What Was I Saying...?

Whenever I get deep into my writing projects, I get an itch to return to Michael Macbeth. Originally conceived thirty years ago (yikes), Michael took a lot of (undisguised) inspiration from Dirk Gently, and to this day is a character I greatly enjoy—but for whom I have a very rough time coming up with ideas. I did manage to write one short novel featuring him, as a NaNoWriMo project, but it was… thin? There was some genuinely good stuff in it, but the whole was definitely lesser than the sum of its parts.

On a related note, the topic of the Brigid and Greg Fictionlets comes up in conversation periodically; Multiclass Geek recently pondered what a story about that dynamic duo now would look like, compared to their heyday of the early 2000s, but that idea would by necessity take the story places I wouldn’t really want to go (Isadora’s age being just one example). Like Jeeves and Wooster before them, Brigid and Greg are inhabitants of a particular moment, and letting time pass for them would force them to change into something else.

The biggest obstacle with both Michael Macbeth and B&G, I think, is that they are both about “a vibe.” Michael Macbeth is “creepy and kooky on a rainy afternoon in a college town.” B&G is “what if Jeeves and Wooster were Gen-Xers?” But a vibe is not a story, a vibe is just… a vibe. When I go to write about these characters, I get hung up on trying to think of things to actually happen, because part of the requirement is that it shouldn’t significantly change their status quo. A Michael Macbeth that doesn’t live in his shabby little apartment always just a few dollars away from broke, isn’t Michael Macbeth any more. The goal for Brigid and Greg in any long narrative would be “get out of whatever is going on and go home.”

In writing The Sky Pirate’s Prisoner, I had the freedom of characters who could end up anywhere as long as the journey was interesting—if anything the whole premise of that story is that the status quo is untenable and must be destroyed. How do you send heroes on a journey where the goal is to remain mostly unchanged by the end?

Obviously it can and has been done, many times over. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, just about any superhero you can name, all have long and serialized careers that consist of resetting back to starting point at the end of each story. And those work by focusing on the plot, the series of events, rather than on character development. As somebody whose strength is primarily in character development, I suppose it’s no surprise that I flounder there.

But I keep trying! And I will probably continue to keep trying, as long as I can put words together.

So NaNoWriMo is going the way of the dodo. Posts about it on Mastodon or Bluesky all tie that to their embrace of AI, but what I’ve seen suggests that they’ve been struggling for some time. Given how excited I was to participate in it once upon a time, I would expect to have stronger feelings about it, but honestly I just don’t. I have reached the stage where I assume unless proven otherwise that enshittification of anything good is a matter of when, not if; as such, I just don’t emotionally invest in such things the way I once did.

But I’d say that NaNoWriMo is an exemplar of a larger trend of the web and post-web era: so many of the web’s best things are just not viable economic concerns, and should never have been treated as such. Just like nobody should reasonably expect to somehow make a living building model trains or hiking mountain trails, “encouraging people to write” is a valuable activity on its own, but trying to make it financially remunerative is just not a thing that will go anywhere. In the same vein as “the Post Office is a public service, not a business,” our culture has an unhealthy fixation on trying to make everything profitable somehow, even things that just aren’t.

There’s a reason so many artists and other creative types can only make a living via some kind of patronage arrangement. Art, writing, other creative pursuits are immensely valuable to society without being profitable, in the same way that exercise or brushing your teeth are valuable to an individual person without being profitable. There are exceptions of course, creative people who can make a living or even thrive through their work—but there are also professional athletes who make a living or even thrive through doing exercise. But those exceptions are extreme outliers.

If NaNoWriMo had stayed in its lane, so to speak, and always been considered a valuable community activity and event instead of a money-making enterprise, it would still be alive and well and beloved by many. (The whole AI thing was a huge blow to their reputation, of course, making the beloved part less of a slam dunk… but who knows how much of the AI thing was a desperation bid to make a profit? I’m not versed enough in the matter to have a meaningful opinion on it.)

So, alas, poor NaNoWriMo. I am proud that I managed to succeed at the challenge once or twice, and I’m grateful for the impetus it gave me. But the truth is it had long stopped being relevant.

-The Gneech

Do you label your works as LGBTQIA+? Why or why not?

“It used to annoy me when my elders would bemoan the sad state of the world,” said Greg. “But in this case, things really did used-to-be-better. All of our society’s evils linger on like a cold that just won’t go away, while everything good withers and dies.”

Brigid narrowed her eyes. “Is that some kind of crack about my mother?”

“What?” said Greg. “No! Your mother is a national treasure. I’m talking about the degradation of our culture.”

“Anything specific?”

“Even Dunkin’ Donuts doesn’t carry crullers any more,” said Greg.

Brigid nodded sadly. “We live in an age of barbarism.”

Greg sighed, clearly fighting off despair. “How can we have fallen so low?”

-The Gneech