Control: The Hardworking Pessimist

I, Dalton Lewis, need to decide: am I positive or negative? I used to love the misery and fright of thinking that the world was broken and a sad and dismal place for quiet geeks who couldn’t sell millions of novels. Am I happy or am I sad? From youth I wanted to say something about not having girlfriends or good jobs or close female friends. I knew some wonderful people — Finnegan is the most loyal friend imaginable, and he loves board games and innovative role-playing games and is a father of two and married man. He loves all around him. Philip plays Warhammer 40k like it’s a work of art. He makes moves I’ve never thought of or would never see coming. Gilbert went to college with me and let me live with him when I couldn’t finish sentences. Sal — good old Sal made friends with me when I had no one. I wanted to show the world all those wonderful people, but it didn’t happen. Something got wrong in the mix, and I started to write glum stories about broken people winning in the end. I think that’s what got me started as a writer, and I want to continue to get back to that. I will not give up and wallow in my home, drinking zero calorie soda and eating donuts and barely walking around my home. No, I will work to make it in life.

That begins with my new novel, V Max One, a sci-fi epic about young men who are unhappy with their lives in the far future. Ares fails at his engineering job and begins to wander around, all night, and wonder what he’s supposed to do in life. He gets fired over and over and can’t find any women to talk to. He is underemployed and desperate and wants to lash out at the world.

Trying hard to write such a book does not have to correlate with optimism. I can be negative about the prospects of the world around us and still work my ass off to make something that is a work of art. I remember that I worked my ass off to have only a few people read anything that I wrote this year, but I won’t sit around doing nothing: no, I will try to read and write more. I will continue to try. No one can stop me from trying to write a work of literature.

I read novels that are works of literature and compare them to the most popular movies of the year. The movies seem very safe, trying to create something fun and interesting but not taking enough chances. Still, the Marvel movies and Star Wars movies are well-crafted, interesting stories that I enjoy watching. I just don’t know if they are trying hard enough to take chances and show what is wrong with life. I don’t know how many times the galaxy or planet can be saved.

Seriously — I liked the James Bond movie where everyone was trying to kill Judi Dench’s character because I understood the real-world stakes. Someone was trying to kill someone, someone we liked. The same happened in Logan, another movie that I liked, in which they wanted to kidnap or kill X-23, a young girl who Logan wanted to protect. Those were movies with real characters fighting to save a person. Those movies reflected something that, crazy enough, could happen in the real world.

I don’t understand these space epics in which someone saves reality from a diabolically evil figure. I want the good guys to have flaws. I want to understand the villain and maybe root for him a little bit. I don’t want this ridiculous and silly habit of saving reality. Okay?

I also want to craft better characters. I want to know these vibrant and interesting characters. I want my main character to be funny and self-effacing and to hate himself and to want to do something with his life. I don’t want a boring good person trying to save lives. God, that’s exhausting. It’s exhausting to have characters without personality traits.

It’s exhausting, and I will fight to finish it. I will fight to write a better grade of novel. I will try to fight desperately to show how fucked-up the world is — and not show some strong person save reality from a baby-rapist.

Thanks, and take care, friends.