Unwritten Novel? Shitty Laptop.
Another one of those nights, eh? Kicking back with a glass of pinot. Baby asleep. Wife on the phone. TV turned off. Sun setting. Mind wandering. Wandering to that novel you’ve had kicking around in your head for a few decades now.
You know, the one about the priest far in the future who faces a criminal syndicate in a world where humans live as avatars in a “virtual” reality. But the priest decides to go offline, leaves his “vial,” and discovers that the world is all messed up, with genetically engineered glow-in-the-dark pumas wandering the hellscapey countryside. Most humans live in “vials” except for some who are like druids. And the billionaires have legally co-opted the Native American tribal government system in the U.S. to give themselves personal sovereign immunity for their crimes. And it deals with religion and technology. It asks real questions about personal and tribal identity in a world of pure self-determination. It ponders the nature of existence and whether humanity can survive a post-Singularity world. It doesn’t touch on race because you’re white. What was it called? That’s right…
s0u1.
I gotcha.
First things first, though — time to get a new laptop. Because obviously there’s no way you can knock out six hundred pages of thought-provoking, existential, Stephenson-esque sci-fi fantasy on your Dell running Office 2010. Not happening.
Or maybe you could revisit that novella you started in grad school. That one was a historical novel set during the Seige of Stalingrad. It was about that female sniper who killed like two hundred people in that battle. Her name was Lyudmila M. Pavlichenko and she was hunted by a German sniper named Erwin König. Remember, you had outlined those awesome set pieces about their cat and mouse game in the fiery rubble of the city, and a great bit about how their respect for one another cut through their hatred. You changed the name of the German to Edwin Krebs (which is German for cancer, which also kills a lot of people) and were going to name her the Russian word for regret because she didn’t want to do what she was doing. What was it called?
Starcrossed.
(That’s right. You were going to try to work “crosshair” in there to tie in the sniper thing, but it got unwieldy.)
But then you could only find the Russian word for regret in Cyrillic and you could never figure out how to look it up in the English spelling. Then, of course, you remembered the whole thing was basically Enemy at the Gates, which you saw around that time but had forgotten about. Then you found out how in reality the historical protagonist was a sniper in Odessa and St. Petersburg, not Stalingrad, and you didn’t know as much about those battles. Also, it got sort of tiresome once you started writing it because it was just shooting after shooting in rubble, and you couldn’t figure out how exactly they were going to meet, and there’s only so many words for gray. And you’re not Russian or German. Furthermore, you don’t know that much about the battles (or her) so there’d be so much research. As well, is it right for you to write about a female protagonist anyway? Really, the sex scene probably hasn’t aged well either, especially in today’s climate, but you didn’t know any better since you were a virgin.
So…why not just make it an existential sci-fi fantasy about two snipers in the future? And instead of rifles they use code to try to kill people’s uploaded, digital personas? Perfect! What could you call it?
0b1t.
No, you already did the binary thing. Well, you didn’t publish a book with a binary play on words in the title, but you thought of that other one.
How about, c10ud?
Shit.
How about, Ctrl-Alt-Delete? Or Control, Alter, Delete. Because they do that sort of. Alright, fine.
Well, whatever you call it, good luck writing that one on your old laptop. You can’t write a novel like that on that Acer Chromebook in your garage. On Google Docs? Are you kidding? Think of the words that will need to be processed. You’ll need a Pixelbook at least. They’re only $999 now. I think there’s a Best Buy ad around here somewhere.
What’s that you say? Ernest Hemingway wrote out all his novels longhand? Well, why do you think he killed himself? It wasn’t the alcoholism. It was the cursive. Unless you want to end up dead (like him) and unpublished (unlike him) you better head to Fry’s or wherever still sells them shits and upgrade your laptop.
I mean, just imagine it. Sitting there *clacking* away on that Fred Flintstone keyboard. No backlighting under the keys. Touchpad looking like an after-hours KFC cutting board. Wimpy Obama-era Athlon processor kicking on the loud-as-hell cooling fan from all those dense-as-fuck chapters being held in a measly 512MB of RAM on a Toshiba Satellite. Toshiba? Didn’t they go out of business?
Seriously, do you think your glorified vacuum tube could handle that novel idea you had that time when you were high. That one about two children who escape together from foster care when they’re ten, thinking they’re brother and sister? No way. Not that one, where this old lady, their neighbor, helped them escape and they end up joining this band of bank robbers who train them in various bank-robbing skills. Then when they’re eighteen they start sleeping together, wracked with guilt because they think it’s incest. At the same time, they find out the bank robbers use the money to finance a drug smuggling operation that sells drugs to kids…in foster care! So for that reason (and also largely from shame over what they think is a super-incestuous relationship — [screw taboos! ]—) they set out this big bank robbery for the gang, planning to double-cross the gang, kill them, then give their money to the old lady who helped them escape, and then kill themselves. But they get arrested before they can kill themselves, and the money gets seized before the old lady gets it. They’re sent to prison apart from one another, wracked with grief and broken hearts from being alive separated. (Echoes of an anti-Romeo & Juilet, perhaps?) Then one day, the old lady visits the girl in prison, because maybe they stayed in touch or something, and it comes out over one of those glass-wall telephone prison-visit things that the girl bank robber and the guy bank robber WERE NEVER BROTHER AND SISTER! They just were in the same foster home and assumed they were! Woah. And the old lady maybe was the girl’s real mom the whole time, which you learn from a photo at her house when she goes home and dies later. Shit yeah.
You could call it $ibling$.
Your old. Ass. Laptop. Could not. Handle. That. Shit.
No convertible touchscreen for you to write with your finger using that thing on TV ads back then that they’d show that would convert your finger-handwriting to text. No terabyte of solid-state hard drive on tap for all that internal monologue.
This hasn’t been proven, but I think Michael Crichton got cancer from squinting at some old Macintosh. Do you want to risk that when OLED, Retina-display, Ultra-4K sweetness beckons from that weird store, Microcenter, right down the highway?
Sure, they say word processing is all on the “Cloud” anyway, and you could basically write a novel on a Linux browser on a Raspberry Pi hooked to your TV, but those NVIDIA gigahertz they have now have to be put to use some way or they’ll go out of business like Toshiba. This is really about jobs.
Plus, if you forget to turn on the “Cloud’s” password and you get hacked then your whole fuckin’ œuvre could get copied and plagiarized. And then someone else will be signing books at a Barnes & Noble in Sioux Falls, starting to seriously doubt whether the sales of their Brad Thor-inspired, barely-disguised right-wing, geo-politico-techno-sexo-thriller will recoup the advance and the book tour expenses.
I mean, your dusty laptop could maybe handle that short story you have in you. You know, the one about the guy who goes to the nursing home and reads novels to his dad. He reads the same ones again and again because his dad as dementia and doesn’t remember. You think the guy is being great to his dad, but then the rug gets pulled the F out from under you when you realize his dad actually wrote the stories on the side while he was a CIA agent. But the son found them and published them as his own. So he’s the one getting rich off them even though he never wrote anything himself except a bunch of crappy novels that he never even tried to get published (probably because he had an old laptop)! But then you start to wonder, where’s the harm? His dad has Alzheimer’s, so he’ll never know. The dad never published them himself, so victimless crime? But then why didn’t the son publish them under his dad’s name? Well, maybe he needed the money or whatever. Or, he didn’t want the nursing home to get it! Yes. But then the son feels guilty because what he’s done only proves to him that he’s a failure with a Windows 7 crotch-cooker and his dad was a success. Or does he really feel guilty? There’s a struggle there. Maybe at first the son just read his dad the dad’s novels and he told him they were his. But dad wondered why he never published them and was critical of them, and then he forgot he wrote them, so sonny just started saying they were someone else’s novels — making up some cool, meaningful pseudonym — because it was easier. Then the son just over time took on the persona of that fake author he had made up to soothe his dad. Touching. And perhaps morally ambiguous. Maybe there’s all these legal issues or something as well. And it touches on topics of dementia and elder abuse and the nature of authorship and identity. And, of course, what is copyright anyway? At the end he gets a new Macbook.
Posthumous. Or, Birthwrite. Nice. (Why does every title have to be a pun, though?)
Your old laptop. With the VGA plug, the Firewire port, the old-printer-cable screw-in thingie, the USB 1.2 hole, the bloatware, the proprietary memory-card reader, the DVD drive, the standalone webcam, the Harmon-Kardon Xtreme Bass-Boost button, the burning heat…
It might be able to handle a 3,500-word short story. Or some light blogging. Maybe an essay or two on Medium. But trust me, your old laptop cannot handle your novel. Not the one you’ve been mentally workshopping since 1998.
So before you start writing, you better get a new laptop.
Because that is the only thing holding you back.
