Salad and the Talking Fish

The Third Book Is Always The Dullest

This is part three of “Let’s try to bore all of the followers to death at the start of the season” series. It’s OK if you don’t like reading this. It’s like licorice. Not everyone likes licorice, and even people who do like licorice don’t want this much of it. Those of you who are still reading should be prepared. You’ve said, “I like licorice,” and now I’m going to serve you a licorice cake. It’s fine if you give your piece to the dog.

For those of you who clicked on this by accident, if you want to see exactly how I’m driving Mediumans to unfollow me, start with:

• The Editor Calls Me to Lunch (part I)
• First and Second Courses (part II)

The Salad Course

The salad was served. It contained fancy greens, perhaps a mesclun mix, and was topped with walnuts, mandarin orange slices, and a balsamic…

“Less,” said Hughes holding his salad plate out to me. “Take mine if you want it, I never eat the stuff. Now, where were we? We have a main character, did you give me a name?”

“Sterling Macy,” I said.

“OK,” he said. With no food in front of him he took to looking at the other diners around the room while he spoke. “I assume he is some sort of middle-American white guy with negative market power, unless, of course, he has a superpower or a big, big gun. Does he have any superpowers or big guns?”

“No,” I said.

“Too bad. Maybe we’ll have to add some. What does he do?”

“He plays video games.”

“This is starting to get quite dull,” said Hughes frowning. He looked about the room and motioned to the watron to fill up his glass. “When are they going to bring out the main course?” He asked. Then continued, “What happens to your man after he enters the platform?”

Seeing that Hughes was growing impatient, I started to condense the ideas. “He meets a bear, smokes pot, and turns into a skunk.”

Hughes choked on his wine, then sputtered, “A bear? A furry bear? What kind of bear?” He looked around the room with a wild expression and then focused back on me. “A teddy bear, a gay bear, or a bear like one of Pullman’s bullshit macho projections?”

“A bear kind of like Brer’ Bear,” I said.

“This is not good!” He laughed, “I hope this isn’t some kind of fucking furry tale… not only do I not like furries, but, more to the point, they don’t sell! Furries make their own fiction and draw their own pictures, then they upload their work to non-commercial servers… they won’t even buy a pre-made furry costume. They are an economic sink hole, and…” He went on, now quite animated and looking directly at me with a big smile, “…lycanthropes and were-animals are the same. You couldn’t sell one of those books even if you were a thirteen year-old home-schooled girl raised on a houseboat in Bangladesh! The petal is off the rose for lycanthropes and vampires. There are no vampires in this story are there? I can’t stomach vampires,” he said, and then he called for more wine.

“No vampires,” I said.

“Cats?” He asked.

“No cats,” I said.

“That won’t do. Cats sell. What about dragons? Are there any dragons in the story?”

“No dragons,” I said.

“That won’t do either. If it’s a fontasy story, it has to have a dragon. Movie directors have a hard-on for dragons. One dragon increases the value of the movie rights by fifty-thousand dollars. The problem is most people can’t make good dragons because every dragon is supposed to be a genius. Most people aren’t geniuses, but I can help you with the dragon when we add it.”

The watron, who was a middle aged man wearing a simple white shirt, came over to us and asked us, “What would you gentleman like for the main course? We have a choice of chicken, fish, or grilled portabella mushrooms.” He actually described each dish, but Hughes won’t let me tell you how. We both ordered the fish.

The Main Course

“Lord, this is dull stuff, Gutbloom” said Hughes, “It’s not that it’s a worthless idea. It’s not, and you are free to pursue it this season if you want to. You’ll certainly have the time.”

“Why will I have time?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “Because the bots will be doing all of the work. Your fontasy play is very 2000. That’s an idea for yesterday. I don’t doubt that we could create a world where people might be willing to spend money on giant swords and tokens to look inside a pixelated whore house, but that space is crowded and, most importantly, no publishers are making money at it. Software is a different business. Thin margins. Hard work. Lots of stress. Basements.”

“Basements?” I asked.

“Yes, basements,” he said. “Walk into a bank. How do you get to the engineers? Answer: walk downstairs. Have you ever been inside a server farm, or seen 200 COBOL programmers in the same room? If you have, I bet the best decorations you saw were a “Hang in There” cat poster and an out of place Van Gogh reprint. We want to stay above ground, and the way we do that is the way we’ve always done it, by finding the marketing budget. The marketing people might be silly assholes, but they have budgets and nobody cares how they spend them.”

The fish arrived. When it did, the one served to Sam looked up from its plate and said, “hello.”

“What’s this,” said Hughes, “A talking fish? How come?”

“I was going to use it to explain the magical system of the platform.”

“I’m sure both the fish and I are glad that we are past that,” said Hughes.

The fish looked up and said, “Would you please start eating. The lemon juice is burning my already thoroughly cooked insides.”

“I thought we promised that there would be no discussions of food,” said Hughes.

“I’m allowed to talk,” said the fish. “I’ll have you know that I am a Clear Springs trout from Buhl, Idaho. I am of the ARS-Fp-R family. I’ll have my say.”

“Hah!” Laughed Hughes. “The trout knows more than you do, Gutbloom!” With that, the fish went silent and Hughes began to dig into it.

“I don’t understand,” I said, “Was that some kind of Heraldic yelp? Is that fish the trout equivalent of the Dúnedain?”

“Not at all,” said Hughes, stuffing a forkful of fish into his mouth and continuing to talk. “Your silly magical realism/meta-fictional trick introduced my plan for 2016. This fish,” he said, holding another forkful in front of his nose, “smells like money.”

Continued: The Final Course.