The Machine Of The World: Afterward

In August of 2004 I got a bright idea. I asked my wife, Elvira what she wanted for Christmas, figuring I had a good four months lead time to shop around. To my surprise she said she wanted, me to write her a, “Gothic fairy Tale with pictures.” I figured I’d write a short story, ten maybe twelve pages long, do a few doodles to make it look pretty. It’d take two, maybe three weekends (a month, tops), plus it would give me an excuse to fiddle around with Adobe InDesign, which I’d wanted to tinker with for a while. I could print it at home. It’d be a fun project and a personal gift. What could be better?

So I started flipping through my notebook, looking for ideas. I found a page-long summery of a dream I ‘d had a few nights before, about an undead king who kept his family up at night, murmuring into the pipes. I remembered that dream vividly, which is a fairly rare occurrence. It had a very Guy Maddin feel to it, weird, a little silly and kind of surreal.¹ I could see the flicker of the silent era cinematography, sepia toned with German Expressionistic sets, like something out of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. It was decidedly Gothic.

I was still in Grad School at the time, working on my Masters Degree in Library Science, so naturally I had all the time in the world to write and illustrate a Gothic Fairy Tale. Thanksgiving rolled around and I hadn’t written more than four pages. They were (and still are) the first four pages (mostly), so it was a start but I knew there was no hope of me finishing it before Christmas. So I applied for an extension, promising Elvira the story for her birthday.² That way, I had until July and I would be done with Grad School in early May, so I had plenty of time.

Over winter break, I wrote the first draft. It clocked in at 3,000 words, around 12 pages. Most of it is still there: the first part of chapter 1, a short version of the Parliament scene in Chapter 2, most of the three physicians (chapter 5) and the last half of chapter 17. The slightly mad, undead King was there, as was the sleepwalking Princess Lydia and ambitious but incompetent Prince Laslo. The only thing missing was Inez. In this version, Lydia was the protagonist. For most of the story, the only character who spoke was the King. Everyone else’s words would be summarized and they wouldn’t get a voice (no dialog) until after the King was dispatched. Once free of their ancestor’s oppression, the Prince and Princess could talk for themselves. This created a neat little restriction that also encouraged me to be brief. Otherwise, I’d just write pages and pages of dialog and the thing would never be done.

My friend Kevin read the first draft. He liked it but felt it lacked something. He then offered the single best piece of writing advice, ever: a story should at some point reach for the Transcendent. That moment of clarity where the world is put into sharp focus. It doesn’t have to be a big epiphany or even one that is achieved. It doesn’t have to be spiritual transcendence, either. It can be numinous: as simple as recognizing true love, the power of the human mind to imagine and create and solve problems, or the visceral realization of living in a weird and beautifully tragic world. But there has to be a hint of something larger at stake than just the tally of plot coupons adding up to a resolution. And he was right.³ This story didn’t have that moment. I spent the next two weeks trying to figure out why.

It occurred to me that part of the problem lay in the inherent structure of the fairy tale as a genre. Most fairy tales are about either noble princes or beautiful but put-upon princesses. The Divine Right of Royalty, in other words. As a free thinker and fan of the Enlightenment, this went against my basic principles of liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness. In real life, princes and princesses are spoiled brats like Paris Hilton or Prince Harry of Wales.⁴ Now sure, fairy tales are often idealized versions of life and don’t have to reflect reality as such, but at the same time, Disney has damaged so many children by convincing them that they are all princesses entitled to wealth, power and privilege just because they are unique and beautiful snow flakes. And that’s not what I wanted to have going on, even in the subtext. Also, since this fairy tale was for adults (specifically, one beautiful and smart adult), it didn’t have to be simple minded, and since it was also in the Gothic tradition, it didn’t have to have a happy ending. In fact, it probably shouldn’t. So I decided that the main character should be a servant. Someone close to the royal family, in order to observe and become tangled in their web of intrigue but not a royal herself. a commoner with a pragmatic perspective. Since it was for my wife, I decided she should be female as well. Also, female protagonists, especially a cute good natured girl who is oppressed by her circumstances, is fairly easy to root for. You want her to kick ass and survive against the odds.

I rewrote the story, adding in Inez Vespertine, Lady’s Maid to Princess Lydia. Right away, things were working better. From her perspective, the Miasma became a numinous experience, something to be embraced rather than feared. The second draft was up to 20 pages but it worked better. My friend Jenny read this draft and offered some advice and preformed admirably as copy editing. Still, something was missing.

It was now February and that’s when something wonderful happened. Pure serendipity. Disney had acquired the distribution rights for Studio Gibbli and released the first wave of Hayo Miyazaki’s films. Among them was my all time favorite, Nausicca of the Valley of the Wind. I saw this film when it was released back in the 80’s. That version had been poorly dubbed and cut up by distributors who thought that Americans wouldn’t jive to Miyazaki’s eco-mysticism. But even with these egregious changes, the story blew my eight year old mind. Pieces of that film had been lodged in my subconscious for decades and though I hadn’t seen the film in years I bought it the day it came out. I was not disappointed.⁵ I watched the film again and it was even better, as they had restored all the footage and gotten some seriously talented voice actors.

That night, I dreamed of fungus falling like snow. A world consumed by mushrooms, where death was like dreaming… I woke with a head full of ideas. The moment of serendipity came when I looked out my bedroom window and saw that a half foot of snow had fallen in the night. The University of Maryland closed the campus. I had a day off to write. So I did. Over the next ten hours, I completely rewrote the story, adding the Ergot Forest and the Marquise. +7000 words in one day. It’s still my personal best writing day, ever.

This third draft was double the length of the second. It was over 40 pages long and I hadn’t even started the illustrations. And I wasn’t finished. This draft was read by my friend Eva, who offered some advice on how to make Lydia more interesting. She also suggested that the third act was a little rushed and there should be more motivation for Laslo than just him flipping the crazy switch.

Over the next three months, I wrote in the evenings and on weekends, scribbling notes during lunch break. By May, I was up to 25,000 words, or about 85 pages. At some point during this time I hit on the idea to use footnotes as an expository device.⁶ One of the perennial hurdles in science fiction and fantasy writing is overcoming the infodump. If your story takes place in a moderately realistic setting, there’s no real issue here, unless you are getting technical about something like cryptography or history. A good writer can usually find a way to fit this into the narrative without breaking the flow. It’s a bit more challenging when it comes to stories set in imaginary worlds where the history, culture and even laws of physics are completely foreign. Finding a creative way around the infodump is always a challenge. If you just plow through it, you can end up with “As you now, Bob…” dialog, where characters explain basic facts to each other for no apparent reason. Why would two specialists in wormhole physics explain elementary principles to one another, in the middle of an alien invasion? They wouldn’t but the reader needs to know this stuff, and so does the author, if only to avoid handwaving and set up the rules of how this world works. Footnotes allow this to happen unobtrusively, plus they provide extra elbow room for color commentary, historical asides or just plain fun stuff that doesn’t necessarily move the plot along but helps set tone, build the world, or provide atmosphere. When it comes right down to it, storytelling is mostly about the details. Get those right and the reader is willing to forgive a few week plot elements.⁷

Over the next two years, I worked on this book, set it aside to start a second novel, came back to finish this one, decided it wasn’t really finished after all and went back again (at least twice) to add more scenes. The illustrations were a completely different story but let’s just say they were finished, eventually. By the time I was finally done in April of 2008, the short story with pictures that I had promised my wife for her birthday had grown to 55,000 words, or over 180 pages long. I’d written a novel by accident.

That’s where I hit a dead end.

I had been idly looking for a place where I could get a few copies printed up. Someplace inexpensive but run by someone who got what I was doing and would do a good job. I decided against finding a publisher for two reasons: 1) three and half years of working on what was supposed to have been a project that took a month, tops had grown beyond all intentions and taken on a life of its own. I was thrilled, and so was Elvira but I really wanted to be done with it, as I had other things scratching at the inside of my skull, wanting to get out. As much as I love my wife, her birthday present from four years ago needed to be wrapped up, soon. I didn’t want to spend another year or two finding a publisher and dealing with all that it implies. And 2) No one was going to be interested in a book by a first time author in the Post Apocalyptic Mushroom Forest Fairy Tale sub-sub genre.⁸ It might sell ten copies, nine of which would be sold if it was timed to come out at the same time as a Tim Burton film, so they could ride a small crest of Goth popularity. Maybe if it had been written by Neil Gaiman, or some already established author, the story might be different. But then, Neil Gaiman could sell a hundred thousand copies of a napkin on which he had scribbled notes for a short story, so there’s no real comparison there. I’m not Neil Gaiman. And if I were, this story would not be this story.

So yeah, dead end. I had made a pitiful attempt at printing and hand sewing an earlier version of the book myself. It was fun but not quite as pretty an end product as I had envisioned. And after three and a half years of waiting for her birthday present, Elvira deserved something a bit more professional looking than what my amateur book binding skills could produce. I was running out of ideas and afraid that maybe my aspirations exceeded my skills. I briefly toyed with the idea of just printing out the manuscript and illustrations and having it bound like a thesis. It would have technically been a book but… Luckily, I was saved by cartoon hobo cats.

About this time, an online cartoonist named Ape Lad started to gain notoriety for his Hobotopia comic strip, which is about hobo cats who speak in the patois of internet memes. Like most people, I found out about Hobotopia through boingboing.net. I was a regular reader and soon tuned in weekly to read the latest adventures of Pip and Kitteh. Then Ape Lad self published a book of Hobotopia comics on lulu.com. That was it! The answer! It hit me like a wifi enabled, fully digital, open source sledgehammer. Print On Demand publishing was inexpensive–no upfront costs for printing. It cost just as much to print one copy as it did to print a hundred: nothing. If Elvira was the only person to ever read this, it would still be a success in my eyes.

So, that’s how The Machine Of The World came to be. It’s no “Last son of a dying race of super beings adopted by kindly rustics,” but there are worse origin stories out there.

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[1] I don’t remember now if I had seen Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary before or after the dream. I’m going to say before, as the image of Lucy’s mother in the glass casket strikes me as a solid inspiration for the image. That and the idea of premature burial from Poe. When choosing your inspiration, might as well steal form the best.

[2] Her Christmas present that year was a hardback edition of Howl’s Moving Castle, which is now one of her favorite books.

[3] This bit of advice has proven itself true more times than I can count. Whenever you read a book or see a movie that feels like it lacks something, now you know what that something is: the author has failed or not even attempted to reach for the numinous. This is what makes Battlestar Galactica such a great show: almost every episode grabs that epiphany and won’t let go. The handful of episodes that don’t seem to work are the ones that fail to grasp the moment of transcendence but the series as a whole wrestles with the transcendent on a weekly basis. This is also why the Star Wars prequels are so bad: George Lucus isn’t even looking for that numinous moment, he’s just going through the motions. The original trilogy is mostly successful (the first two films, anyway) but it appears now that this was mostly an accident. The transcendental moments in Star Wars* piggybacked their way into the film when Lucus cribbed from The Hero’s Journey and the numinous bits in The Empire Strikes Back are there because Lucus had next to nothing to do with the script and were put there by Leigh Brackett, a sadly overlooked but talented journeyman sci-fi author.

*A New Hope for you kids out there who think its the 4th film. You must understand, in the galaxy far far away, you start at 4 and then go back to 1 after reaching 6. You must unlearn to count the way that you have learned. From George Lucus.

[4] To his credit, Prince Harry is shaping up to be a decent human being, as princes go. Though a child of wealth and privilege, he not only joined the army, but volunteered to go to Afghanistan and follow in the noble tradition of the House of Windsor and serve his country. Paris Hilton, though not real royalty, certainly acts like a princess. She decided to clean her act up as well and not be a complete whore for a whole year. Oh, and adopt a new dog. It’s the thought that counts, I suppose.

[5] Disney isn’t completely evil, despite making “brat” a badge of distinction rather than an epithet. They’re simply incompetent when it comes to making good films anymore. They do have one of the best distribution networks though and have made two good decisions in the last decade. The first was to acquire the distribution rights for Studio Gibli and the second was buying Pixar. Since both were pretty much masterminded by John Lassiter, they should basically let him run the place and maybe they’ll make a few more good decisions. Though, they still have a lot to answer for foisting Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan on the world, so maybe not.

[6] he first time I ever saw footnotes used creatively like this was when I was 18, while reading Robert Anton Wilson’s Historical Illuminatus Chronicles. In Vol. 2, he starts laying on the footnotes, introducing characters and subplots that run parallel to the main action of the story. It would be a few more years before I discovered that he had gotten the idea from Flan O’Brian’s The Third Policeman. Where Suzanna Clarke got the notion form I don’t know but she uses footnotes in such a superb manner in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel. There’s practically a whole other novel just in the footnotes. So we could say that I stole the idea from RAW, who stole it from Flan O’Brian and was reminded of the idea by Suzanna Clarke.

[7] See: Indiana Jones and the Raider of the Lost Ark. Why does the US Government care that Nazis are wasting time, energy and resources hunting down mythic pottery? It can be argued that they aren’t really, which is why they hire an archaeologist to go find the Ark of the Covenant, rather than send a team of OSS agents. But at the same time, why bother? As far as we know, Indiana Jones lives in a realistic world, albeit one fraught with elaborate booby traps and ex girlfriends. And yet, the US government is afraid that Hitler will uncover a magic box that shoots death rays. And they want it so they can stick it in a warehouse where they will never use it, ever. Wouldn’t it make more sense if they encouraged the Germans to waste resources looking for any and all mystic artifacts by spreading disinformation? Just have your spies drop oblique hints as to the whereabouts of the Spear of Longinus, Thor’s hammer and Hypolita’s magic girdle. Hitler will be so busy with his head up his ass, looking for magic treasure that he’ll be less of a threat. Instead, the G Men send an Archaeologist into an unstable region occupied by Nazis, just in case magic is real. Indy’s motivations cover up this hole: he wants to find the greatest historical artifact of all time and has no problem doing so on Uncle Sam’s dime. So we’re off! Cue the John Williams score.

[8] There are only two other works of fiction in the Post Apocalyptic Mushroom Forest Fairy Tale sub-sub genre: Naussica of the Valley of the WInd and Super Mario Brothers. Since they are both Japanese, The Machine Of The World is technically in an even tighter niche: the Western Post Apocalyptic Gothic Mushroom Forest Fairy Tale. While I have an entire sub sub-sub-sub genre to myself, try convincing a publisher that they should invest in this area. There is easily a fan (maybe two!), just begging for more.