{"id":1168,"date":"2009-04-17T07:33:18","date_gmt":"2009-04-17T15:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/17\/writing-about-the-afterworld\/"},"modified":"2009-04-17T13:35:22","modified_gmt":"2009-04-17T21:35:22","slug":"writing-about-the-afterworld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/17\/writing-about-the-afterworld\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing About the Afterworld"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been feeling anxious about Jim and the Flims<\/em>, my novel-in-progress. I think it\u2019s useful to stay in a frame of mind of doing it my way, <\/em>rather than trying to make it commercial<\/em>. As has been rather amply demonstrated by my previous eighteen novels, it\u2019s highly unlikely that any novel I ever write will be a giant commercial success. The skittish fen are suspicious of me, and forever more will be. So why should I start groveling and bowdlerizing and self-censoring and hobbling myself\u2014especially if so doing vitiates my joy in writing?<\/p>\n

I feel cornered, backed up to a cliff\u2019s edge, and that I should try harder to be commercial. Hand in hand with that comes a feeling of rebelliousness. My instinct is to give “them” the finger and jump. And maybe, in the long run, that is in fact the most commercial move. (And keep in mind that “they” only exist in my head, that is, “they” are a certain set of voices in my ongoing tourtured-artist-type internal dialogue.)<\/p>\n


\n[My painting Big Sur at Lucia<\/em>, started at Lucia Lodge on my 63rd birthday. Prints at rudy.imagekind.com<\/a>].<\/p>\n

Maybe I flip my wig and go totally surreal with Flimsy. Random crazy stuff, like in the Alice <\/em>books. I have an idea for a garden of growing clones for sacrificing to the jivas, and that\u2019s a nice fresh image. As a working method, I could go for shock-effect after shock-effect, picaresque style, enjoy it locally, and that\u2019s all it is.<\/p>\n

But, face it, flipping isn’t enuf. I need a story-thread to keep myself wanting to sit down and write every day. When a book is going well for me, working on it is as interesting to me as reading someone else’s novel—I’m eager to find out what happens next.<\/p>\n

Another issue is that I need some consistent overarching relationship between our world and the alternate world \u201cFlimsy\u201d\u009d that Jim visits. Today I\u2019m entertaining the idea that Flimsy is in some ways the afterworld. I did use this move in White Light, <\/em>which was largely set in a kind of afterworld. So I\u2019ve mined this vein a bit, but certainly there\u2019s more ore in the seam. How might the alternate world \u201cFlimsy\u201d\u009d in Jim and the Flims <\/em>be the afterworld?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(Afterworld 1<\/b>) One possible move is the traditional one of giving the character a health crisis, then segueing into increasingly bizarre adventures, and then he realizes that he\u2019s actually dead. \u201cAnd then Jimmy Olsen realized he\u2019d been dead during the preceding N chapters, and that all those mad adventures had been afterlife experiences.\u201d\u009d [When I say \u201cJimmy Olsen\u201d\u009d I\u2019m riffing off those old Superman <\/em>comics where cub reporter Jimmy Olsen kills Superman, and in the last panel of the comic, Jimmy Olsen falls out of bed, and says, \u201cOh, it was only a dream.\u201d\u009d]<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A downside with the Jimmy Olsen move is that the longer you postpone the reveal (that is, the larger N is), the more annoying it is for the audience. Like they\u2019ve been reading along, and taking the story seriously for chapter after chapter, and suddenly you\u2019re telling them you’ve been scamming them.
\nAnd once a reader actually does <\/em> know that the character is dead, the adventures take on a special interest of a different kind.<\/p>\n

This said, if the main character is dead, this takes some zest out of the story, as who cares, after all, about what happens to a dead guy? And he can\u2019t really die, now, so what does he have to worry about?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(Afterworld 2<\/b>) A second way to write about the afterlife is to use Dante\u2019s move in his Inferno<\/em>. Dante himself isn\u2019t dead, he\u2019s on a tour of these other worlds. It\u2019s like an exploration of alternate universes. Note that Niven and Pournelle already wrote an SF pastiche of Dante, so I wouldn\u2019t want to copy any particulars, just the general notion of a living guy exploring the afterworld\u2014which is, again, the move that I used in White Light<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Kicking up the spook factor, maybe one or two of those three surfers that Jim meets before he leaves are in fact dead, they\u2019re ghosts or zombies? And maybe half the people at the surf party are dead, too. Surf zombies. That would be cool. I still want the drama of killing the obnoxious boss surfer Header with an axe, so maybe Header is alive\u2014but I guess he could be a zombie, and then he gets back up to his feet even with his brain gone and his head axed, all Vault of Horror style. Gnarly, dude. If Header\u2019s a zombie, then I can keep using him as a character even after he\u2019s been killed…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Is Jim\u2019s mysterious woman friend Weena something like an angel or a devil? Well, she\u2019s from this other world, which might be the afterworld, so maybe she\u2019s a ghost. Or maybe that world had native-born people as well as ghosts that have emigrated there from here.<\/p>\n

I do like the idea that Ginnie is a ghost\u2014this is the surfer woman whom Jim falls in love with. And once they\u2019re in Flimsy\/afterworld, Ginnie is substantial and he can make love to her. There can be some prefigurings of Ginnie being a ghost before she tells Jim or before he figures it out. She’s hard to see when it’s dark. Other people don\u2019t seem to notice her.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And maybe, what the hell, further into the book, widower Jim meets up with his dead wife Lucy over in Flimsy. Kind of an Orpheus and Eurydice number, I think I\u2019ve never used that pattern before, hooray, or wait, in White Light<\/em>, the guy does get a girlfriend over in the Land of the Dead, but it\u2019s not his ex-wife. Man, I\u2019d be hooking into a silo fulla corn with a dead wife routine, wheenk <\/em>to spare, very commercial. Especially when Jim can\u2019t bring her back from Flimsy to his homeland. Tearful fade-out. [Here’s a post <\/a> where at the end I explain what I mean by “wheenk”.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been feeling anxious about Jim and the Flims, my novel-in-progress. I think it\u2019s useful to stay in a frame of mind of doing it my way, rather than trying to make it commercial. As has been rather amply demonstrated by my previous eighteen novels, it\u2019s highly unlikely that any novel I ever write will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1168"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1169,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1168\/revisions\/1169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}