FLEXIBLE CONCRETE: THE FOUNDATION OF THE INDUSTRY

Hello all!

I hope you all had happy holidays and a cheerful New Year! I did, and right now it is still going well. My life is looking up. I hope yours is too.

SO! What do I mean by ‘flexible concrete’? Let’s kick off the new year, 2024. First, many clarifications are in order. Put on your smart person wizarding hat. Good? Good. I suppose I’ll start by clarifying my intent and definitions. See, I’m doing all this—blogs and novels and fantasy—as a calling, but until recently I didn’t have a…I didn’t have a language to describe my intent. I had plenty of gut feeling/intuition, like we all do, and like the rest of us I didn’t know how to put those insights into words. I almost quit this blog project, and other ventures, like, four times now? Since October 2023? You really do have to keep trucking. Moving by unspoken instinct, instead of a rational plan. That stuff.

Anyway, ignore past me of last year, he was a FOOL. An IGNORAMUS! A dummy who didn’t know how to talk. Point and laugh at him. I am, because I learned to laugh at myself as the year changed over.

My intended audience is for the young and inexperienced. It is for the curious, and for the lost. Yeah-yeah, nerd bashing, blah blah blah, that’s all on the way. It is not for older people, unless they are reading fairy tales again, and all this is definitely not for the plague of our time, the Midwits. More on them later. Don’t worry, I am going to cover Flexible Concrete as promised, we have to build up to that point. Though, I won’t be able to cover everything I want to say about it here. I have to lay the groundwork, build up, and give examples—too many for one post.

Fiction, fantasy, and wonder, have become an industry. Not necessarily a craft. We, as children of the Entertainment Age, take the wonderful for granted. That is dangerous, because we underestimate the dangers of the Wonderful. One of the earliest lessons that was taught to me—by who, I’m not sure, so I’ll say Real Life and the Wisdom of Stories are my teachers—one of the earliest lessons of Fantasy: Guard your heart. Guard your heart, and screen out what you put into your dreams, your subconscious. The danger of Fantasy is that it bypasses the thinking-talking part of your mind, for most of Fantasy is, simply, images. Images that tell a story without words. Don’t get me wrong, Fantasy is still informed by Reality, especially actions, and consequences.

The danger of Fantasy is that it can give you the wrong Desires and the wrong Hopes. And make no mistake—the world of Fictionland is a battleground. It is a battle to shape the imagination; or, ‘the pulling apart and putting-together of images’; to have a goal and to know what goals are possible! This is not Post-modernism—this is a part of humanity since the beginning. Authors, thinkers, and speakers, and the wise, ought to know there is a life-or-death responsibility in shaping the imaginations of others.

It's why Satan-worshippers like Commie-Fascist tyrants and Postmodernists constantly try and control the imagination. They don’t go deep enough! That’s their problem—they always go after language and the ability to speak, but humans are gifted with self-communication by non-words. Namely, images, intuitions, and feelings. Speech only goes so far. We may not be able to name our enemies—but we do have a danger sense of them. And the imagination is remarkably fecund. The despot’s ideal is to make an illusory self-contained world of limited images*—limited images! That is because you don’t need to combine that many different things to make amazing possibilities.

[*Like North Korea under the Kim’s, where people are so raised in isolation that they do not even know they are slaves. God bless Yeonmi Park.]

Now, that is the extreme threshold as what happens in Real Life. I am NOT saying that the Entertainment/Fantasy Industry is a Satanic conspiracy*. No-no-no. I am not saying that. Ahem, it can, though, be hijacked by human elements bent towards—you know. It’s a movement that rhymes with ‘yoke’. They, however, are not subtle. Their fantasy/entertainment is trash and they can’t hide that it is trash, because they haven’t destroyed all the better or superior stuff.

[*I do say that honest-to-goodness angels and demons exist. I’d be a liar if I didn’t. I mention that demons are opportunists, and are clever enough to use and pervert anything to ruin everything. Angels, it seems, make the best of everything.]

My main concern is, even without malice, Fantasy can lead you to strange and demented places—and you wouldn’t know they were strange and demented unless you have good knowledge of the Weirdness of Real Life! A related concern is that we are talking about an industry. They have to make money to survive—they can’t be generous. Then there is the huge problem of Copyrights and trademarks. You do realize the most daft idea of Capitalism is that people can own intangible things, right? The next most daft idea is that institutions/corporations have honest-to-God rights as ‘people’. And the unspoken truth is that Corporations, like Nation-States, act like sociopaths to survive. And we protect those metaphysical sociopaths…UGH.

Anyway, Fantasy can pervert the innocent and the Entertainment Industry has to do sh*tty things to survive. Correction, has to do sh*tty things to get big and strong, and has no incentive for staying small, compact. We are in an age where the independent studios will save the day. Will they become big with success? Hm…

How do you sell a Fantasy in the Industry? We’ll start with that. First, you have to sell something that is already familiar or ‘re-package’ it in familiar terms. Book genres are not for the good of the customer, genres are meant to serve distributors/publishers.

…You have to have a Theme, and play with its Variations. Theme and Variations. That is the central shell, the line, the boundary, and you build within and around that ‘shell’. To rattle off some examples, in streaming order:

-Cowboys—are they good, bad, ugly, or anti-hero?

-Slaves escaping to freedom, be it a bad home life at the smallest, to a genuine Exodus at the biggest.

-All the different varieties of Korean Pop, and who they sell it to, East or West.

-Going on an Adventure through a strange land—was it worth it? Necessary? Was it the Journey, the Destination, or the New Friends that were important?

-POWER—UNLIMITED POWER and its consequences.

-Successful people who failed and failures who found success.

And so on. Now, to have an important clarification—you CAN’T make a story out of anything. There is no phrase I find more untrustworthy, ‘you can make a story out of anything.’ BULLSH*T. The people who say this either don’t know how to write, or are talentless writers who lie to themselves. The idea rests that you can, with enough effort, make something entertaining. Making a statue out of feces is still a great big pile of ****. Trying to turn a ten-minute drive to work into an exciting story and/or a commentary on human nature, or the banality of modern life, or how the driver is trapped by the forces of traffic and fatalism—wait, damn, that could work!

One time. It will work one time, and then it will be boring if it becomes a genre. You can’t make small things bigger. You can’t make cheap stuff valuable. If you take a crappy, low-pixel computer picture and make it bigger, its low quality will be highly obvious. For those stories to work, the Audience member has to lower himself. The Audience member has to make himself less in order to be at the level of the small or cheap stuff. Don’t get me wrong, dumb fun has its place. But dumb fun is disposable. Don’t forget that.

For your Theme and its Variations to work, it has to be something that can inherently grow big. An oak or mustard seed, say, instead of a petunia or poppy. Frankly, the Short Story Industry has truly ruined the creative environment. Yes, I am cursing the Short Story for existing. I curse the Short Story format, so favored by magazines and publishers, because it proliferated fiction to ridiculous levels. Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), father of the style in the USA, summed up the structure of the short story best: You have to take a normal person and put them in a bizarre situation, or take a bizarre person and put them in a normal situation. That is the real essence of short fiction. Unfortunately, it leads to a disastrous conclusion in the Industry— to stay entertaining, you have to put a bizarre person in a bizarre situation. Tell me, tell me, how often is that the case now?

It was not only Poe, either. Though I am not as familiar with them as Poe, I’ve read enough of Franz Kafka (1883-1924; Prague, Czech Republic) and Jorge Luis Borges* (1899-1986; Argentina) to see they do the same thing, where they write fiction that is unrooted in time and place, surreal, of strange people and places. Of them, though, Borges is the playful one (he lived in a library); he played with weirdness. Poe and Kafka were sad wrecks all too familiar with madness and isolation, respectively.

[* ‘hor-hey loo-eese boar-hez]

The three of them don’t necessarily write fairy tales, though they are like fairy tales in that their fiction is hyper-focused on specific things, images, objects. In a word, timeless things narrowed to an extreme point. For example, Poe’s objects of horror (ravens, hearts, teeth, cats, etc.); Borges has abstract magical concepts (ex., a book you can read forever); Kafka had a story (‘In the Penal Colony’) where a military man executes himself with a bizarre machine, out of a bizarre obligation to tradition. These timeless objects, effectively, consume the whole story, are the whole story. They are pungent, sharp as knives, and shave away all things that are unrelated to the timeless object. Attention is hyper-focused on these things to make the moral of the story. You can say that, reading these authors is a deliberate act of madness, because they strip away most of reality to get you to focus on just one thing. You know, like most crazy people. They aren’t violent, they just can’t comprehend reality any more EXCEPT for a few simple things, and sometimes they take those simple things and make them bigger than what they are…

Why do I bring them up? Because sex sells and weird stuff sells too. Freak shows wouldn’t be a thing if they weren’t fascinating, though thanks to human rights, freak shows now only really exist in Fictionland.

This is important, because, with Poe and friends in mind, what is your Theme? It can be very narrow but vibrant. How many Variations does your Theme have? With Themes in the different genres, they don’t have to be that broad. You want your cheap, smutty romance novella? That’s fine. You want your blood-and-guts war action paperback? Sure, pay ten bucks. …How about imagining yourself a murderer? A classic horror monster even? Or maybe you want to try living in a world where good lost, and the forces of evil won. Perhaps, even, a world where people aren’t right or wrong in black-and-white terms, but a world where people are right in some situations and wrong in others? Do want a world where everyone has superpowers? A world where your superpower is tied to a certain color of the rainbow? Or the more messy, muddy side of life—nah, how about where you’re already a god in a pantheon of gods—but you’re the god of a really silly thing, like gorillas and whales? Oo-oo! A story where every character is a fractured personality of an unfortunate crazy person.

Most of these Themes are not fit for public consumption; like Poe and co., they’re too weird for the majority of the normal people. (Most of those mentioned are RPG* settings, FYI.) Most are too weird and too full of icky stuff. I find that, for example, in most sci-fi TV shows that the Theme is facilitated by a Weird Plot Device (WPD).

[*And, to come clean some more—most of my experience with the Fiction Industry is from the Role-playing Game area. In the world of literature, I am familiar with the classics, the big names. I am not a publisher who determines what gets published and what gets thrown in the trash. It would be fascinating to get into their minds, to ask ‘how does this romance novel or this thriller story get approval?’ Approved to get published. Though, a sad, cynical part of me thinks that stories that are cheap and easy get more approval.]

In Severance (2022), its Theme is human nature interacting with corporate culture, facilitated by the ‘severance’ technology (WPD). If you work for the company, you undergo a surgery that separates your memories of when you work in the company and the memories when you go home. In effect, you are remade into two different people, who have two different motivations. The show, a thriller, hints at the lives of the main characters—who they were before they joined the company—while showing each character as a different corporate personality, like the tired day-worker or the bootlicker or the slogan-saying man.

Or take Westworld (2016), whose Theme is exploring ‘what is human nature? What separates humans from robots?’ but whose WPD is a technology that can create synthetic humans—look human on outside, have a robot brain—and how those synthetic humans are abused in a Cowboy-themed amusement park for the enjoyment of real humans.

Or take Star Trek (1966) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987), where the main Theme is exploring the unknown and encountering moral quandaries IN SPACE. Their WPD is faster-than-light travel, where the space crews can just, up and leave a planet when the drama is done. No consequences to follow after them when they leave (most of the time).

A Theme, its variations, and its audience. They’re almost on sliding scales. Is your Theme broad? It can cover a lot of ground but it can lose its ‘punchiness’ if too broad. Is your Theme narrow? Well, now they can become interesting, but at the risk of becoming too strange to understand. Who is your audience? On the worst end, you try to appeal to everybody, and become mostly boring. The danger is not political correctness, or offending people, but rather, in trying to appeal to everybody, the writers don’t shoot high. Appealing to everybody makes a story that lulls people to sleep. The authors don’t cover things that are too interesting, weird, or jarring; the entertainment becomes like hum-drum life. The opposite end of ‘who is your audience’ is sensationalism. You don’t care who watches, you make over-the-top junk to get attention, and to make people talk. This parallels another spectrum, one for ‘adult entertainment’, where most of that entertainment is adults acting like gross children, to ‘children’s entertainment’ on the other end. The story is so dull that children won’t watch it, they’ll go see a horror movie to get something exciting.

I find that the most powerful forms of entertainment are ones who are simply themselves. They are not made for a target audience—they draw people to them. A good piece of literature is like a person, for in interacting with it, you find things you like and don’t like, where it can shape you like it was a person. And you can reject what they say and do. Strange, no?

….

I’ll have an announcement on Wednesday, 1/10/2023.

More to follow!