WATWB – Your Monthly Shot of News That Doesn’t Suck

It’s Thanksgiving day here in the States. Or, as I like to call it, the Feast of a Thousand Turkeys. So, Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Go eat a shitload of food and get ready to spend a bunch of money tomorrow.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, it’s on to the meat of the story.

I think we can all agree that there’s been a rise of white nationalism in the United States. You can shake your head and cluck your tongue and call me a dumbass libtard all you want, but when jackasses in polo shirts are chanting things like “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us”, the evidence is right there in your face. A lot of people fought and died to wipe that scourge out decades ago, but hatred and pathetic losers have a way of lurking in the shadows like cockroaches.

Since punching Nazis in the face – a longtime American tradition – seems to fallen by the wayside, new ways of sticking it to them had to be invented. Oddly enough, this time by a Lebanese guy who bought up all the Hitler memorabilia at an auction in Germany just to keep it out of the hands of neo-Nazis.

You have to appreciate not only the will to do that, but also the sheer spite of it all. Abdallah Chatila spent €600,000 on ten items that he didn’t want, just to make sure that a bunch of jackasses who did want them couldn’t have them. That, in my opinion, is a good use of money. With a bit of luck, Mr. Chatila will film himself tossing Hitler’s hat in a fire and pissing on that silver-covered copy of Mein Kampf.

With an even bigger bit of luck, it won’t be long before the whole sick cult of Nazism is tossed into the ash heap of history.

Read the whole story here.

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Our lovely and talented hosts of the month are: Damyanti Biswas , Lizbeth Hartz, Shilpa Garg, Peter Nena, Simon Falk

~~~GUIDELINES~~~

1. Keep your post to below 500 words, as much as possible. (Wow, I totally missed that mark this time around).

2. All we ask is you link to a human news story on your blog on the last Friday of each month, one that shows love, humanity and brotherhood.

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And now your moment of Zen.

The Art and Science of Selling Out

Earlier in the year, some of my Twitter writing community friends and I were trying to pull a guy back from the ledge. We’ll call him Gunther because, for some reason or another, that name popped into my mind.

Gunther, it seemed, had a problem. His prose was weighty. Dense like a collapsed star, and about as fun to read as stereo instructions. His reviews were coming back with things like “Reading this was like wading through rancid molasses” and “This was so bad, I think it gave me cancer”. Note: not actual reviews, but those were the general gist.

Now, as every writer knows, reviews can be important things. They can help drive sales, but they can also give you an indication of what’s working and what’s not working. I got one a couple of years ago about head-hopping in a story. For the uninitiated, head-hopping is the process of switching back and forth between viewpoints in narrative. It’s part of the third person omniscient style of telling a story and, done correctly, it can be a useful tool because it lets the reader get into each character’s head. The problem is, done poorly, it can be jarring and leave a reader wondering which character was thinking what at the time. That leads to confused readers and the number one rule of writing is never confuse your reader.

Guess which way I did it.

Actually, when you get down to it, that’s really the only rule of writing. You can do anything you want in a story as long as it doesn’t leave the reader scratching their head and wondering where you scored the crack before you started writing. Tell an entire story without punctuation? Sure. Charlie Huston did it in his Joe Pitt books. (Fun fact: Charlie Huston is kind of my hero). Tell a story while you’re hopped up on every drug known to man and drunk as a skunk to boot? Go check out Hunter S. Thompson. (Also my hero). Make liberal use of the word “fuck”? Guilty.

Point is: Huston and Thompson and every other successful writer out there knew how to tell a story without confusing their readers, no matter what other weird chicanery they may have pulled. Gunther lacked that skill. So, not only was his prose dense as fuck, it was confusing to boot. Think of it as a weightier version of Sean Penn’s abysmal writing without the star power to drive sales.

While a handful of us were imploring Gunther to just, you know, change his style to something that people would want to read, he was busy complaining that he couldn’t change his style. And moping about it. And whining.

That was about the part where I checked out. When you’ve got a handful of people giving you some advice, you don’t immediately discard it because “you can’t change”. Advice is like a live-action review and woe unto the person who ignores the review that says a book was so bad it gave them cancer.

Here’s the deal: any writer worth their salt is going to be able to adapt. There’s nothing wrong with adaptation. Like the U.S. Marines like to say: Improvise, adapt, and overcome.

You can call it selling out if you’d like. You can even call that a bad thing if it makes you happy, but what’s worse: Writing exactly like you want and having no one read it or adapting and still getting your words out?

My grandfather used to love to say, “A piece of information is only good if you have a use for it”. Thomas Edison’s middle name was Alva and the Battle of Hastings was in 1066? Unless you’re really into history, that’s useless information. Knowing Edison was an inventor who’s credited with a short ton of inventions is useful. Knowing he was vicious bastard who happily stole inventions from other people and called them is own (*cough Tesla cough*) can be useful. Knowing his middle name? Who cares.

Writing’s kind of like that. You can either be the bit of information out there, all alone and screaming into the void, or you can be the thing that changes the way people look at the world. Gunther, if you happen to come across this post at some point, consider at least trying to do things differently. Trust me, you can do it. You can improvise, you can adapt, and you can overcome. Or you can be Alva. Your call.

Book Review – Mind’s Horizon by Eric Malikyte

I’ve always loved H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas. The worlds he built were amazing with a richly detailed mythology that shows us exactly how tiny and insignificant we are in the universe. Imagine a universe where it was not only obvious that humans were terribly outgunned, there’s an undercurrent that god doesn’t really love us. It’s kind of like stepping to a guy in a bar and getting your ass handed to you and then spitting out your teeth and watching through swollen eyes as your gal goes off with him.

But here’s a funny thing: Much as I love Lovecraft’s worlds, I really have trouble getting into his writing. It’s too dense and has too many apostrophes. Maybe that’s just me, though. I’ve been bitter ever since Miskatonic University turned down my application for “not understanding magic” and “being lazy”. Anyway, the whole “universe is out to get you and, let’s face it, you’re boned” philosophy has a great vibe to it and giant world-eating things are fun to think about, even if reading Lovecraft’s prose ain’t my bag.

So, when I get a chance to read something that tracks along with Lovecraft’s “giant things about to eat the planet” mythos without his weighty prose, I jump at it.

If you look back a bit, you’ll see I reviewed one of Eric Malikyte’s books a while back. Echoes of Olympus Mons was a brilliant bit of sci-fi horror. Malikyte has recently followed up the woeful tale of Mars’s untimely death with a love letter to H.P. Lovecraft. Mind’s Horizon features all the good apocalyptic stuff you expect from Lovecraft, notably world-ending excitement, a hint of magic, and teeth. Lots of teeth.

Humanity’s time is done.
A modern ice age has all but stamped out human civilization and left the Earth nearly uninhabitable. For Ira Hartman and the dysfunctional band of survivors that surround her, all that’s left of the old world are ghosts trapped beneath the still forming ice sheets.
Living in retrofitted tunnels beneath Riverside, California, scrounging for food, supplies, and desperately trying not to kill each other, things could be worse; but when an accident causes the generators powering their shelter’s heating system to be destroyed, hope seems to have run out.
That is until Ira discovers a strange heat signature in the San Bernardino mountains, and it leads to a secret military research facility housed deep within the mountain.
At first, it seems like the perfect shelter. Plenty of rations. Water. Warmth.
Then they discover the remnants of horrifying experiments. Corpses, strapped to operating tables, horror etched on decomposing faces, experiment rooms filled with strange machines and occult symbols, and the logs of a raving lunatic. The unmistakable feeling that something is watching them, waiting in the cold, tubular concrete tunnels, in the shadows.
What Ira and the others don’t know might just kill them.

Get your copy on Amazon

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