Latent Maturity

***LATENT MATURITY***

So…whenever a public figure fucks up beyond belief, it can usually be linked to how old they were at the time it happened. This is especially true when the perpetrator is a teenager and in some cases in their early twenties (not all cases, but some). The younger you are, the more forgivable you are in the eyes of the public. But what about fucking up badly in your later years? Suppose you do something horrible in your late twenties and apologize for it in your thirties or forties? Only then do you not have an easy way out of your predicament.

Whenever a teenager writes horrible fan fiction that accidentally glorifies monstrous behavior, they can be easily forgiven. But if that author was older and allegedly wiser, then the criticisms become harsher. An example of this is Anna Todd, the author of the One Direction romantic fan fiction After. The book got a lot of heat for lionizing abusive relationships, cheating, and overall deplorable behavior. Anna Todd wrote that book’s first draft when she was in her early twenties. Because she should have “known better” at that age, many of the attacks on After were lobbied against her as a person. Is this fair? Does she legitimately not know how the human experience works or is this some part of an evil conspiracy?

As many of you are painfully aware, I have my own experience with writing awful and tone deaf first drafts. Beautiful Monster, anyone? I didn’t figure this out on my own, but the first draft version of Tarja was manipulative as hell and incredibly nosy when it came to being therapeutic to Windham. Yes, you heard that right. Somebody else had to point this out to me. As a bonus to this juicy backstory, I just celebrated my thirty-third birthday when I completed this first draft. As someone with that much life experience, I should have known better than to make Tarja Rikkinen a super-creep. But that’s the thing: I DON’T have a wealth of life experience. I DON’T have a treasure trove of wisdom. In today’s world I’m thirty-four years old and I’m still taking too long to mature.

But when it comes to first drafts, authors should be given as much permission as possible to fuck up badly. First drafts are NEVER perfect when they’re barfed onto the page. Even well-established authors will tell you this. If you see a first draft of a novel and you want to point out mistakes, be forgiving and nonjudgmental. Every author deserves the benefit of the doubt. But the thing with Anna Todd’s book is, from what Book Tubers have said about it, it reads like it never made it past the first draft stage. It has so many typos, so many plot holes, and so many shitty characters. No sane editor would have allowed any of those mistakes to stand. And yet, here we are in 2020 and After not only is a published novel, but a fucking movie. By the way, I’m using the F-bomb as an adjective, but the movie could very well be about the act of fucking.

Here’s my stance on latent maturity. Fucking up badly is not exclusive to any age, whether you’re a teenager, an adult, or shit, let’s extend that to the elder years. My only concern is, did the offender grow as a result of this mistake? Did they change their ways? Did they learn the lessons they were supposed to learn? If the answer to these questions is yes, then that person should be forgiven, provided the crimes committed weren’t overly serious. Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein don’t deserve forgiveness. I rest my case.

So if I really do lack the necessary life experience to make rational decisions about my first draft, then why am I a writer? Isn’t wisdom a requirement for being successful in that industry? It is indeed. In fact, I have just enough wisdom to know that I need help crossing the street from time to time. I certainly don’t want to be offensive when I write first drafts, but it does happen and I need people to point this out to me without holding a blade to my throat.

I used to hate criticism so much that I’d reject all of it no matter how reasonable it was. Now that I’ve gained just a little bit of wisdom, I know that criticism is vital to my success as an author. I can’t have a career without it. Does it hurt sometimes? Absolutely. But does the criticism come from a place of love? Hell yeah it does. That’s something we as creative people owe each other: a place of love, forgiveness, and growth. If we’re being judged all the time for our worst mistakes, we’ll never get anything done. That’s not productive in the least.

Beautiful Monster is hardly the most offensive first draft novel I’ve written. In 2018, I wrote two others named Silent Warrior and Incelbordination, both of which are about school life. Because they are first drafts by their very nature and I don’t trust my wisdom one single bit, there are things going on in both of those novels that I don’t know could be offensive as fuck. Is Scott George from Silent Warrior a creep because of who he’s dating? Am I sending the wrong message by having his girlfriend heal him? Did I also create a bratty protagonist that nobody wants to cheer for?

What about Incelbordination? Is Oswald Crow a whiny bitch? Do I overplay the fact that he has dwarfism? Does he have any real dimension to him other than smoking pot, being short, and listening to heavy metal? Is having him pine for romantic love a sexist trope? It’ll be a while before I’m ready to have those two first drafts critiqued. I’ve got my hands full with Beautiful Monster and Emilio & Marigold. And goddamn, do those stories have some SERIOUS fucking problems!

To cap off what is already a very rambling blog entry, I just want to tell each and every one of my dearly beloveds out there to be kind to each other and don’t judge each other too harshly. Does Anna Todd deserve forgiveness? What about E.L. James? Or Stephanie Meyer? Is being naïve really an excuse or is the damage done too overwhelming? These are all reasonable debates that you can have among your friends and audience members. But when you have these debates…please be kind and if necessary, rewind. I’m Garrison Kelly! Until next time, try to enjoy the daylight!

***BEAUTIFUL MONSTER PROGRESS***

I’m certainly taking my sweet time with editing the shit out of my novel. It could be the creative burnout. It could be general tiredness. Or it could be that my slowness has been right all along and that I should take more time to think about how I’m going to fix these longstanding problems. As of this blog entry, I’m getting ready to edit chapter five, where the readers are first introduced to Tarja Rikkinen, the token female mercenary at Shadow Asylum. Or as Commander Rinehart calls her, the “diversity hire”. We know right away that she’s an excellent fighter, but being insanely violent doesn’t necessarily make for a likeable character. She needs something extra. But what will that extra nuance be? Her love for animals? Her penchant for cracking jokes at inappropriate times? Or maybe…Shelly Atwood will invade her thoughts and implore Tarja to…spill her secret! What secret is that? Well, if I told you all, it wouldn’t be a fucking secret! Stay tuned. Or as Lindsey Doe says on You Tube, stay curious!

***QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“Love is one of the most intense feelings felt by man; another is hate. Forcing yourself to feel indiscriminate love is very unnatural. If you try to love everyone you only lessen your feelings for those who deserve your love. Repressed hatred can lead to many physical and emotional ailments. By learning to release your hatred towards those who deserve it, you cleanse yourself of these malignant emotions and need not take your pent-up hatred out on your loved ones.”

-Anton LaVey-

Stupid Rabbit

***STUPID RABBIT***

It’s no secret that Looney Tunes had a huge influence on me as a kid and still does as an adult. Many of my Poison Tongue Tales entries have been compared to Looney Tunes cartoons and I take that as a compliment. My mom is also a Looney Tunes fan, so much so that I got her a DVD collection of the cartoons as a Mother’s Day present one year. I guess you could say that it’s a family tradition to be a fan of this genre. That’s why when I saw a You Tube video of Yosemite Sam’s piano bomb prank on Bugs Bunny, I had to make it a part of my motivational self-talk.

What happens in this cartoon is Yosemite Sam rigs a grand piano with dynamite that’s set to go off when a certain key is struck. He then challenges Bugs Bunny to play a song on that piano where one of the notes is the detonation key. Bugs cracks his knuckles and plays the song without striking the key. Furious, Yosemite Sam yells, “No, that’s not it! Try again!” Bugs tries again and still fails to hit the trigger key. Sam then screams, “Oh, you stupid rabbit! Like this!” Although Sam played it the correct way, he triggered his own trap and blew his facial hair off. This piano bomb gag was common in Warner Brothers cartoons, but Yosemite Sam’s version is the one that sticks out to me the most.

Now whenever I make a grave mistake in either my writing or my drawings, I mentally yell to myself in Yosemite Sam’s voice, “No, you stupid rabbit! Try again!” It sounds negative on the surface, but it’s Yosemite Sam’s voice, so it’s actually a giggly form of motivation. And it’s true: in the world of creative work where introversion is the key to getting shit done, you get an endless supply of chances to make things right. You’ve written a first draft novel? Try again! You’ve miscalculated the limbs on a drawing? Try again, you stupid rabbit! Although, you won’t ever have to worry about your keyboard or colored pencils being hooked up to a bomb.

In a world where everybody is telling artists to give up and get STEM jobs, you need as much positive motivation as you can possibly get. Even though Yosemite Sam is yelling “Stupid rabbit”, I get a chuckle out of it instead of getting down in the dumps. Being able to laugh at yourself is the most powerful thing you can do as an artist. If you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

Although having a massive ego is completely natural (we all have one whether we admit it or not), being able to tame that ravenous beast is one hundred percent necessary. That doesn’t mean you can’t believe in your own ability to improve. It just means that not all critical advice is bad. I paid Marie Krepps to critique Beautiful Monster and she delivered the goods and more. Now I’m contemplating rewriting the whole story from scratch to accommodate the radical changes she suggested. And while I’m doing it, I’ll be hearing Yosemite Sam’s voice echo in my brain.

“No, you stupid rabbit! Try again!”

You have no fucking idea how good that feels. I love the Looney Tunes, damn it! I’m Garrison Kelly! Even when you feel like dying, keep climbing the mountain!

***PROVERB OF THE DAY***

“There are two motives for reading a book. One, that you can enjoy it. The other, that you can boast about it.”

-Bertrand Russell-

Perfectionism vs. Word Vomit

***PERFECTIONISM VS. WORD VOMIT***

If you’re a budding author, you’ve probably heard this piece of advice before: “Write every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s carefully chiseled out or the worst thing written in the history of the world. Let the editors take care of your mistakes.” A lot of professional authors say this and for a lot of rookies this advice works. This is just my preference, but this particular piece of advice doesn’t work for me.

If I write something, I want it to be golden from the start. While it’s true that no first draft is perfect the first time around, I at least want to try to make it into the best thing I can. This is why I don’t write everyday: because there are some days where my brain is so foggy that I can’t produce that perfect piece of writing. To my way of thinking, if I can’t be good at what I do, then what’s the point? Do my editors really want to go through the nightmare of cleaning up my messes?

If you’ve ever seen my drawings before, you would ask why I don’t take the perfectionism route with them given their weird quality. Yes, it’s true that my drawings don’t always look like golden goose eggs. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try. That’s the important thing for me: while I’ll never be 100% perfect, I at least have to try my hardest. Editing will be much easier if I actually make an effort to produce a good piece of art.

But like I said earlier, this approach to art doesn’t work for everybody, but it works for me. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I used to have a huge ego back in my college days. It’s true: even the smallest criticisms would make me retreat into my safe place, and this was in my late teens and early twenties. When my creative nonfiction teacher asked the class, “How many people here don’t think their own writing sucks?” I was the only person who raised my hand. Of course, my big ego didn’t match up with my writing skills at the time, because I wasn’t a diehard reader yet. Instead of having high self-esteem, I was arrogant, both of which are two separate things.

As I got older, I realized that being overly arrogant was a terrible approach to writing, because I desperately needed to let my critics into my inner circle in order to get better. That’s when I reached out to Second Draft Critique Services (a subdivision of Writer’s Digest) for help. Of course, their services were quite expensive, so I could only submit short stories. I was nervous at first, but when I actually read their critiques, I was confident that I could make chicken salad out of chicken shit. That’s the difference between arrogance and self-esteem: arrogance means you’re the king of the world and self-esteem means you believe you can grow from anything.

But if it’s true that I don’t have a massively inflated ego anymore, why do I still feel the need to be a perfectionist? I guess the easy answer would be that old habits die hard. Then again, if I didn’t believe in myself at least a little, I wouldn’t be writing in today’s world. I’ve had my fair share of evil criticisms and it would have been easy to give into those people. But being stubborn and full of fire got me through those hard times. Only years later did I realize that positivity and kindness were the answers, not hatred and anger.

So it stands to reason that if I write word vomit as opposed to the perfect product, I would have sufficient self-esteem to believe that I can fix it and make it shine. I’ll grant you that, but consider this: if I write the perfect product, I won’t have nearly as much work to do when the time comes to edit. Editing can either mean a few grammar corrections or a complete overhaul of the story. To make the process less intimidating either way, I take the perfectionist approach to my writing.

I know full well that first drafts will always have mistakes. The current first draft versions of “Watch You Burn” and “Filter Feeder” read like acid trips. While being on drugs may or may not be a heavenly experience (I wouldn’t know), that’s not the feeling I want to give my readers. It may work for Pink Floyd’s music, but not me. I’m not Roger Waters or David Gilmour no matter how hard I try to be.

There’s another thing that I try to practice: not using other artists’ transgressions as excuses to do them myself. I watched Pulp Fiction as a teenager, so my very first movie script “Pumping Filter” had a bunch of swearing, violence, and racial slurs, all of which didn’t need to be there. Because it could never have been perfect, I abandoned the script altogether. Another example would be me listening to Immortal Technique’s music and thinking it’s okay to use homophobic slurs in my poetry. If you want to use creative fuel, make sure you analyze it first and run it through your mental filters. Because I couldn’t do that just yet, many of my hateful poems are no longer in my archives. Thank god.

So now the question of the day is, are you a perfectionist yourself or do you allow your writing to truly be a first draft? I’d love to hear other opinions on this subject whether you agree with me or not. We’ve got ears, say cheers!

***WEEKLY SHORT STORY CONTESTS AND COMPANY***

When my brain finally agrees to cooperate with me, I’ll write something for the “snow man” prompt called “The Theomancer”. It goes like this:

CHARACTERS:

1. Krimson, Red Ninja
2. Yeti, Mummy Giant
3. Seven, Prophet of Sevenism

PROMPT CONFORMITY: There are snowmen all over The Frigid Highlands, each of them with creepy decorations.

SYNOPSIS: The true identity of Krimson is unknown, but he is believed to be an emissary of the Raven Strike Society. They are a secret organization of atheists dedicated to disproving the beliefs of Sevenism, the religion of choice for oppressive authority figures in this dystopian fantasy world. Krimson ventures to the Frigid Highlands to assassinate Yeti, the gatekeeper to Seven’s paradise. The battle between these two warriors is fierce and intense, but Krimson is determined to get answers and revenge from Lord Seven himself. The red ninja is believed to be a deity in human form, which is why he’s having moderate success against Yeti in the first place.

FUN FACT: This story draws inspiration from the Mortal Kombat and WCW franchises from the 1990’s. Krimson is a red palette swap of MK ninjas Sub-Zero and Scorpion while Yeti is the direct theft of a WCW wrestler of the same name. Seven is also taken from a former WCW wrestler, this time one of the alter egos of Dustin Rhodes. All I needed was an excuse to use the title “Theomancer” and now I have a reasonable story idea.

***TWITTER WAR OF THE DAY***

TWITTER TROLL: You’re a professional wrestler. Lift some weights or do sit-ups. Good God!

BARON CORBIN: It’s your girl’s fault. She keeps bringing cookies over late at night.