Watch Your Back, Beck: Blistering Excerpts from Rumproast’s New Prog-Blog Novel!
I will not lie to you. I will not “spin” you. And I absolutely, positively will not be undersold.
“Raven had been with many ‘progressive’ men since she first ‘went online’...”
A woman, some men and the Internet. What great story isn’t built on those three simple elements, and/or a sadistic female prison guard? But in a market crowded with marquee names like Glenn Beck and Larry Sinclair, I knew I needed more than just a dependable, workhorse premise to light up all those jaded Kindles. And that’s when I wrote discovered the Ten Rules of BlogFiction, which made Who Blog in Darkness the eminently-optionable fake book you see before you today.
BlogFiction Rule #1: Lead with a Left Hook
Raven had been with many “progressive” men since she first “went online.” They had all been sleek, hip and wicked funny – more than a few, in fact, with genius-level intellects – and her soul ached to be a dancer in their mad, noble, intoxicating dream. But, no matter how much that ache ached, and no matter how failed and dishonest her trembling weakness made her feel, she had always selfishly withheld a small, secret part of herself, even from her blog-leader, Hillaire. A part she had protected and nurtured like the pearl in an akoya ever since the day she found out Rock Hudson was gay. The part called “sex.”
Hillaire, whose proud. idealistic mind was yet no stranger to empathy, detected the subtle tremor in her embrace. “Is everything all right, Raven?”
“Of course,” she said, lyingly, as she brushed her flowing hippie-hair back from a face that fiercely bespoke generations of benignly-enforced social diversity. “Will I see you tonight at the blog-slam?”
BlogFiction Rule #2: Look for an Open Character, and Throw Deep
Like a shivering Bolshevik moth drawn to the twirling candle-flame of Leftist Utopianism, Raven glared into the beckoning incandescence of her flat-screen display. As her fingers closed around the molded shell of her ergonomic, wireless mouse, a thousand memories suddenly flooded her mind, like a sudden, thousand-fold flood of memories. People. Moments. Lessons learned. And in a flash she realized, It was time.
Armand had awakened her to the poetry of Ché; while OortVoyager had opened her eyes to the yawning chasm of urgency and style that separated “Access Bloggers” from “whiny-ass-titty-babies.” And despite her silly Midwestern corn-country fears, she had permitted SithDude to teach her how to field-strip, clean and fire a hibachi with the cool precision of an Iron Chef.
She remembered Hillaire’s teasing question at the end of the weekly editorial conference call: “Do you really think you’re ready to ‘go live,’ Raven?”
Hell, yeah, she thought to herself, as she typed her password into the Admin gateway page.
BlogFiction Rule #3: Bridge Plot Holes With Gratuitous Comic Relief
“Axerod? Fuck Axelrod,” HarajukuGod32 thundered, via email. “I’ve got a fucking RL day-job, for Chrissake. I spend my waking life trying to parse the difference between ‘Half-Off,” “2-for-1” and ‘BOGO,’ and that slimy bastard wants to slide a knife between ‘Single-Payer’ and ‘Universal Coverage’? I’m a copywriter, dammit, not a rocket-enterologist!”
BlogFiction Rule #4: MORE SEX, PLEASE!
“Have you ever been with a real woman before?” Raven asked, cooingly.
“Fuck if I know,” I answered, with a look of brooding, mannish intensity. “But I keep condoms in that Mentos tin, as Chairman Mao instructed.”
BlogFiction Rule #5: Life is Conflict, Conflict Means Hits
“Damn,” Hillaire whispered, as he clicked down the SiteMeter referrals. “It’s what I’ve always feared most.”
“DOS attack?” piped Were-Hamster.
“No,” said Hillaire, slumping down in his Pininfarina Aresline Xten with Twitter-adjustable lumbar support. “It’s a blog-war. I never wanted this. I swore I’d never let it happen. But now it’s come. You’d better break out the Bunnahabhain and stand by to close comments.”
“Good God!” rumbled a smoky voice from the phalanx of co-bloggers behind me. “We’re gonna need more ice on that server!”
BlogFiction Rule #6: Make the Main Character Just Like Yourself, Only WAY COOLER
“How long?” I screamed into the five-mile-deep wedgie separating K2 from the adjacent peak, not really expecting to hear an echo. How long had it been since I first started posting? How many aliases? How many spoofs? How many dreams had I crushed, how many hopes ruined? Had it all started with Denver? No, long before that…“back in the day” when Wingnuts wore their colors with pride, like Harley patches, and you could surf 24/7 without finding a single trollish comment that began with “I know we’re not supposed to link to WorldNetDaily, but…”
In the Grand Blogmology of the Universe, I guess I knew that was really no time at all—hardly a fart in a Black Hole. But 5,000 years—that’s a shitload of time,” I thought, flicking my sputtering, broken kreteck onto the pristine ice, “and that’s as much time as the fookin’ Arabs have had to come up with a decent clove cigarette that doesn’t die on you like a stick of wet moss, but they haven’t licked it yet. And so we wait.
BlogFiction Rule #7: Where There’s Friction, There’s Fire
“My Mother smoked Cheroots,” I typed, crisply, in a larger-than-usual Italic font. “What’s your point?”
BlogFiction Rule #8: You, Too, Can be a Dead-POTUS-Whisperer
It occurred to me that I had seen that gaunt, schoolbookish face before, and I frantically searched my meat-memory for a match. “You look tired, son,” he said, resting a low-opacity, weightless hand on my shoulder.
Then it hit me, and I felt myself rising reflexively to attention. “Tired and sober, President Wilson,” I lamely japed. “And, if it’s all the same to you, I think I need to fix the ‘sober’ part right now.”
BlogFiction Rule #9: Don’t Forget the Obligatory Epiphany and Flounce
“Yes, Ayn Rand wrote books that were more juvenile and simple-minded than Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway. And, yes, you have to be some sort of slobbering, congenital dickhead to pitch fuck-the-useless-eaters ‘selfishness’ as a ‘virtue.’ But—Christ on a red, twisty swizzle-stick—is this what ‘progressive’ blogging has been reduced to? Do we bestride this twinkling global synaptic cloverleaf merely to point and laugh at the colossal dimwittery of people who confuse cutouts with candidates, varmints with pundits and ‘de Tocqueville’ with ‘de Tocque-a-Planned-Urban-Center-of-Tomorrow’? Maybe I don’t speak for many of you here tonight, but I can and must cry out for everyone, everywhere who’s had it up to here with the ‘Daily Word Jumble.’ I mean—fuck—a crossword puzzle is one thing, but that shit’s just freakin’ ridiculous.”
BlogFiction Rule #10: There Can Never, EVER Be “Enough” Sex
Raven set her open copy of Going Rogue on the nightstand, and nuzzled against my shoulder. “Can there possibly be a bigger dick in this whole wide, crazy Universe?”’ she inquired, softly, sleepily.
And as I peered into the gathering shadows at the foot of the bed, I could swear I saw Woodrow Wilson smile.
Here he paused, the pen fell from his fingers…
Posted by StrangeAppar8us on 06/12/10 at 07:05 PM • Permalink
Categories: Rumproast Related •
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