Week 41 - What Would Donnie Do?

 

Update – Not much writing got done last week. I’ve been working on a paid assignment, when I wasn’t moaning over a dentist appointment. Seems another one of my aging teeth chipped and cracked and needs an expensive crown. And because I reached some limit on my Medicare expenses, they’re not covering this. I’m totally on the hook for the whole $1800. Since I need to pay down the Visa card before the interest kicks in, everything from here on out will be going on the Mastercard. Welcome to the wonderful world of credit card debt. Well, the writing didn’t work out so well. Maybe I’ll win the lottery next year.

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Something a little different this week, although it could be considered a writing lesson if you stretch the definition a bit. A lot of stories get their start with the words, “What if…?”

Here’s mine, inspired by the upcoming Presidential election. It’s a question I’d love to ask Donald Trump if I could stomach attending one of his town halls. I understand he did a half-hour danceoff to his personal playlist at a recent meet-and-greet. Yeah, there’s presidential material. But then, Bill Clinton jammed on the sax on the Arsenio Hall show when he was campaigning back in the 1990s, so who am I to judge.

Anyway, here’s my question/scenario: Trump wins—legitimately, just to make things simpler. It’s Inauguration Day. Donnie and Vance get sworn in. They step down from the podium, ready to celebrate, when word comes in: Vladimir Putin has invaded Alaska. Russia used to own it, and now he wants it back. His challenge to the brand-new Prez: “What are you going to do about it?”

That’s what I’ve been wondering: if his BFF Putin challenged America by trying to re-annex Alaska, what would Donnie do?

Let’s be clear: Don doesn’t necessarily really want to be President. He needs to be President. At this point it’s the only way he can keep his ass out of jail. He wants the power, the attention, the crowds at his rallies cheering him on. Or the chance to go golfing whenever he feels like it. Somebody else can deal with the boring job of actually running the country. That’s what Vance is for. Responsibility is not his favorite thing. Ditto for accountability. We’ve already seen how quick he is to dodge both.

He's also a bully, and only stands up to people he thinks or knows won’t fight back. He wants to be seen as the tough world leader, the absolute dictator, feared and respected. He talks the talk, but Putin walks the walk with spiked leather boots. Putin doesn’t even have to stare; Donnie’s already blinking.

There’d be a lot of huffing and puffing and demands for negotiation and threats of nuclear war, but in the end we all know we’d be kissing Alaska good-bye. It’s not even a real state, or it would be down here with the rest of them. Isn’t it really part of Canada anyway? Nothing up there but snow and Eskimos. Good riddance to bad rubbish, says Donnie.

Though frankly, I’ll bet the absolute first thing Donnie would do is shit his pants right in front of the Fox News cameras. Then thrust the keys to the White House into Vance’s hands and hightail it back to Mar-A-Lago and hide under his bed. That’s what the Vice President’s there for, right? To take one for the team so the Big Guy doesn’t have to?

This is the moment Vance has been waiting for. His time to shine. We’re gonna nuke those godless Commies back to the Bolshevik Era! And the missiles start flying. China and North Korea join in on Russia’s side because they want to be good neighbors. Iran lets a few nukes fly in all directions and hopes nobody notices in the confusion. Europe as a whole sighs and goes to hunker down in the cellar. Africa looks at each other and says, “There go the white folks again.”

And civilization as we know it is destroyed. With humanity bombed back to the Stone Age, the damn dirty apes are free to acquire intelligence and take over the planet. So it goes for centuries, until Charlton Heston shows up. Or maybe it’ll be the raccoons this time. I like that ending better.

Here’s another possibility: Putin doesn’t go for the big red button. He offers to buy Alaska back instead and offers a shit-ton of rubles. Donnie’s greedy eyes light up. One less pesky state to worry about, and he gets money in his bank account to boot. Then North Korea chimes in: “Hey, nice little Hawaii you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.” They make an offer. Aloha, Hawaii.

Oh, wait. Is that Mexico banging on the door, reminding us how we stole Texas from them? Hey, what the hell. Give Texas back to Mexico and he won’t have to go to all the trouble and expense of putting up the damn wall. Not only does Donnie solve the immigrant crisis, he makes a tidy profit in the bargain. See what a great leader and businessman he is?

And so it goes, from Florida to the Louisiana Purchase to the Navajo reclaiming their native lands until we’re pretty much down to the states nobody cares about, like Rhode Island and New Jersey. Then Canada offers to take whatever’s left off our hands. Donnie moves his loot to an offshore account and skips town. Nobody really minds because, with Canada in charge, we’ve finally got decent health care.

Granted, neither of these would make a very good novel, unless you’re aiming for heavy satire. But the concept of brainstorming is sound. Pick an idea, play around with it, let your imagination run wild. Sooner or later something legit is bound to crop up. And if it doesn’t…hell, think of the fun you’ll have.

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Actually, I did come up with a workable concept for a political thriller, even before this hectic campaign began. I just don’t have the knowledge, talent or skill to pull it off the way it deserves. Suppose somebody did succeed in offing Donnie Dearest? Not even in public. He goes to bed one night and the next morning the maid or Ivanka or somebody finds him dead in his bed with his throat slit. Obviously an inside job. Or a Russian mole? Or a Democrat? None of the above?

My story would have had several agencies competing to solve the case. I think my hero would have been an FBI agent because I was a big fan of the X-Files. Which enemy of America offed him, and why? The plot would take several twists and turns and finally settle on a cabal of right-wing Republican Senators intent on taking control of the United States for their own benefit. Or maybe they’re working with China. It doesn’t really matter who because the plot is foiled and the good guys win. Except for one little problem: none of them actually did the deed, they just saw the opportunity and ran with it. So, who killed the Prez?

And the answer to my What If? game was: none of the above. When considering possible assassins, I realized no one on earth has the right to kill Donnie except for one person: Melania. The wronged wife, the trophy wife, the mocked and despised arm candy. She never asked for any of this. Not the criticism, not the side-eyes, not a husband who serial cheats and brags about it while doing political interviews. She finally had it up to here with his public and private shenanigans, waited till he fell asleep, pulled out her nail file and did herself a favor. She’s background, set dressing, a prop in Donnie’s drama. Who would even think to suspect her?

This was how my book would end: the FBI agent figures it out…and lets her go. On the final page he’d be standing on the tarmac at the airfield, watching her and her son fly back to her European homeland, never to return. Damn, I’d love to read that book. Maybe David Baldacci will write it for me. Ball’s in your court, Davey. See y’all next week.   

Week 40 - Tossing in the Towel

 

Update – Not much went on last week. Mostly I worked on paid stuff. Did a little work on the detective book, played some games (which I’m not supposed to be doing) and got the lawn mowed. That one knocked me out; we had rain, drizzle and gloom for roughly a week and a half, then finally it cleared up but left some tall, thick green behind. But I got it all done, beating out most of my neighbors. I wasn’t the first, but I was up there in the top five. By the time Monday rolled around we all had our grass nicely clipped again. The weather’s gotten chillier. I’m hoping this means the end of the mowing season. I may need to chop it down one last time as we go into November. I never did get the yard work done. Maybe next year.

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Here’s something else I never got done: a first draft of a book—any book at all—in a month. I was going to do one per month every month this year. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I got some bad eggnog at New Year’s and it gave me delusions. Something gave me a massive block this year, part of the reason (along with work, financial anxiety and depression) I couldn’t write as much as I thought I could. So I’m calling it quits. I’ll continue work on the detective story, even though that’s hit a rough patch. How can you get blocked on a second draft? I’ve got the bones of the story written; I just have to dress 'em up nicer and pick better words than what I feverishly scribbled in longhand in two of those 1-subject school notebooks. But going back over it, I keep running into mistakes and plot holes that I glossed over the first time, and I have to straighten everything out so the story still works. It’s a work in progress, folks. That’s all I can say.

There’s another reason I may have gotten discouraged, and that’s the current market. Assuming I ever get it done, where do I send it? It’s not firmly slotted into one specific genre. It’s primarily fantasy, but it’s also a mystery, a detective story and partially a romance. I tend to refer to it as my Twilight Zone book, which would put it in the fantasy category. If I got the right agent, though, I could probably sneak it into mainstream. That’s where Stephen King’s books were first shelved, even though given the subject matter (psychic powers, vampires) they should have gone into the Science Fiction and Fantasy section, where H. P. Lovecraft and his ilk got lumped in with the elves and the rocket ships. King obviously had an excellent agent.

I’ve already sent a query to a SFF publisher for one of their open calls; we’ll see if anything happens. Other than that, I’m considering Hard Case Crime. Those are straight up mysteries, but they’ve published a couple of Stevie’s books, so I know there’s leeway. I just have to hope mine’s good enough.

Why not just query the SFF publishers? Back when I started, in the distant past, that would have been my go-to genre. But now I’ve hit a road block that I’ve touched on before, and recently saw an article on the Internet confirming my worst fears: SFF has essentially been taken over by the diversity crowd. It’s not just a moratorium on straight white male characters—now they want to block out the straight white male writers. Only female leads written by female authors—preferably an author of color and any gender other than straight—need apply.

(Insert screams and lots of colorful swearing here)

But you’re female, I hear you saying. You’ve got a ticket in. For the cheap seats, maybe. I’m still white and straight, writing about straight white male heroes. The problem is, I was planning on using a male pen name for this book. This book was going to be my entry into the horror genre. Stephen King doesn’t write the type of books that made him famous any more. I was hoping my nom de plume could step in and fill the void. But if white males are being elbowed out of my target genre, what’s a girl-passing-as-a-male-writer supposed to do?

So why can’t I use my real name? Because about a decade back, when I switched over to racy romance, I stupidly used my real name as my byline. Suppose the book sells well and piques people’s interest. They’ll look up my backlog and find my sex books. The ones with two guys, or one woman and two guys, or women with vampires and/or werewolves, doing fun activities together. The kind you don’t want your kids finding out about until they’re at least 27. I can’t use my initials because that’s what I used for my SFF stories, and that one YA romance with the vampires that sold maybe five copies, if that. So my real name and my initial name are both out of the running. And so’s my whitebread male pen name, it seems.

I’m still going to give it a shot, but my hopes aren’t high. My goal for 2025 will be to learn how to successfully self-publish.

Although…

Remember that screed I posted a few weeks back, about the publisher who wanted the male author to make his book “inclusive”? De-age the characters and play up the romance, only make it gay. I came up with a version of my book that did exactly that, eliminating all straight white maleness entirely. I meant it all sarcastically, getting my frustrations out of my system.

But what if I went ahead and actually wrote that version? Then queried both versions to the same or similar publishers? Which would sell? One? Both? Neither? What if I sold one and self-pubbed the other? Would I be sued for plagiarizing myself?

(Don’t laugh; that happened to John Fogerty, lead singer/songwriter of Creedence Clearwater Revival. He was called into court for writing a solo song that sounded too similar to a song he’d written for the band. It all depends on who owns the rights to what, and he didn’t own the rights to his CCR songs, even though he'd written them. The law's a funny thing.)

Might be an interesting experiment. It would make me feel like I’m actually doing something writing-related. I may just fiddle around with that next year, unless the diversity fad passes in the meantime. I’ve heard stories of romance e-book writers who do a traditional (MF) version, then rewrite the story as MM and sell it twice. I considered that, but while plotting I realized I was coming up with two separate storylines. I can’t even plagiarize myself correctly.

Or I could just go back to writing sex books. I need to do something to pay off the credit card before the interest kicks in. It doesn’t help that more and more outfits are saying, “We accept AI-assisted material.” Great. Like regular competition wasn’t enough, now I have to contend with Skynet’s literary efforts. I predicted that on here too. And you wonder why I’m depressed all the time. I think I’ll go watch TV. See y’all next week.