Authors Electric

The other day, stuck between paragraphs, I dusted off a vintage Magic 8 Ball I had picked up at a yard sale, gave it a shake and asked: "Will I finish writing this book soon, if ever?" "No doubt about it!" Came a viscous, bobbing, red-lettered response in its little round window. The thing about oracles, as I learnt when I got into doing the I Ching back in the 1970s, is that the questions are more important than the answers, just don't ask the same question twice. Never one to pass up an opportunity to distract myself, I kept going - trending towards the ridiculous to see if I could get Mr. 8 Ball to melt down. "Why this? Why that? Why do I write, anyway?" Foiling 8-Ball is harder than one might think, using conventional wisdom. Really, it's foiling oneself. The standard Magic 8-Ball  (developed in the 1950s and inspired by a World War II, Three Stooges skit) has 20 possible responses floating in its mystic liquid of possibilities. They ru...

Iago and Othello I got to fretting over my fictional villains again the other night after flipping off the news (in more ways than one.) Too many real ones at the gates now. Though Trump and his barbarians are nothing new, their arrogance is more flagrant than any in my lifetime. The Death Star of demented greed appears at perigee, bloated with obscenely-financed self-assurance. You can't make these bastards up, even as parody. They're complicating my novel. Just when I think I've got the right shade of dystopia, my near-future narrative needs to turns darker. I've always found creating villains daunting. The memorable ones - from Iago, to Moriarity, to Voldemort - seem more challenging than heroes, particularly the multidimensional ones with whom we can empathize or at least identify with, like Medea, Lady Macbeth, and Raskolnikov. Not that villains are always needed. Protagonists can be their own worst enemies. A suitably sinister villain does, however, ap...