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Dear Hollywood:

Please consider featuring less of the following:

Judd Apatow

Will Farrell

Movies involving weddings

Saccharine animated morality plays

Jennifer Aniston

Movies that mostly seem to feature people having tired postmodern conversations on cell phones bemoaning the fact that they never seem to do anything but have tired postmodern conversations on cell phones

I think a pretty convincing simulation of Hell could be had by having Judd Apatow produce an animated movie with Jennifer Aniston and Will Farrell as voice talents where they talk endlessly on cell phones about the postmodern angst triggered by their upcoming wedding. Man. That would be enough to make me confess to crimes not yet committed!

Back To The Grind

I've been on vacation.

No, I haven't. I'm lying. I only wish I'd been on vacation, flitting around the South Pacific in my own flying boat and doing... well, whatever one does in the South Pacific in a flying boat.

Mostly I spent the last few weeks sitting on my well-padded keester writing a novel. Note that I didn't say "publishing" or "sending to an agent" or anything like that. I just like writing them; what happens to them after I'm done seems to be secondary. Oh sure, I think it'd be great to be a rich and famous author, but it's one thing to put about 130,000 words down on in Microsoft Word, and quite another to actually try to sell the thing. I may be 51 years old and I may be fairly secure emotionally, but I'm still in no hurry to start collecting rejection notices in a shoe box. Besides, I have a hard time imagining that anyone would actually pay me to read my stuff - it's hard enough to get people to read it for free.

Still, I may look into e-publishing. I don't have huge financial expectations, and I'm sure the advance for genre fiction of this sort amounts to about fifteen dollars, so I don't think e-publishing would be a major blow to my potential earnings. But it certainly sounds easier than conventional publishing, especially for a hack like me.

What genre is my novel? There are more genres today than one can shake a stick at, but I think when people say "genre fiction" today, they mean that dark romance stuff like Twilight and True Blood, romance novels retooled with vampires and werewolves. That sort of thing isn't for me - I prefer my vampires to look and act like Bela Lugosi, thank you very much, and I am openly scornful of the super-fast vampires popular these days. Watching the backwoods shit-kicker vampires in True Blood go booking off across the bayou at 150 miles per hour makes me roll my eyes, to say the least. (And while I'm the subject, why does every damned vampire in True Blood seem to own a bar or night club? How come none of them are ever shrimpers, or work on off-shore oil rigs?)

Not that I have anything modern "dark romance" novels. I have friends who enjoy them considerably, and that doesn't bother me.

Mostly I write science fiction. Among the novels I read in my formative years were Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, The Forever War, the Berzerker series, Tactics of Mistake, Dorsai!, and to a lesser extent World of Ptaavs and Ringworld. That's more or less what I write, though my own "house universe" that I tend to revisit over and over borrows some prehistory from the old Simulations Publications wargames Starforce and Starsoldier, and maybe a hint of Battlefleet Mars.

And the day that makes me a fifteen dollar advance, I'll be frankly surprised.

Good Fortune

I don't remember reading a lot of fortune cookies as a boy. Maybe they didn't exist back in the Pleistocene, when mammoths (and I) roamed the landscape. I read that fortune cookies were invented "in the early 20th century", so maybe they predate me a little (I hail from the "middle 20th century", and my fossils can be found in strata marked "Late Eisenhower Epoch"). But I still have no boyhood memory of fortune cookies, or for that matter Chinese restaurants in general.

It wasn't that we disliked Chinese food. Later on, Dad got in the habit of stir-frying, and I remember that pretty clearly. His stir-frying endeavors were enthusiastic, but not always strictly successful. An adherent of the Iowa "More Isn't Enough" school of cookery, he overloaded the wok to such an extent that nothing was ever truly stir-fried; the best one could say of it was that it had been stir-simmered. And he made heavy use of five-spice, which is truly the plutonium of gastronomy. (Ralph Nader once said that a pound of plutonium, ground into dust, could kill eight billion people. Critics of this theory cry "Bullshit! A pound of plutonium could only kill two million people!" That's a relief. For a while I was getting really worried.) It doesn't take much five-spice to make everything taste like five-spice, and dad shoveled it in by the tablespoon. Weeks later I could still taste it, and I later estimated the half-life of five-spice was about twenty days.

What I'm really saying here is that I don't know what the fortunes in fortune cookies were like back in the golden days, when cars had fins and Ike's ghost beamed paternally down at us. There is some argument that fortune cookies are actually Japanese in origin, sort of a shotgun (or Shogun) wedding of independently-existing cookies and fortunes at some temple in Kyoto. This could be true. Any viewing of anime must surely lead one to the conclusion that Japanese culture is capable of producing almost anything.

But mostly I wonder if the actual fortunes in the cookies were different in the Olden Days. Were they actual fortunes? Actual testable predictions of events yet to transpire? Like the California Psychics, only without a 1-800 number? I like to think so. You will meet an enigmatic stranger. That would be kind of fun. Or maybe they would be vaguely ominous, like Beware of Pomeranians, leaving you to wonder if they were referring to the dogs or the people. Or maybe they'd be strangely self-referential, like Help, I'm trapped in a Chinese fortune cookie factory!

I don't know. But what I do know is that the three most recent fortunes I've gotten in Chinese restaurants have been unsatisfying. The discovery that multiple Chinese restaurants all used fortune cookies made by the same company unsettled me - the notion of fortunes being bought and sold wholesale seems to cheapen the whole endeavor, just a little. This suggests that somewhere in the sprawling Chinese Fortune Cookie works, there is one guy at a desk writing fortunes, and he's starting to get a little bored and complacent. "Nobody reads this crap anyway," he says as he copies and pastes in random text. But I read them.

So let's look at my most recent fortunes.

A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner.

Huh. You might want to double-check with the skipper of the Exxon Valdez on that one. And I might point out that a smooth sea never made me spill coffee on my shirt either. This one has a distinct consolation prize quality about it, as though it feels sorry for me and is trying to buck up my flagging joie de vivre by chucking me on the shoulder and offering some small-potatoes consolation like "Well, at least you didn't lose both eyes..."

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.

And if this was really true, we'd still be drilling holes in people's skulls to let the evil spirits out. It turns out that what we believe to be true often turns out to be total crap, and when we realize how wrong we were, we feel pretty stupid. But in a way, this fortune does provide one useful service: it seems to sum up the entire body of post-modern thought in one sentence. It may be wrong, but saves one a good deal of time and bother. Don't bother with Harvard, guys, here's post-modernism in a single sentence.

Alas! You are the apple of my eye.

This one really bothers me, mostly because it sounds so embarrassed about the whole thing. It's like it has a crush on me, but it finds that crush distasteful in some way. I like you, but you always embarrass me in public. I like you, but my friends think you're a loser. I like you, but I wish I didn't because you always smell like Beef-A-Roni. I like you, but honey, nobody cares if the Ringworld is unstable or not.

But I guess it isn't a total loss. At least now I know what my lucky numbers are. All eighteen of them.