Skid Roche

one cigarette away

Originally uploaded by michele cat

If read fiction, particularly science fiction, and you’ve never read the wonderful Turkey City Lexicon, from the Turkey City’s Writer Group, I encourage you to do so. It is packed with brilliant insights into just how bad writing can get, and how good writing can misstep and still get away with it. The good news is that other writers are there to ridicule you.

As you know, Bob, the Turkey City Writers Group is a bunch of professional speculative fiction writers who live in Texas and workshop each others’ stuff, apparently without mercy.

I am struck by one particular Lexicon term named after the late Thomas M. Disch:

Dischism

The unwitting intrusion of the author’s physical surroundings, or the author’s own mental state, into the text of the story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision — when this is actually the author’s condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the story. “Dischism” is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome.

This reminds me the time I tried to write a vampire novel while I was attempting to quit smoking. Good Christ! These were the smokin’est vamps you ever done saw. They could suck down eight cigarettes a page while expositing copiously, and still have time to slam Macallan between turkeyfucks, because I was also quite poor at the time and could not afford decent liquor. It was shocking these dumb fucks ever had time to eat anybody. They also talked a lot about smoking: “Holy shit, Vlad, we’re smoking more cigarettes!” “These are great cigarettes, Morticia!” “I’m eating my cigarettes, Wiktor!” “Yeah, me too, Suspiria — cigarettes are delicious!” They eventually snorted cocaine and had some kind of freaky blood orgy, but I never got to that point because I realized that I really just wanted to write a love poem to cigarettes.

Sometimes I go back and glance through my old works from that period to see if story elements can be salvaged. I always end up wanting a cigarette.