and longing. Who were these people? What stories lay hidden in the pages of their lives?
In that moment, Clara realized that every book held not only its own story but a world of untold tales waiting to be discovered.

That's the one and only story that recieved a 9/10. I marked down the poetry, because the vocabulary felt a bit underwhelming: "avid reader", "bygone era", "dusty shelves" of books, it was all a bit too cliche for my liking. But, I think this is a genuinely great story. I wonder what training data ChatGPT3.5 used to write it, because I'd be interested to know where it got this from.

The only part about this story that I really don't like is that it was number four - I liked the fourth story, so I had high hopes that I might actually like several more of these stories. I did not.

Now, let's look at some of the "unsure meanings", starting with:

Drabble 07
The old lighthouse stood tall on the rugged coast, its beacon cutting through the stormy night. Captain James had sailed these treacherous waters for years, guided by that familiar light.
Tonight, however, the lighthouse had dimmed, a signal of danger. Waves crashed against the ship, and the crew fought to keep it steady. With every gust of wind, James scanned the horizon, searching for a way through the tempest.
Then, a flicker of light. The lighthouse keeper, though frail and weary, had rekindled the flame. With a newfound hope, James steered his ship to safety, grateful for the unwavering dedication of a stranger in the night.

This is alright, I gave it 5/10, but I didn't like it because I didn't really see the point. Like, yes, that's what lighthouses were for. But, do you have anything to say about that? Perhaps I'm more critical than most, but I think this is an example of a "well, gee, ain't that something?" type of moral. Yes, life would suck if people didn't do their job... "we live in a society" and all that. But, this story doesn't seem to mean anything. We don't know what James was doing, who the lighthouse keeper was, or why it went out in the first place, so... I'm just left stumped. I guess it's saying that it's good that lighthouses used to exist...? Well, gee, ain't that something...
Let's look at some more incomprehensible morals:

Drabble 14
In a forgotten corner of the garden, a single rosebush stood, its blossoms vibrant and untouched. Maria, an avid gardener, cherished this hidden gem.
As she tended the rosebush, she marveled at its resilience. it had weathered storms and neglect, yet it continued to thrive, its petals unfurling in defiance of adversity.
The rosebush became a symbol of hope for Maria, a reminder that beauty could emerge from even the most challenging circumstances. In its delicate blooms, she found strength, and in nurturing it, she discovered the power of patience and unwavering care.

2/10. Why? Well, read the story again and you'll see that it makes no fucking sense. This is Maria's garden, and despite being an /avid gardener she had one part of it that she forgot about? Okay, that's a thing. Then, because a pretty rosebush survived her neglect, that brings her hope. But then the moral of the story is that she found strength in her patience and unwavering care. Firstly, unwavering? She forgot the fucken thing! Second, I thought this gave her hope in its strength and resilience, so how can you support that message if she then needed to nurture it to keep it alive? Your moral is backwards, and makes no sense.
But here, let's look at my least favourite story at all, whose moral was just confusing...

Drabble 20
In the heart of a bustling market, an elderly street vendor sold colorful kites. Timmy, a young boy, watched in awe as one soared in the sky, tugged by the wind.
His eyes met the vendor's, and the old man offered him a kite: "Here, my boy, let your dreams take flight."
With the kite in hand, Tommy raced in the open field. He released it into the breeze, and for a moment, it hung in the air, defying gravity. Timmy felt the exhilaration of freedom and possibility.
In that simple act, he learned that dreams were like kites-sometimes, all they needed was a little push to soar.

This story is entirely ridiculous. For one, this is a street vendor in a marketplace, why is he giving kites away for free? And this bullshit about dreams comes out of nowhere. And, like Maria before, this makes no sense - I thought we were in a bustling market, where the fuck did an open field come from? And, although the story never says his age, Timmy is a young boy, I'm pretty sure kids fly kites because "it's fun", yet Timmy is having an epiphany that you shouldn't let your dreams just be dreams... I hate this. There was no story, the vocabulary was bland, the poetry didn't help the story. If it wasn't for the fact that this did have a coherent beginning, middle and end, this would have gotten a zero. These aren't people, they're not even characters, they're puppets that perform actions. But, why? I can't see meaning here, only action. Just because you always Tell (and don't Show) your moral as your conclusion at the end, that doesn't mean you have a coherent moral. This story certainly doesn't. I knew this would be bad, but I didn't know it would be this bad...
Oh, and I have to include this one, just because of all the stories, this was the most frustrating - I thought I was going to like it.

Drabble 24
On a remote island, Emma discovered an ancient temple hidden in the jungle. Intricate carvings adorned its weathered walls, telling stories of forgotten civilizations.
As she explored, she uncovered a hidden chamber. Inside, a single, glowing gem lay on an ornate pedestal. It pulsed with an otherworldly light, filling the room with an ethereal glow. In that moment, Emma felt a connection to the mysteries of the past and the magic of the present. She left he gem undisturbed, a reminder that some secrets were meant to be preserved, and some treasures were best left undiscovered.

WHAT?! Take the fucking gem! Oh my god, you fucking plotblocked me, you goddamned tease. I was genuinely invested in this story - so few of these stories explored fantasy or science-fiction, so introducing a glowing gem actually caught my attention. But then she LEAVES IT UNDISTURBED?! Fuck you, story. And it's not just that I disagree with the moral - I find a lot of the "love is forever" morals disgusting, because they are unrealistic and present an unattainable goal (can't love forever if you don'tlive forever), but at least it was coherent.
But I hated this because whilst I disagree with this moral, as presented, it could have been awesome! Why was she even exploring a lost temple in the first place, if she believes that you should leave secrets preserved? If she stumbled upon it, that might make more sense, but she was exploring! It's not even like there was some hint that this was intruding on native land, since these civilizations died off in time immemorial, and it's not like the power of this gem was dangerous or evil. So, why did she leave it?!
I would have forgiven this if she left it because, despite its power, she was an intruder and unwelcome in this place. But, she didn't, it didn't, and so I didn't - this story is bad, and ChatGPT3.5 should feel bad for writing it.

But okay, here's where things get really obvious. I'm going to show you three stories, back to back, so you can see this for yourself, because when I read this I was genuinely shocked. Here's Drabbles 03, 10 & 21...

Drabble 03
Amidst the bustling city, Lily found solace in a tiny park. On a worn bench, she watched the world rush by. Her sketchbook rested on her lap, and charcoal in hand, she began to draw.
With each stroke, the chaos around her faded, replaced by the tranquility of her creation. Her lines captured the essence of the city, its energy and contradictions. People stopped to admire her work, and for a moment, they shared a connection through art.
In that small park, Lily discovered that even in the heart of urban chaos, beauty could be found and shared, one sketch at a time.

Drabble 10
In the heart of the bustling city, a street artist painted a masterpiece. Passersby paused to admire the vibrant colors and intricate details taking shape before their eyes.
Among the crowd, a young girl watched with wonder. The artist noticed her fascination and handed her a brush. With a shy smile, the girl joined in, adding her own strokes to the canvas.
As the painting neared completion, it became a symbol of unity and creativity, transcending language and background. In that moment, strangers became collaborators, and the city streets transformed into an open gallery of shared artistry.

Drabble 21
In the heart of a bustling city, a street artist painted a mural on a blank wall. Passersby paused to admire the vibrant colors and intricate details taking shape before their eyes.
Among the crowd, a young girl watched with wonder. The artist noticed her fascination and handed her a brush. With a shy smile, the girl joined in, adding her own strokes to the mural.
As the painting neared completion, it became a symbol of unity and creativity, transcending language and background. In that moment, strangers became collaborators, and the city streets transformed into an open gallery of shared artistry.

That's clearly the same damn story, three times. Hell, the last two were even written identically, bar one change. I thought I'd get repetition, but I thought that the random number generator was better than this. Three stories, with the moral of "community, through art" Also, this was the first time that I realized that none of these stories seem to be drabbles...
See, a drabble is a story that's exactly 100 words, that's what makes it a drabble, but when I realized that these stories were identical, except replacing "masterpiece" with "a mural on a blank wall" I realized that they'd have to have disparate wordcounts.
I didn't count them because I had assumed that ChatGPT3.5 would be able to stick to a wordcount, since it's a computer (a calculator), it knows how to count. But, that's the thing... ChatGPT3.5 doesn't know how to count, because it wasn't designed to count, it was designed to write grammatically correct sentences and paragraphs, based on a prompt. This is also the reason why it fucked up the meter on that poem earlier, it can't count the meter because it's not writing a poem, it's just putting one word after another, in a way that the neural network defined as "fitting the prompt of 'poem'", so it doesn't realize it screwed up the poem's meter, just as it never realized that almost none of these drabbles were actually 100 words. They were close - probably because it does have a fair sample set of drabbles in its training data - but, if you tried to submit any of these to a drabble contest, you would fail. Even my favourite, Drabble 04, was actually 107 words.

Thankfully, I'm not judging this off wordcount, I'm judging it off literary merit. But, I'm afraid that it fails there too.
These stories were "interesting", mostly as an exercise in analyzing how a computer puts a story together, and genuinely I think you could use these as prompts for your own story. Write a short story about a man in space. Write a drabble about an artist in the city. Write me a tale set in a neglected garden. Write a story about twelve women called Sarah who discover each other, and realize they've all been cloned by a machine.
But, whatever you do, don't use artificial intelligence to write your stories for you. Unless you're fine writing a mediocre-to-bad story, 80% of the time. Because, as I said, you need creativity to be a writer. Computers aren't creative, they just do as they're told, and if you tell them to be creative, well, all you get is this.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and Until Next Time, why don't you challenge yourself to write a drabble. Maybe one about a woman discovering an ancient temple, and when she discovers a glowing gem, she ACTUALLY TAKES THE DAMN THING! Yeah, I'm still not over it...

More than Human

I've been talking about artificial intelligence a lot for this Halloween Countdown, because I have a lot to say about it. But, I get that it could get a bit much... after all, in my experience, everyone is talking about A.I. right now, it's all over news, media, art and culture right now. So, okay, today I'm going to talk about something else.
How about Superheroes? (ha, ain't I a stinker?)
Fine, maybe they're talked about perhaps even more than A.I., but when I was considering the theme of "inhuman", to discuss robots and A.I., "superhumans" was one of the first things that came to mind, and I have a lot to say about it and inhumanity.

Superheroes are really cool, and one of the reasons they're so popular is because they are wish fulfillment. It's a fantasy, to be strong, powerful and beautiful. Male superheroes are usually muscular, young and handsome and always get the girl, and female superheroes are usually powerful, young and sexy and wear revealing outfits - according to TV Tropes, the Most Common Superpower is having big breasts.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is heterosexual, male wish fulfilment; not all girls want to have a thin waist, and a slinky spine that can show off their bum and boobs at the same time, and not all men are straight and care about getting any girl, let alone a hyperfeminine model in a skintight catsuit.

But, besides the whole sexist legacy of superheroes that still affects comics to this day one of the issues with these being wish fulfilment fantasies is that they're unachievable.
We're meant to aspire to superheroes, and in fact a lot of people have spoken about superhero characters as mythological - they're meant to be a symbol of morals, of truth, of justice or even just of kindness. But, superhumans aren't just really great humans... they're "above humans" that's what the prefix super- means, something above, greater than, more than.
Often, superheroes are an allegory for some kind of injustice, some philosophy which the hero is standing for, but if you're presenting the iconic hero as someone who has power greater than any human can achieve, with inhuman strength, speed, ability, intelligence or morals... how can we possibly achieve that? I worry that superheroes, by being so much more able than humans, actually make their morals seem unachievable.

Now, that's a little pessimistic. After all, in these movies often the villains too are also superhuman. Sure, you need a Captain Planet to clean up the oil spill from a supervillain like Hogs Greedly, or to protect the animals from a Looten Plunder; but when facing earthly problems, even a kid like you can be an earthly hero - the power is yours!

That's what Captain Planet wanted to teach us anyway, and that's fair. But, I still can't help but notice that a lot of modern superheroes solve their problems with violence. Yes, we should be willing to fight for what we believe in... but often that fight is more metaphorical, but I can't think of a single Marvel Superhero in the MCU that hasn't thrown a punch. Seriously, can you name a single Marvel superhero who has never tried to punch their problems away?
This problem is twofold, because not only does it normalize violence, but it also reduces problems to ones that are purely physical. If you can't represent a problem with something that has a face which you can punch, then it's not a problem that a superhero can solve. But not all problems are physical...
Sexism, Racism, Homophobia, Capitalism, Corruption, Tyranny, Inequality. Systemic problems, all, but a superhero can't fight them unless there's one big, bad Keystone villain behind it, whose death kills it.
I won't spoil anything explicitly, but In movies like Black Panther; Black Widow & Captain America, heroes face issues of racism, sexism & nazism; in series like Daredevil; Falcon and the Winter Soldier & Loki, heroes fight corruption, injustice & tyranny...
But in every case, they stop these systemic issues by finding the one person responsible, usually a supervillain, and punching them in the face - or the equivalent, using arrows, magic, lasers or whatever their gimmick is. I'm not dismissing these movies, I like these movies, but you can't deny that they boil problems and conflicts down to the actions of "the people that do the bad thing", and then solve it by removing them from the equation.

That's not just inhuman, that's alien. If you think the way to stop inequality is "find the person who caused inequality, do a backflip and snap his neck", then I don't think you know what inequality is.

But, okay, these tend to be action movies... and some of this is to be expected. Stories are meant to be entertaining after all, and many stories pay lip-service to these ideas, whilst still being interesting. After all, whilst Captain Planet destroyed robots and stopped forest firest with his super-breath, he didn't exactly stop to pick up trash every day. There's a reason he left that crap to the pre-credits "educational segment", because otherwise the show would be boring. Unfortunately, in the real world, solving systemic problems takes education; political activism and protests, most of which aren't necessarily "boring", but it's sure as hell not what I want in my sci-fi action movies. It's meant to be thematic, that's fine...

But, what's not fine is that when you look at movies thematically, solving systemic problems is not only "not heroic", it's downright villainous.
Almost half of the villains in the MCU want to change the world. Sometimes, sure, it's because they're selfish, greedy or evil - Iron Monger wants money and power; Abomination wanted military might; Whiplash wanted revenge; Red Skull wants Nazis to rule the world; Loki wants royalty and power & Malekith wanted to destroy life and light to empower dark elves... do y'all remember Malekith? the "Thor: The Dark World" villain...
Anyway, my point is, they want to destroy for their own ends, to get their own power. But, that's not the only change supervillains aspire to.
Ultron's ultimate goal was world peace; Iron Man first fought Captain America for the sake of transparency and accountability (prior to revenge); The Vulture's goal was economic freedom for an oppressed lower class; Killmonger's goal was social freedom for an oppressed ethnic minority & Thanos's goal was to prevent societal collapse, on a cosmic scale.
You could even argue that Ego's goal in Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2 was ultimately family and community, but that might be pushing it... either way, these supervillains are fighting for change, and sometimes they're even fighting for good change. Obviously, if your goals are greedy or selfish at the cost of others, that's wrong... but what of the ones fighting for good? Well, they usually do that by, say, killing dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions, billions of people - hell, I don't even know what "-illion" of people Thanos killed, but I'm pretty sure it was half a zillion.

Their goals are worthy, but their methods often aren't. But, this is worrying because the more and more that superhero movies become mainstream, the more we start to absorb their tropes.
Consider this, even if you don't know who the villain will be in a story - let's say it's either kept a secret, or you just avoided all marketing - unless they're covered in blood and screaming like a maniac, the obvious giveaway will often be that it's someone confident and charismatic who wants to change the world.
And yes, some confident charismatic people who want to change the world are bad... I'm just going to say the word "Hitler", we will acknowledge Godwin's law, and the fact that Nazis suck, but then we're going to move past it and look at more examples: Susan B. Anthony; Martin Luther King; Nelson Mandela; Harvey Milk; Sylvia Rivera; Greta Thunberg.
These people look at the problems, speak out, and have changed the world for the better.

Superheroes are reactionary, which takes away a lot of their agency, but more importantly, their goals are often to stop people changing the world. No, I don't want people to die, and I don't want some greedy villain to get more power, money or meaningless revenge... but, if all superhero fiction had an overarching theme, it appears to be: "true heroes sacrifice everything to keep things the way they are"... which is a depressingly regressive point of view.
The only way to improve the world is to change it, and sometimes, yes, that does mean we have to destroy what we once had. Change is scary, especially if you don't trust the person doing the changing, but I just want to ask one thing...
Rather than React to supervillains changing the world for the worse, when will a superhero Act to change the world for the better?

I'm not saying superhero movies are bad, or that you shouldn't enjoy them. I'm just saying that if there's one thing that superhero movies are missing, right now, it's change. I will keep watching them, I am a geek after all, but I won't truly be happy until I see a superhero change the world.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and I think this was an apt post. All this talk about how A.I. is dangerous might make people think that I don't want change, but I do - admittedly I prefer it when it's slow and manageable, but I do like progress.
Until Next Time, remember that just because you like progress, that doesn't make you a supervillain... it's the killing and hurting of innocent people in the process that sends superman flying after you.

The Worst Story I've Ever Written

I said last night that I would follow up tonight (at time of writing) with Part 2 of the "Failed Films" post. Unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances and work obligations means that I wasn't able to do that. I am going to work on finishing it for tomorrow night - fingers crossed - but until then I still want to post something tonight, so... well, I'm gonna have to bite the bullet. I didn't want to tell you about this, but there's only one big "Failure" that comes to mind which I can talk about without any research... and that's the worst story I ever wrote.
It is a failed story, but I did write it, so it doesn't count as one of my "abandoned projects". I considered just posting it, but honestly, it's so bad that I don't really want to do that. Even with a disclaimer like "I write better now guys, please don't judge me", I still don't want to expose anyone to that story. I genuinely don't like it, and I don't ever plan on sharing it. But, that doesn't mean I'm not going to tell you all about it. I considered it a learning experience, so why not share what I learned with you all?

So, what's the story? Well, it was a short story called "Evil".
Yes, I was a pretentious little git when i was younger, but the title was because the story was from the perspective of a villainous character that I considered "evil". Since I don't really believe in objective morality, I don't really like the concept of calling things "truly good" or "truly evil", but my goal was to have an evil character.
See, the basic premise behind this story is, as a student , it bothered me how many silly little rules everyone has to follow for the sake of "safety", even though they don't actually make us safe. I'm talking walking on the left side of the footpath; wearing school uniforms; going home before the sun goes down & that kind of thing: arbitrary rules that don't actually make you safer.
Now that I'm older I know that this kind of thing is called Security Theatre, the little performances that are designed to make us feel safer, even though we're not. The most pertinent example I can think of are signatures. Not always, but like nine times out of ten, when you sign something nobody checks it. And of course they don't, nobody cares. Most people don't know what your "real" signature looks like and if you do your signature wrong, who can tell? Give it a go, next time you get a product delivered that requires your signature, spell your name backwards, or draw a smiley face, see what happens.
Usually? Nothing. Nobody cares. But the act of signing something feels important, it's feels like you're doing something official (even though you're just writing your name quickly), so it doesn't actually change how secure your money, purchases, or postal deliveries actually are.

So, with that all said, the premise behind the story was "What if there was a character who decided to show just how fake this false sense of security is?" That's why the story was called evil, I figured that all it would take to shatter this false reality would be one evil person, one bad guy. It was about a truly evil character who showed everyone how unsafe they really were, out of a sense of vengeance and disgust due to the frustration at his own dreadful life. I think now is the best time to give y'all a Trigger Warning that I'm about to discuss, a story heavily involving Violence, Crime, Murder, Sexual Assault & Suicide; and vague references to Death & Decay, and Domestic/Parental Violence. If these are an issue for you, you may not want to continue reading without adequate preparation.
Okay, well, that trigger warning is basically the spoiler warning as well, because that's kind of exactly what the story was about. Now, I actually had some interesting ideas which I don't entirely hate. Like, I wanted this to be five chapters, starting with him deciding to do wrong, committing his first crimes, turning to murder, and then finally killing himself on live camera; and I thought to represent his moral decay, I wanted to include a black & white image of a dead frog decaying in five stages from freshly-dead to bones. I only managed to find a dead lizard image, but I still think, for a darkly-themed story like that, the imagery is striking and thematically appropriate.
So, what happened in this story? Well, it was about this kid called Liam (I picked the name because Liam is mail backwards... that's literally it, I just thought that was interesting). It's starts with him doing a monologue about how the world is terrible, and people need to be more like him, able to see through the bullshit. Then he comes across a group of girls, who are all talking about how one of them was mugged with a guy at knifepoint. The guy calls the girl weak, and they tell him to go away, but it inspires him to try to "fix" the world.

"What if I could teach the world how to deal with shit like this . . . what if I could heal this broken mess. If one man can control a girl with a knife, simple math says that one man can control everyone with the right tool." - EVIL, page 1.

The rest of the story is then like the kid's manifesto, as he describes the steps he takes to "change the world". It starts with him deciding to rape a popular girl at school, the school captain, for the sake of making people scared. I wrote the scene in detail, of how he creeps out of his house and into hers... I did skip over the rape itself, but he describes how he didn't enjoy it, since to him it was just a means to an end. Most importantly, he tags the side of their house with the words "FIXED".
The idea was, he was trying to be like a domestic terrorist, and he wanted a name for himself. He saw himself as "fixing" society, so he tagged his crimes as "fixed".
In the next chapter, he kills his father, then steals his dad's car. Tags the side of it "FIXED", then parks it in the middle of a railroad crossing, in the hopes of derailing the train. It didn't derail (I wanted to show that this kid wasn't even that competent, I mean, trains can hit semi-trailers without derailing, so I didn't think a single ute would, even for a passenger train. But that was sort of the point - this kid wasn't that smart, yet he was causing all this chaos).
Chapter three starts with him bitching about the fact that the train didn't derail, but still wanting to create some more havoc, he steals a gun, goes into a local doctor's surgery, and shoots everyone inside, before writing "FIXED" on the wall.
Now, since he's trying to make a bigger name for himself as a domestic terrorist, he finds someone who looks rich, walking out of a government building, the person wearing the nicest suit, but without any security. He drags them into the bushes, stabs them to death, and puts a post-it note with "FIXED" into his pocket.
Finally, the last chapter - called "Change the World" was all about him breaking into a local television studio with his gun, He shoots everyone in a local news-room, looks at the camera and monologues into it about how he's the "Fixer", he's just a kid who killed so many people, and people need to wake up. Then he finishes his monologue by shooting himself in the head, and the story ends mid-sentence.

Alright, class, now before I reveal it all to you, can anyone tell me what's wrong with this story? Hmm?
I mean, besides the horrendously dark tone; the cringe-worthy attempts at a teenaged writer being "edgy"; the completely gratuitous scenes of rape, terrorism & suicide, and the overwhelming lack of research into how difficult it actually is to steal a gun, kill a politician/businessman or break into a television studio?
Yes, all that aside, can anyone tell me what the actual, fundamental problem with this story is?
Alright, I'll stop the artificial dialogue schtick, I know you can't answer, so I'll just tell you...
The actual problem with this story is that, whilst it initially had a point - divulge and deconstruct security theatre - it was so mired in darkness of tone, and this weird character study that the message was entirely lost. And part of the reason for that is I was angry when I came up with the idea. I was a teenager, and I know it's a cliche, but I was angry about learning just how unfair the system is, and how it felt like people went along with it out of a sense of either "loyalty" or "ignorance". Now, don't get me wrong, if you are a writer, and you come up with a concept that even you look back on and think "Oof, I was really in one of those moods, when I was thinking that", then turning that into a villainous character concept is fantastic. We all have dark thoughts, and using them to build a character is good. But... you really shouldn't write a story about that. Whilst I wrote it I was thinking:
  "Yeah, cop this... I'm fuckin' saying it how it is. I'm breaking down barriers, man. I'm writing the story they're not ready for..."
I didn't actually think with that kind of vocabulary, but that is 100% the tone of this story - and looking back on it now, it's fucking embarrassing. I still think I would like to write a story about the deconstruction of security theatre... but, I'd like to write it as a horror story. I'd write it from the victim's perspective, and have a villain who thinks of himself as a chessmaster, a mastermind, when really all he's doing is breaking societal moors.
  "What, you thought because you locked the door, you could keep me away from you? Foolish child, I'm much craftier than that."
And more importantly, I'd frame the story properly. A casual reading of this story disgusts me, not because it's poorly written (although it is), and it's not because it's so edgy, it lives on the underside of a cliff made of razor-blades (even though it is that as well), but it's because in my sad attempt to make a character that was exposing how civilization lies to its civilians, I was effectively blaming the victim. I was blaming citizenry for living in a society that has these systems which lie to us, rather than the system for lying to us in the first place.

So, in conclusion, I wrote a story that failed on EVERY CONCEIVABLE LEVEL. I tried to write a dark and edgy story that turned out to be cliched and whose violence only served as an attempt at shock value, rather than story development; I failed to effectively communicate my story's themes and messages because I was too busy developing a character that didn't deserve their place as a villain-protagonist & worst of all, I tried to write a story about a genuine issue, but I failed to fully understand the core of the issue whilst blaming those who it affects most greatly.
This story sucks... but, I still have it on my computer, I have the file saved to read occasionally. Not because I like the trite dialogue, or the gratuitous angst, but because I think it's important to remind myself just how important it is to think through an idea, not only how it's written, but also how it's read, and how it will be understood by a reader.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and I hope now you can see why this didn't even deserve a spot on my Abandoned Projects list (and if you do attempt to use this to write something, please don't blame me for whatever you write. I do not approve of this message).
Until next time... I hope I actually have the time to write my next post before work obligations and deadlines sneak up behind me and force me to expose more of my embarrassing failures to the internet.

My Abandoned Writing Projects (Pt. 2)

In yesterday's post, I listed the first five of ten of my most interesting abandoned writing projects. It's a lot of fun, you should check out that post here.

But, without further ado, allow me to continue with the Top 5:

THE A.W.N.'S TOP 10 STORIES I CAN'T WRITE (5-1)

05. THE GUY IN THE TREES
This one is kind of embarrassing. Not to talk about, no, but because this one is something I nearly completed. And first thing's first, it was a story, but it wasn't a novel or a short story... this was a YouTube series. See, I am a huge fan of Night Mind, a youtuber who presents dark ARG; unfiction & horror series from the internet, for people to learn about and discover for themselves. I had seen a lot of these really creative video series, and since I'd done a course of Film & TV in university, and helped write a successful student short film, I thought it would be a fun challenge to do something like this for myself. At the time, I didn't have a job, and I was at home, alone, for a few weeks, so I came up with a plot for a horror series. The concept was pretty simple... it starts off as my character, played by me, discovering that there's a homeless guy living in his neighbourhood, whom he just calls "The Guy in the Trees", since he seems to spend most of his time in this little collection of trees (that actually was in my neighbourhood, at the time). He decides to confront him, so he goes to his tent late at night, and the guy is missing, but instead he discovers a creepy notebook. The homeless guy returns, and he has to run off, and jump in his car to escape. He gets home, and reads the notebook, it's full of mad ramblings. But, what intrigues my character is how it talks about "a creature that controls me", some kind of monster which he appears to fear as well as worship, which killed his whole family - and there are several pages torn out of the book, which the guy finds. The character then recieves a threatening message, from the Guy in the Trees demanding his stuff back. So, he encounters him, and they get into a fight which my character manages to get out of, although he's covered in blood, but I didn't show (firstly, because it was just me, there were no other actors; secondly, because it was important to the plot). After this fight, my character reveals that he's lost sleep, and managed to get the missing pages off the guy, which reveals both some important names of his family, and the ritual to call upon the monster. After attempting the ritual; my character disappears, reappearing hours later, and tells a weird story about slipping into another dimension. Then there's a knock at his door, he answers it, and the story ends shortly after. So, what was this about? Well, I really only had ONE idea... basically, yes, there was this evil monster, but the reality was, that all happened after the guy became homeless, he was just an unfortunate drunk... after the fight in the woods, my character had killed the Guy in the Trees, hidden his body (stolen the pages from his corpse), and that's why he was losing sleep, and investigating this mystery, he was looking for some justification for his murder, proving that the Guy in the Trees killed his family, or that he was trying to summon a demon, but he wasn't. The knock at the door which he answers was the police, coming to arrest my character.
Unwritten because... actually no, that's a lie, this is written, I wrote it; and I filmed it. . But, in the editing process, I realized that this was not that great of a story. So, uhh...
Unpublished because: It had only one gimmick. I had a lot of fun filming this whole thing, and creating the notebook prop, but it all relied on the whole "he secretly killed the Guy in the Trees" thing, which I thought was clever... but it's not clever enough to rely on for a whole story. Also, I don't have any skills with special effects, so I couldn't really make the monstrous demon thing that I wanted to, it just looked like a crappy power-point animation... which it basically was. And, without the monster thing, it lacks that necessary misdirection, of the guy trying to find a monster, when in reality he was the monster - the murderer - the whole time. A year after filming this, I came to admit to myself that the only reason I created this wasn't because I had a cool story that I wanted to tell, it was because I could, and I wanted to be able to say I'd created a cool youtube series. But, after looking back, my major inspiration was "I want to create a YouTube thing", and that's not a good reason to create. That's why I say this one is kind of embarrassing, because it's only as I approached the finish line that I realized, I didn't have a good reason to run the race. Whilst I still admit that I enjoyed the hell out of acting, filming and creating this short series, and I do recommend that kids try creating short films, it's a lot of fun... but, don't do it for clout, and don't do it because you want to post something to YouTube. Do it because it's a lot of fun to bring a story to life. I'm not opposed to creating any kind of YouTube series... in fact, I created a pair of videos for my Halloween Countdown a while ago. But, that was because I created something that needed to be on video to show it off in its full glory, not created for the sake of creating it, and that makes those videos something I'm still proud of, to this day.

04. COLD VIRTUE
Remember how I said I love a good murder mystery? Well, Crooked O'Hare wasn't the only time I tried and failed to write one. The difference is, rather than a series, this one was planned as a novel. I still think it's a pretty good idea... see, I wanted to set this in a dystopia. I was inspired by the prevalence of YA dystopia novels at the time - see Hunger Games; Divergent; The Maze Runner - and I thought it would be a great place to set a murder mystery story since, well, all the crime - and who doesn't like a couple of pseudo-futuristic technologies thrown into the mix? So, the concept was simple, a kid is being trained for the youth police (yes, very much Hitler Youth, I said this was Dystopian, right?), but just before he graduates, even though he is basically top of his class (or near, I didn't want to be too cliche), his father is declared a traitor to the state, and executed. His father was a mid-to-low-tier member of the political party, and so he'd been given many benefits of the 1% - free housing, cheap food, low taxes, household servants.
This means that after his death, not only is their family name horrendously besmirched, but they lose their home, their income and their food security in one fell swoop. The main kid and his mother are forced to live in government housing (i.e. slums), so they're crammed in a tiny apartment with a dozen other people, and since this kid lived his whole life of privilege, he walks, breaths, talks and smells like money, so as soon as he walks through the streets, he is targeted and attacked, he defends himself, but he gets a hard and nasty lesson about "justice" in the slums - Criminal gangs, drugs and murder are rife in these densely packed, low-income facilities. So, to earn some money and hopefully clean up his neighbourhood, the kid sets up an "office" in the burned ruins of a state-banned church - no roof, and little-to-no security, but it has privacy - and so he starts working as a private investigator. The idea was that he would solve a few small time crimes, but the story would focus on a series of 5 or 6 murders; starting with victims of crime, moving up to slum-lords, state police and eventually to a politician visiting their slums. He'd make a few enemies when he refuses to ally himself with any of the street gangs, until he manages to find himself a space as someone who turns a blind eye to non-violent gang activity, and eventually he makes enough money to afford a smaller (like, the size of half a room), but nonetheless private home for his mother and himself (I didn't decide what, but his mother would find work, probably as a servant in a richer household).
The whole idea was showing, from the ground up, how the system was forcing the lower classes into desperation, and the upper classes into classist paranoia. And of course, the novel would end with the kid uncovering the mystery of whether his father was truly a traitor, and who betrayed him to have him executed. It was a cool idea, one I still think would make a fantastic story, of dystopian murder mystery.
Unwritten because: Dystopia relies upon worldbuilding, and this requires a lot of worldbuilding and politics that I am not the best at parsing. Out of fear I'm starting to sound lazy, I want to clarify, I'm not against doing research. The problem is that I really need to have some foundation upon which I can build - Stephen King, as a writing teacher, is famous for his oft-quoted lesson: "write what you know", and people unfortunately misunderstand this advice horrendously. They think it means "only write something if you've experienced it" which would make for a lot of boring fiction, every writer would write about what it's like to be a writer... no, what "write what you know" means is, write stuff you can understand. I am not a murderer, but I can understand murder, I can understand the emotions and motives and opportunities and biology of murder, I can understand what it is that leads to a murder victim, in a murder mystery. But, I don't understand politics and socio-economic strife (at least, not very well); and I don't understand how to represent the lifestyle of people living in slums and gangs and political strife. Basically, I don't know enough about this setting to really bring it to life, even though I think it's a clever cross-genre concept. And hell, if I threw in a love triangle subplot, I'd have hit every one of the necessary tropes for dystopian YA of the era... I think I've kind of missed the mark on that particular "pop culture" moment, but I insist that murder mystery is awesome, and I'd love to see someone turn this into a real story. I'm just not the one willing to do it...

03. TRANSYLVANIA
The idea here was pretty simple, it was the idea of doing a Frankentein rewrite with a transgender theme. The story I had was that in this version, Frankenstein had an Igor that helped him from the beginning to develop the methods of creating life, as he was inspired by Frankenstein in college to work with him. But, as they discovered the keystone to the research, the alchemical/electrical (or whatever, as the plot needed) element to finish, Victor and Igor celebrated, and Igor finally admitted the truth... (HEAVY TRIGGER WARNINGS for discussion of Gender Dysphoria & Suicidal Ideation - it's a huge part of this story, so you may need to skip to the next list entry if that's too much for you, but it's a huge part of why I couldn't write this story, so it's important)
Igor is a pre-transition transgender, and she loves Victor. She was inspired to work with him because, as a male, she is incapable of carrying children, and the idea of creating life inspired her. She admits all this believing that, as they've gotten so close (and with his love of science, she hoped he'd understand her). However, Frankenstein rejects her out of... well, basically "Trans Panic", and attacks her.
Then, Igor dies... I'd originally planned, as suicide because she basically gets her gender thrown in her face, but I thought maybe it could be murder or manslaughter.
But, when Victor calms down (or, when he discovers Igor's body), he realizes how wrong he was, so he decides to resurrect IGOR with the science they uncovered together. And, as per her wishes, he actually uses the corpses of women to surgically transition Igor.
I hadn't decided the name, and this was all in the planning phase, but for the rest of this, I'll refer to Igor as "Irina". The idea here is that Victor and Irina would work together, and at first Victor is simply sympathetic to Irina's plight, and wanted to save his old friend, but in time Victor would fall in love with Irina, but there would be complications as the townspeople learn of this resurrected person turned into a woman, and would rally against the doctor.
I hadn't decided the ending, but it would be very much fire and pitchforks.
Unwritten because: Do I even need to explain it? The key feature of this whole idea is Unfortunate Implications. Part of the inspiration behind this is that I love science and medicine and knowledge, and the idea of showing how science can turn a person assigned male at birth into a gorgeous, feminine woman is the epitome of that; and the inspiration for this was seeing how many - even modern - movies tend to write sci-fi horror as "man should not wrestle in god's domain", as though toying with nature is inherently evil, but I think that's nonsense. The real monster is ignorance, and this kind of story would thrive on that... However, it also thrives on:
  1. Representing Motherhood as the pinnacle of Womanhood
  2. Turning a transwoman into a creature literally called Frankenstein's Monster.
  3. Trans Panic as a Plot Device (for a main character no less...)
  4. Suicide/Murder as plot device. (Yikes... I never decided which but pick your poison, both suck.)
And whilst I personally like the juxtaposition that Irina would be seen as a monster, but the real monsters are the townspeople who fear her; the problem therein is that it requires a delicate equipoise of understanding the inherent reading and counter-reading of the "monster" metaphor, which idiots like JK Rowling have already shown to be completely incapable of.
Also, do I have to mention that I'm cisgender? This is me looking from the outside at the trans experience, and trying to write a story to represent that from experiences that are entirely academic. I don't think I can, or should, attempt to write a piece of literature designed to define the transgender experience. I've considered writing this by working heavily with a sensitivity reader... but I realized, I'd have to rely on them so heavily that clearly I'm the wrong person to write this story, if indeed it can be written at all without going against everything I believe in. I don't know how to resolve all of these unfortunate implications, even though I think this is a cool story idea, so I'd rather just admit defeat, and step away from the concept altogether. I do plan on writing stories about transgender persons, but I want to do so in a way that doesn't have so many unfortunate implications.

02. THAUMATURGUS
Y'know, this one is a little hard to explain, and that's because it's an absolute mess of a concept. It's easy to understand in principle... when I was younger, I realized that I had a LOT of story ideas, and I mean a whole lot, so I decided "Hey! What if I took ALL of these ideas, and put them together?" so, I did. But, this was before I realized that you could, and should, cannibalize, frankenstein and remould ideas to make them fit, so I basically took whole story ideas, and slotted them into this story wholesale. The basic concept was that the story would follow this young boy and his sister, who live with their grandfather, and the boy discovers  a magical world, and has to fight a big, bad evil wizard... very generic "2000s YA Urban Fantasy" schtick. But, I threw in all these other concepts wholesale. So, the grandfather owns a dozen weird cats with weird names, because I had this "kennel for familiars who lost their witches" idea; the kid meets a teen boy who has a living car with a personality, because I liked this "living, magical car" idea; I threw in a wise, old cat called Tembley, from my "Cursed Cat of Cecil Street" idea (which I also used for a "hyperlinked story" project at school, that's why that story's so short, had to fit a wordcount); they also encounter a dozen strange freaks on the street, because I threw in my 'Nocturnals Gang' idea; the kid works in a burger joint that gets attacked by a shadow monster, because of my 'We Never Close' story idea; one of the characters would be a late night jazz musician, because of my "Smokey Jones" idea, and I think I even threw in a DJ at a magical radio station, because of my "Wizard Radio" idea; and two of the characters were identical twins, and vampires, because of a "Sinister Sister" idea I got from my cousin... hell, even the title comes from an unused story title I really liked, so this world was heavily populated with all of these fascinating characters and stories, I figured it would be like a crazy, fantasy amusement park ride of adventure!
Unwritten because: I realized that this would basically be like an amusement park ride. Specifically, a dark ride. Sit in the car, keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle as we drive slowly past hollow, plastic, lifeless scenarios, where cheap representations come out and play out some distilled version of their full character before sliding back into the dark so we can drive past another fake scene. I thought I'd come up with a clever way to use all my unused story ideas, but I wasn't using them, I was abusing them. I had to just ignore major parts of these ideas to fit the main story... I still like a lot of these ideas, and I think I can reuse them (and like I said above, some of the ones I really like, I'm not sharing, since I either can, or already did, alter it to work in another story), but throwing them all into a story like this simply turned the story into a junk drawer. And if I strip all of that away, all I'm left with is a generic urban fantasy premise - child discovers magic; child learns of magic threat; child defeats threat... blah blah blah. I'm not against urban fantasy by any stretch of the imagination, but without the junk drawer full of unused ideas, there really isn't anything left.
So, I'm not going to write this story. If someone else wants to try, they can... heck, you can even throw in your own unused story ideas. Or, hell, you can take some of these individual ideas and turn them into something... heck, even though I already wrote "The Cursed Cat of Cecil Street", you could try that too. Write a better one - I made that for a school project in like 2007, surely you can do better than teenaged me.
But no matter what, learn from my mistakes. Ideas are incredibly adaptable. Take, for example, the idea of a living car... that's a cool concept, but why? You might have a lot of reasons why you think it's cool, but I like it for three reasons. Firstly, I like the idea of exploring an inhuman mind (how would a car think?); secondly, I have always enjoyed the A Boy And His Weird Pet trope, since it's about friendship and forming a unique bond; lastly, I really like the idea of having a Cool Ride. Knowing this, I can adapt this idea to fit in literally any story. If I wanted a (somewhat) realistic romance story, I could have an unusually smart horse; if I write a sci-fi, the obvious rendition would be a space-ship with a quirky A.I.; if I wanted it in a horror, well, that's basically just the plot of Christine...
That's why I find that idea cool, but if you have an idea, but you're struggling to find a way to make it fit your story, break it down into it's fundamentals - why do you like the idea in the first place? And, can you adjust those things so that you can include the parts you like, and leave out the parts that don't fit your story? I know I spent half of this entry talking about writing advice, but that's really what this idea is... the idea is "find a way to put your unused story ideas to use, in a single story". If you want to give a try for yourself, well, I hope you do a much better job than I did.

01. THE UNSPOKEN KING
This is the biggest one... because all through high school, this was my magnum opus. For literally eight years, this was the only story I ever thought about, it was going to be a middle-to-high fantasy series, and the premise was simple. It was about a knight in the middle-ages, called Sir Graham, who died in a battle against a dark, evil monster, but came back as a mindless zombie, because of the evil lord's magics. As he had once saved the king from an assassination attempt, the king had a soft spot for Graham, and so had the poor man buried in a stone sarcophagus, in a far, secluded corner of the cemetery. over 100 years later, for reasons unknown, Graham's mind returns, his mind is alive, in a dead body. So, Graham pries himself from his grave, and decides to seek out who or what resurrected him... kind of like an anti-murder mystery, if you will. But, since he's a corpse, he's reviled and rejected by society, meaning the only people he can turn to for help are similarly abandoned outcasts of society: a half-demon cursed man, a mad wizard, a pirate ghost... all kinds of fun monsters, some who are friend, others who are foe, he doesn't know who to trust. And the first story was all about how the same evil monster that killed him hard returned (yes, very "dark lord returns"... it's a trope for a reason, people), so he's the first suspect in Graham's undead anti-murder mystery, so he decides to confront him first...
Unwritten because: Well, two reasons really. Firstly, I am not a historian. I decided to set this in the actual middle ages, as in the year 1472, meaning I had to do research on all kinds of medieval things from that specific year... and it kind of slowed down most of my research. But that's not a huge issue, this is clearly pseudo-fantasy, I could get away with a lot of this by leaning on magic... but then I hit a terrible snag, and this is only the second time this happened to me.
I had philosophical issues with this story.
See, I started working on this in high school, before I'd fully come to terms with my own beliefs regarding atheism, absurdism and dualism, which means at the time, I still believed in ghosts... albeit in the form of souls, or spirits, whatever you want to call it. Now, as an adult, I don't believe in souls or the afterlife. Part of what initially appealed to me about this story was exploring the ugly side of life, death, and since Graham was asking "why am I not dead?" there was some philosophical discussion of  death, and what death even means, why does anyone die. I mean, one of the main characters was going to be a ghost. And, without going into horrendous spoilers, my plan was effectively that Graham was going to be a "ghost" trapped in a "zombie" which the "Anti-Murderer" (no spoilers) had basically fused with magic back into a single body, for some reason relating to later stories.
But, since I now don't believe in souls, I'm kind of... well, philosophically opposed to the main conceit of this story. I could potentially rewrite it to refit my philosophies, but I would have to change the story so drastically that, it wouldn't be "The Unspoken King" anymore. I'd have to lose my ghost pirate (what a shame, he was cool), I'd have to change the villain and his whole deal (he was basically a poltergeist, so that's a whole thing...), I'd have to change the philosophical and thematic underpinnings of the story, and I'd have to change how the main character... works.
So, I've basically abandoned this story, thrown the pieces onto the recycling pile. I still do like some of these ideas, which is why I'm actually sharing the subtitle, not the series title. It's not a huge secret, I mentioned it before on this blog even, but like I said, if it's in this list, it's up for the taking, and I still like that title enough that I'm not willing to just give it out to anyone. But, this story - like its main character - as it is, is dead, and even I can't resurrect it after the damage my philosophical maturation has done to it.

- - -

So, those are my abandoned writing projects. It's kind of bittersweet looking back at this list, because when creating this, I had to look at a lot of projects that I haven't worked on in a while, and for some of them, I could say "no, I still want to write this, I want to keep it. This is a good story.", but for some, I really had to bite the bullet and admit, yes, this is a failed project, I can't write it anymore.
Especially those top two. Both are projects I spent literally years working on, but I couldn't manage to pull it all together, until I finally realized that it was beyond saving... for me, at least.

But, I hope you found this interesting, and I especially hope that this list can help inspire a writer out there to make something of these unwritten projects, to create something upon the stained workshop table where I was broken. If any of these ideas inspire you, or you'd like to know more about them, feel free to ask me in the comments below. Just because I failed, doesn't mean you can't succeed.

Speaking of which, I want to finish this by saying that, whilst these failed projects are works that I have abandoned, I do have some stories that haven't failed, and this whole experience of listing my abandoned projects has inspired me to let go of the failures, and turn towards my successes.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and until next time, I'm going to work on some projects I haven't abandoned.