One of my articles made it into the latest issue of International Paneling. Writing for this publication is more relaxing than stressful, and it's fun to see my work appear alongside edgy artsy stuff. The editor has threatened to begin actually paying for articles someday. Maybe in 2023?
I spent the first part of today selecting book passages to read in an upcoming video. What I found were short and sweet excerpts from three novels that could work. Another idea would be to read the first two chapters of The 321 Incident in their entirety. This would convey the setup for the whole story, which might grab potential readers. But it's in the neighborhood of 2,500 words, so that might be too long. Here are the passages I came up with:
From The 321 Incident:
"What else do you want to say about 321SIM and 321 Syndrome?" asked Tom.
"Only that the whole thing is a giant lie and everyone knows it," said Hunter. "The thinking in the Oval Office is that the country's falling apart so why not try to unify it in a fight against this Syndrome? Never mind the gazillion problems with that. Think of the money changing hands over this new emergency. Industrial medicine. Law enforcement and corrections. All the big tech companies. We're already into hundred billion territory."
"That's astonishing," said Tom. "And you say it's all based on a lie?"
"321 Syndrome is the lie," said Hunter. "It's not covid. You can't do an antigen test to detect it. And we all know what a laughingstock the list of symptoms is. So, yeah. I'm Hunter Domino and I'm going on the record to say that 321 Syndrome is a massive fraud, perpetrated by self-interested officials using the 321 tragedy as an excuse to move their agendas forward."
"Wow," said Tom. "Hearing you say it so plainly is a little chilling."
From The Paradise Anomaly:
For 72 hours they holed themselves up in Lana's apartment, performing the fairie ritual. They poured the honey into a large mixing bowl and ate it with their hands. Lana put out a pitcher of milk to drink from and they took turns refilling it. Periodically, one or the other would take a rose bath.
The rhymes got old within the first hour. The rose petals eventually became gooey. Honey residue coated the milk pitcher. They slept and woke and meditated. Took more rose petal goo baths. At the end of day two, they shed their clothes. By unspoken agreement, they stopped wiping off the rose petals after baths, such that they became encrusted with the damp flower petals.
By day three, the ritual's magic was evident. The pair was, in a sense, just two people doing gross stuff in an apartment in Harlem. Yet both Lana and Oliver felt themselves entering a space apart from the world. Silent and covered in goo, licking gobs of honey from their fingers, they felt perfectly at ease. Perfectly normal.
A knock at the door interrupted their reverie. The door unlocked and opened. Lana assumed it was her roommate returning early and prepared an explanation for the unusual scene. But it wasn't her roommate at the door.
From One Man Embassy:
Over a series of increasingly mean emails, Hequa and Maya broke up. During this time, Hequa moved his nest and other personal property from his studio apartment to the embassy. The Great Bamzini called ICE on Hequa, which resulted in ICE agents being turned away from Jhanya Embassy by Defense Intelligence Agency personnel. Robert and Sallycat kept their distance, but each politely submitted to a DIA interview about the tritals. Eventually, Heuqa was alone in the embassy, with a new passport, playing with the joystick trital as if it were a video game.
Vibrant yellow tendrils of fungus had started growing on their twine-and-sponge scaffolding in the corner opposite the trital tanks. A garbage can filled with cut-in-half objects sat near the door. Two card tables and three secondhand office chairs arranged the room's remaining space haphazardly. Giving up the Joystick, Hequa went over to the garbage can and stared into the mass of cut-in-half cups and locks and stones. Considering what to do about this accumulation of waste from his online performances, Hequa wondered what would happen if he used his draath crystal to just melt all of these cut-in-half things into one big lump.
Would having such a lump be better than having a can filled with small, heavy things? As an experiment, Hequa fished enough cut lock pieces out of the garbage can to fill his largest crucible. After melting this scrap, he slowly poured molten metal on the concrete floor to make a blob. Watching the blob cool, Hequa was surprised when the door opened and two people he'd never seen before came in.
There was another passage from The Paradise Anomaly that I was thinking of, but I couldn't recall exactly where in the story it was, so I'll have to keep looking for that one. My usual method is identifying a word from the passage with low document frequency and searching for that, but I can't recall any unusual words in the passage I'm thinking of. Maybe its location in the document will come to me in a flash of insight. Or maybe it's just not the right one to use for the new video.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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