My Trump Satire is Now Available on Kindle!!!

When I wrote my Trump satire for an anthology looking for Trump satire, I knew I was writing something so specific that is the editors didn't want it, it was unlikely that I would find another group that did. So, I vowed to self-publish the story in that case and here it is for the bargain basement price of 99 cents!

This is the first Kindle publication I've done in about six years. Feel free to leave a review if you do decide to purchase it. As always, all reviews are welcome, whether positive, negative or indifferent. Not that I have the power to remove them anyway!

Click here for the feel-good experience of a lifetime! It's the best feel-good experience. You've never seen a better one, I can tell you. Everybody loves it. It's tremendous!

It's Not Always About Getting Published

I recently queried an editor who is compiling an anthology of alternative theology stories. Without getting too deeply into what that means, suffice to say I had a feeling my previously published story about the White Republican Jesus confronting the actual historical Jesus while mindless Americans cheered him on might be what they were looking for. Unfortunately, I sent the query after the submission acceptance period had closed. Here is the thread, starting with my letter (His are in quotes):

I was wondering if you are accepting reprints for this anthology? I have one in which Evangelical Jesus and Actual Jesus have a war words in the street. it was originally published in a for-charity anthology I edited.

-Christopher Nadeau

"We have closed it, but I have a practice of reading late submissions and if they knock my socks off I say screw it if schedule allows and include them.  I have the joy of writing the checks and so I get to make those decisions.  Send it and I’ll read it."

Thanks! Whether you say yes or no to this one, you just made the list of my top five favorite editors with that reply!

Story attached.

"I like this very much.  I’ll know in the next thirty days if I’ve got any room, I have two other stories in the same space.  If room opens up, depending on what drops out, I’ll let you know. 

That isn’t an acceptance or rejection, but it is definitely worthy of the anthology, if room presents itself."

I told him I understood and thanked him; sometimes just knowing that someone would print your story if they were able can be satisfying in its own right.

The Secret to Writing Donald Trump as a Short Story Subject.

It's really simple to write about Donald Trump in a fictional context because, ultimately, he is a living work of fiction. Nothing about him is genuine except his unerring propensity for absolute, unadulterated self-promoting horseshit. So really, he is the very essence of a caricature of a real person. The problem lies in knowing how to handle this knowledge. He's such an easy target that one could be accused of taking unfair advantage or going for the cheap shot with practically every sentence. He isn't a protagonist I would normally attempt in my writing except I happened to read about an anthology looking for parotic tales starring his royal orange majesty.

How did I figure out what to do? I decided to let the man speak for himself. Only a first person narrative could come close to capturing his word salad, nonsense diatribes. I also decided it was better to avoid turning Trump into a parody since he already is one. To try and take a ridiculous character like him and make him more ridiculous would be...well, you know.

So, it works better to let Trump be Trump and make the situation ludicrous or impossible. Directly quoting him is a good method as well, but it's also fun to write new dialogue that sounds enough like him to fool people into wondering whether or not he actually said it. I first cut my teeth on that one by using the Fake Trump Tweet app. Only the ones that insulted me as a writer were obvious to people.

The story is clipping right along and will probably be finished soon. Then the beta reader(s) get to read it and tell me how much it sucks so I can do a rewrite or two or twelve. Then I'll send it to the anthology and hope for the best. If it's rejected, I'm going to do something I don't normally do and self-publish it since it's far too specific to send elsewhere. That's why I rarely send to anthologies that want such particular submissions, but this was too much fun to pass up.

Quote of the Week brought to you by anti-Millenial Bashing

"Baby boomers reaped the rewards of an economic system that was geared towards middle class families and as they grew up into power and money, they changed the system to favor the wealthy and themselves."

                    -From a Comment on a Bernie Sanders Post

Quote of the Week.

(Cocaine) Makes you think you're smarter than everyone else. Makes you talk too much. Makes you think you're incredibly attractive even when you're fat and old. Makes you think you're on top of the world even when everything is falling apart.

Does that make you think of anyone?

-Tad Williams

  

A Prime Example of the Writer's Lament

If I wrote a story with a character who was:

a) Anti-gay and
b) Consorted with White Supremacists while
c) Voting in favor of allowing the mentally ill to own guns and
d) Reaping the benefits of free taxpayer-supplied healthcare

who was shot by a crazy man with a legal handgun, saved by an African American lesbian and able to go into the hospital without a worry about insurance coverage because the government is footing the bill, I would be accused of preaching or being a "social justice warrior."

Yet in real life something like this has actually taken place!

Fiction has to make more sense than reality for people to believe it's realistic!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“So at the end of that monologue I had a few choice insults for the president in return. I don’t regret that. He, I believe, can take care of himself. I have jokes; he has the launch codes. So it’s a fair fight.”

                                                                 -Stephen Colbert

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I am not a nice man. You want something heartwarming...buy a puppy."

-Greg Palast, Kickass Investigative Journalist and Thorn in the Side of the Koch Bros.

Issac Marion's Fake Trump Tweet & The Death of Political Satire

Years ago during the opening credits of one of the Halloween specials "The Simpsons" does every year, one of the many gravestones with funny messages on them featured political satire as the dearly departed. As usual, the alien time travelers who write for that show foresaw the future in hilarious and frightening ways.

At the time, political satire was still viable, despite needing occasional trips to the doctor. However, the dominance of social media, something that should have been a force for increased knowledge and understanding of parody and satire, has actually aided in the swiftly encroaching loss of this most vital component of a supposedly free society. Instead, we're now moving towards an era where all attempts at irony become fodder for an increasingly easily offended population. And political affiliation is becoming meaningless, as the so-called "snowflake" mentality is just as prevalent among those on the Right as it is on the Left.

Recently, horror author Issac Marion who wrote the surprisingly engaging zombie romance satire "Warm Bodies" dared to post a humorous dialogue between himself and *urp* President Trump. I have also used the fake Trump Tweet app a few times. To my delight, nobody could tell if they were real or not in most cases. I never created a series of them like Marion because I knew some imbecile would screenshot it and, at some point, somebody would think they were real. It never occurred to me that a new breed of imbecile would find offense in the satire itself, but that's exactly what happened to him.

In a stunning display of contextual ignorance, angry people who thought the exchange was real and jumped to Marion's defense went on the offensive, reading him the riot act for daring to indulge a fiction writing exercise designed to make a point about a subject he finds repugnant. I'd mention the irony of the invective coming from members of the Left Wing, but since irony is a rapidly diminishing resource, I don't want to waste any of it by mentioning something so obvious.

Marion  breaks down his perceived "offenses" in list form, each point more ludicrous and asinine than the last. The most telling is Point #2, wherein he addresses an accusation of spreading the now ubiquitous and soon-to-be-meaningless concept of fake news. In his analysis, Marion writes:

I am a fiction writer. I wrote a fictional dialogue and posted it on my personal Twitter account, without any surrounding context to suggest that this was a real occurrence rather than just another bit of nonsense theater squirting out of my brain. If anyone thought it really mattered, a quick click to my profile—or Trump’s—would have revealed the truth. But no one bothered to do that because IT DIDN'T MATTER.

That's right, it didn't. People are so primed for and even seduced by the very notion of outrage now that fact-checking is regarded as quaint and wasteful. Not to toot my own horn, but my first instinct was to question the veracity of the reposting. It seemed too good to be true. Trump had finally crossed the line from journalism antagonist to displaying a woeful ignorance of the fiction writing process. And he'd chosen a lesser known writer to attack! Within moments, I'd discovered the truth and guess what? I was okay with it!

Granted, I'm a fiction writer as well and, while my renown is significantly lower even than Marion's self-described low number of followers, I am at least acquainted with the creative process. I don't expect everyone else to be, elitist as that may sound to those who aren't, but satire and parody are protected by the First Amendment! That means it's something all thinking Americans and indeed humans should know about.  There is no excuse for being so wrapped up in one's personal cause that harmless and entertaining humor becomes viewed as worthy of ridicule and scorn.

We are now entering a very dangerous era and it all started when the drawings of schoolchildren containing vaguely violent imagery became calls to the police and mandatory psychiatric sessions. Think of all the people of previous generations--people like me--whose writing and drawing could have ruined their lives in such a free thought hostile environment. Now the same preposterous censorship of the darker aspects of our minds are being scrutinized in authors by over-sensitive adults with too much time on their hands. These same people actually feel the need to write "sarcasm" after their barely sarcastic comments and insist that others do the same to avoid potential offense.

Isaac Marion created a satirical piece, mostly for his own amusement. Leave him the hell alone and get over yourselves.

On Genre Ignorance & Politics

Trigger Warning:
The following post contains a bit of name-calling and a judgmental, possibly even self-righteous tone.

There’s a reason most writers of speculative fiction, i.e. science fiction, fantasy, horror and magical realism, shudder when we hear some overpaid media pinhead use a clueless expression such as, “It’s like something out of science fiction.” It’s not because there aren’t situations that might actually call for such a dubious phrase, however. It’s because the majority of the time, it’s being used stupidly to make a point better made by just discussing the issue at hand.

The most recent example of this started with an idiot being allowed to speak for an even bigger idiot. That first idiot is Kellyanne Conway, Counselor to the *urp* President of the United States. I’m pretty sure you’ve already guessed the identity of the bigger idiot. And unless you’ve been on a self-imposed media blackout the scale of which would be truly impressive as well as enviable, you are probably aware of Conway’s insistence on the existence of “alternative facts.”

Her unfortunate and no doubt intentional phrasing has entered the lexicon in a big and probably unintended way.  Instead of being a viable concept, it’s become a running gag on social media the likes of which we haven’t seen since, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” Naturally, not every piece of commentary has been satiricial, and that brings me right back to where this whole thing started: This well-intentioned but ultimately clueless letter comparing science fiction to alternative facts.

 

The letter's author, one Gordon Merseth of Portland, Oregon, seems to be making a case for science fiction and the sub-genre alternate history as being akin to the altered reality the Trump administration seems hell-bent on fostering on the American public. While that attempt might seem to work on the surface, it's a specious comparison rooted in genre ignorance not unlike the writing of a certain English school principal I wrote about last year. In the minds of non-fans and even those who have little appreciation for science fiction, it is little more than a weird distortion of concrete reality bereft of rules and somehow disingenuous as a literary form.

 

Fortunately, no less than one of the greatest living science fiction authors of all time, Ursuala K Le Guin,  took Mr. Merseth to task for his lack of a foundation in the genre in a letter to his letter. In it, she wrote:

 

 The comparison won't work.  We fiction writers make up stuff. Some of it clearly impossible, some of it realistic, but none of it real - all invented, imagined --  and we call it fiction because it isn't fact. We may call some of it "alternative history" or "an alternate universe," but make absolutely no pretense that our fictions are "alternative facts."

 Even if I didn't know any better, I'd side with a woman the Library of Congress named a Living Legend because of her outstanding contributions to the world of English Literature.

I understand the desire to describe the Trump administration's blatant attempts to gaslight as many Americans as possible in terms that clearly and intelligently do so. But when someone tries to do that using concepts and forms of expression of which they are ignorant or simply misinformed, it becomes the focus rather than the original intended subject.

A Timely Sentiment.

Fascism.

Imma just leave this here and let ya'll do with it as you please...

My Literary Hero James Morrow's Thoughts on the Trump Victory.

"Beneath the disgusting and endlessly distracting masks of Donald Trump—misogynist, racist, xenophobe, religious bigot—lies the matrix of a face unprecedented among those forty-four men who’ve held our country’s highest office: the face not of a mere sociopath (the republic was hardly spared that in the past) but rather of a sociopath who can’t be bothered to disguise his lack of a conscience, knowing that a corrupt legislature will do that for him. And so we leap into a void ...not foreseen by the 18th-century Enlightenment rationalists who assembled our republic: a zone of raw nihilism and provisional absurdity, reverberant with the dark laughter of a nonexistent Providence, where ignorant armies clash by night and tell lies by day, waiting for Godot. Were the stakes not so large, and the impending piles of bodies not so high, my own inner sociopath would anticipate the next four years with sheer, salivating, hideous pleasure."