Am I back? Maybe, I dunno (Monthly update #18)

Also: Pixar, Jason Pargin, Mrs. Davis

Hey all!

For anyone who didn’t notice, I haven’t written anything in several months. Maybe I’ll tell you all the full story sometime, but lately I’ve been feeling pretty disillusioned about writing, and I have no idea what the next step in my alleged career would be, anyway.

I said I’d be back, though, if I felt like writing, and I sort of did, so here I am. Am I permanently back? I dunno.

I managed to pick up a bunch of new subscribers while I was doing nothing, though—mainly because I sent a year-old piece to Freddie deBoer for one of his “subscriber writing” posts and it somehow topped the list. If you’re new here, this is one of my “Monthly update” pieces—just a quick story from my life/career, a link to an older piece, and a recommendation of something cool.

---

“So how’s work?”

“Fine. I just got the bulletin cranked out for Sunday morning, and—oh wait. You meant the writing, I guess.”

“I—yeah. Wait, what were you talking about?”

I was sitting in my doctor’s office, which I hadn’t visited in a couple of years, so I guess I hadn’t told him about my schweet church receptionist gig. But he wanted to know about the writing—he didn’t care enough to follow my blog, I guess, but he cared enough to ask. Which was cool.

So I told him the truth: It wasn’t really going, at all, anymore.

“Why? What happened?”

“I—I could tell you the whole story, I guess? If you want? I know doctors don’t get a lot of time with their patients.”

He said he wanted to know, though. So I told him the whole story: About the agent who consistently ignored my emails, finally responded when I vaguely threatened her, read my new book and told me she loved it and then dropped me anyway. About how writing had become a chore for me, and I was out of things to say to the world, and I was forty and it seemed like the right time to grow up and get a real job. About how, despite everything, I’d still started querying agents with the new book, like a gambling addict who just can’t stop buying those lotto tickets.

“Well,” he shrugged, “not that I know anything about the publishing industry, or your writing, but I’d encourage you to keep trying. Just because it’s cool. Just so I can say I-knew-him-when.”

“There’s an awful lot of people who’ve been waiting a dozen years to say that. None of them can say it yet.”

“I know. But it’s still cool.”

He told me my blood pressure was normal, and I biked home.

I hate this godforsaken industry so much. But God help me, I still spent the rest of the afternoon looking up agents. I’m sure the next scratch-off will be a winner. 🕹🌙🧸

---

Poll of the moment

---

Two years ago

When I wrote this piece in 2023, it seemed potentially controversial to point out how oppressively mediocre all of Disney’s subsidiary studios had become—but now, two years later, it just seems banal and obvious. It’s amazing how quickly the Mouse House has burned through its vast stores of goodwill.

Disney is a perfect, if trivial, case study in how bad monopolistic practices are for consumers and markets: Is there any doubt that Pixar, LucasFilm, and Marvel were all doing far more interesting work when they were still independent entities? Now they’ve all been reduced to churning out ads for action figures and theme park vacations.

Oh well. There’s still plenty of great TV and cinema getting made—you just have to dig to find it. Speaking of which—

A few pieces I missed:

Since I’ve been away for a few months, I missed my chance to shout out this Mrs. Davis review, which might be one of my favorite things I’ve written—and also one of the most ignored, sadly. I guess most people won’t take the time to read a couple thousand words about a TV show they have no interest in, but please allow me to suggest that (1) there’s a lot more to this piece than my appreciation for the show, and (2) YOU REALLY SHOULD WATCH THIS SHOW! IT’S GREAT!

Not only is Mrs. Davis in a similar vein to my writing (which I assume you appreciate, since you’re here), but it’s only gotten more relevant over the last couple of years. It’s about a world that’s surrendered its thinking over to AI, which…uh…ChatGPT, please finish this sentence for me.

I also missed my chance to promote these other two pieces, which I don’t like as much, but you’re welcome to (re-)read them if you want. Here’s one about how to read more books:

One weird trick to read a %&$#ing book

And here’s a really dumb short story about worshipping chickens:

That time you started a chicken religion

---

---

Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

There’s an old TED Talk delivered by movie and TV director J. J. Abrams (Lost, the Star Trek reboot, Star Wars episodes VII and IX) called “The Mystery Box.” He gave it almost twenty years ago—back when it was still cool to like things like TED Talks and J. J. Abrams—which makes it sort of fascinating to look back on now, in an era when nearly everyone has gotten thoroughly sick of both.

It’s fascinating mainly because the emptiness of things like TED Talks and Abrams, though invisible to most of the kool kids at the time, is clearly present in it. Its nominal thesis is something like, “I just noticed that all the stuff I make contains ‘mystery boxes’!”—“mystery boxes” being Abrams’s term for unanswered questions that drive the storyline—but in practice, Abrams never really develops the idea or explores its limits (he mostly just jumps around and gushes about how much fun it is to make movies and use Apple products). It’s an exercise in vacuity because a “mystery box,” by itself, is vacuous—an unanswered question may be enough to initially hook the viewer, but, as Lost and the Star Wars sequels demonstrated,¹ it’s never a good substitute for an actual story.

If you want a masterclass in how to do a “mystery box” right, though, I can’t give a strong enough recommendation for

Jason Pargin

’s new(-ish) novel I’m Starting to Worry about This Black Box of Doom. The book’s setup is a literal mystery box—the whole thing kicks off when a mysterious young woman recruits a schlub of a young man to help her transport a box with unknown contents cross-country, no questions asked—but from there, it spirals into a wild chase and a biting satire of internet culture.

As the two characters set out on their odyssey, the social media sphere picks up wind of the strange goings on, and soon the rumor mill is churning with theories about who these two people are and what they could be transporting in the box. Is it drugs? A body? NUCLEAR WEAPONS??? Soon, everyone, from the FBI to the mafia to (worst of all) Redditors, is chasing after them, trying to get their hands on it. Pargin telegraphs early on that the actual contents of the box are something pretty stupid, but you’ll still find yourself on the edge of your seat, desperate for the moment they finally open it—not because you’ll care all that much about what’s in it, but because you know more than a dozen characters will have their worlds absolutely turned upside-down by whatever it is.

Alfred Hitchcock, who was a far better director than Abrams, liked to talk about the “MacGuffin”—a concept that vaguely overlapped the “mystery box,” and which he defined as “the thing the hero chases” (think the Maltese Falcon or the Death Star plans). What Hitchcock frequently harped on, though, was that it wasn’t terribly important that the audience care about the MacGuffin; all that mattered was that the characters cared. Gaping at a black box and wondering what’s in it might keep an audience engaged for a few minutes, but beyond that, there needs to be something more: a journey; characters growing and changing; people feeling ways about stuff. The real mystery box was the friends we made along the way.

Or…something.

I’ve been a bit “meh” on Pargin’s recent output (his two main series have been running on fumes for a while now), but Black Box of Doom is a book that shows he absolutely gets this, and he’s still got some vital contributions to make to the art of storytelling. Pick it up, but be warned it’s legitimately can’t-put-it-down. 🕹🌙🧸

1. I remember being caught off guard by fan outrage over Star Wars VIII after it (per the nerds) “failed to answer any of the questions” raised by VII (“Who are Rey’s parents???” “How did Maz get Luke’s lightsaber???”)—mainly because it never occurred to me that I was supposed to be wondering about those questions. They’re not, in themselves, interesting questions, so no answer to them could have satisfied anyone.