National Novel Writing Month

It was National Novel Writing Month in November.  I sat down and tried to write a novel for about three minutes.  Here’s what I came up with:

BOOM!  A huge explosion. This is the first thing that happens in my National Novel Writing Month novel.  A gigantic explosion.  Massive wall of radioactive fire eating up the whole sky; trees instantly incinerated. Seagulls knocked out of air currents and turned to ash.  Rocks melted to glass.  Buildings crushed, like toys, in a toy crushing machine.  Crushed like toys during National Toy Crushing Month.  Cars, also like toys. Why is it always “like toys,” as though we crush our toys any more than we crush our normal-size possessions.  Toys are valuable.  Specifically to children, who are the people who own toys– nothing is more valuable than toys.  But anyway, these things are crushed like toys.  Like toys being crushed by a toy nuclear blast, except– this is not a toy.

Oceans evaporated.  The whole world now feels like a small unventilated bathroom after a long shower.  Sharks withering on the beach– once majestic, the king of the sea.  But who’s the king now?  No one. No one, you stupid fucking shark.

That’s as far as I got.  But still, I often think I should write a novel.  Because, you know, I wake up early or go out on my lunch break and sit down at my keyboard and move my fingers around until stuff comes out, you know; I might as well string a bunch of it together.  Maybe I would make some money.  Like my idol, Michel Houellebecq.  Here’s a guy who worked until he was nearly forty at a shitty job that he hated and was preoccupied with getting laid with teenage girls and was a miserable self-loathing person.  Then he wrote a novel called WHATEVER and it became, as they say, a sensation, and he was awarded medals and became well-to-do and was elevated to a sometimes respected celebrity– I was about to say “sometime respected, sometime loathed,” but I don’t think anybody loathes him. He writes candidly about his heterosexual views toward women, which is to say he’s a misogynist, but he escapes the vitriol of feminists for some reason.  Perhaps because he isn’t making any prescriptive announcements, you know.  He isn’t saying “like all pretty young girls, she was good only for fucking and therefore she shouldn’t have been allowed to vote;” he is simply saying “like all pretty young girls, she was useful only for fucking.”  Which is true.

Anyway, that’s what I want to be like.  Michel Houellebecq.  His first novel was like 80 pages long and was basically a transcript of a bunch of shit that actually happened to him.  So, I could do that.  Right?

So I will write a novel, and it will become a sensation.   Except it won’t, because you can only do that in France.  In America, the books that become a sensation are– I mean, the latest one is a piece of TWILIGHT fan fiction where Edward is a billionaire “industrialist” instead of an ordinary high school vampire and Bella is a cub reporter sent to interview him for the college paper.  And he draws her into a long sadomasochistic sex relationship like STORY OF O except instead of keeping her in a prison and handing her ass around to be gang raped by his buddies he flies her around on private jets between sessions of tying her up and ball gagging her and lancing her deeply with his giant industrial cock.

So that’s a successful novel in America.  Or it’s the original TWILIGHT.  Or THE HUNGER GAMES, which is actually good but come on.  Or it’s, on the “literary” side of things it’s Jonathan Franzen, or David Foster Wallace, one of whom is brilliant but both of whom are feminized nebbishes who are completely dishonest about sexuality.  A male novelist who talks about the way every man really feels about women, which is to say a misogynist, is anathema to the times.

So fuck that; I’m gonna be a farmer.

Tags: david foster wallace, fucking shark, jonathan franzen's nut sack, michel huoellebecq, national novel writing month, writing