Live editing my own bad joke.
Sometimes we need to do silly things that don't work.
So, I brought in a few friends as ‘sensitivity readers’ for this, because it’s such a hot topic right now that it felt appropriate. I’ll be hiring some for my Furukawa trilogy too. If you want to know where I got some of the information from here, there are some helpful sources lower down.
So I’m doing some stand-up soon, and I wanted to have something about a controversial subject that could be written in an informative and engaging way. I didn’t want to just wade in with shock factor or rhetoric disguised as jokes, I wanted to write something clever.
I wasn’t even going to read it on stage. Really it was an exercise in over-engineering, something which I know I can get carried away with1. So my goal was to write a pun, over-engineer it, and then work back. This is easy with a subject so convoluted as the one I have chosen.
About the Who Built The Humans? point. Entertainment is seen as a dirty thing in literature. People are far more concerned with two main things now.
being ‘woke’ (keeping up with social trends to maximize sales from whomever it is popular to pretend to care about this week. For an example, see any book marketed as LGBT that murders its LGBTs in the opening preamble).
being ‘literary’ (writing a book about a flimsy-bodied prattling fool who peels an orange for twenty-eight pages and has a sex life described with the sort of language usually reserved for adverts about perfume or expensive yoghurt. Bonus points if the Guardian calls your book POWERFUL or STUNNING, and people pretend to understand what it’s about so they can flirt with their somehow more annoying friends.
Being literary has never concerned me. Even when I was doing alright at writing serious poetry, what drove me was this idea of the poem as a puzzle for me to solve, to riddle it into something entertaining for the reader, an active, living universe they could briefly inhabit. So the long-winded pun further down this blog is something that I know might not appease my entertainment-first philosophy, but I am posting it now to show you what the slab looks like. This is a rare glimpse into how I actually put the stories together. They start quite convoluted. Usually I am writing seven or more things simultaneously2, and a lot of the ‘writing’ is really picking the slab apart and constructing the dust into nice little statues for you to enjoy. Who Built The Humans? was originally a LEAFLET designed to advertise my other book, The Stephanie Glitch. WBTH is only so big because the idea demanded to grow, and I was dragged along.
My writing process
So far, my writing process is thus:
Have the idea, put it in the slab
Research the idea
Write the story, referring back to point 2 when necessary
Tie it all together and make it entertaining
Refer back to point 2 again, making any real-world stuff as accurate as possible (for Nori Furukawa, this included researching Japanese immigration to America in the mid 1950’s)
Bury the clever bits (this is the most important. The immigration research isn’t in the book at all, but it informed how characters reacted to Nori. The same goes for guns. I wanted to make sure they were accurate)
Refer back to point 1, weave in more ideas
Polish the story
Refer back to point 1, rinse and repeat until story is complete
And the slab I am about to show you has not gone through that process. It is merely at point 2, so is a messy web of references. But I like its density, and potentially its destiny. It reminds me of some of the poetry I wrote at uni. It is also time-sensitive. It relies on social media trends to find an audience.
So what did I write about?
The controversy that surrounds JK Rowling like a fart in a lift.
Oh no. He did the bad thing.
Because it’s easy. Because it’s omnipresent in the public mind. Because I find it interesting (knowing both trans and detrans people quite well). And because people are saying you “can’t write jokes about it” not merely from a high-ground or virtue signalling faux moralistic perspective, but implying as if it is some great intellectual challenge, that I, a soyfreecisheteronormativeprobablybinarybutnotreallydemipoet3, cannot comprehend the subject even at the surface level4.
I take that as a personal challenge. In fact, whenever someone tells me I don’t know enough about a thing, I write about it.
Writing is a form of research. It threads your thoughts together.
Whenever someone tells me I can’t understand something, I see it as a puzzle to solve.
Someone once told me I’d never get a project I was working on printed, and I was so imbued with spite that I did it in less time than planned, and it came out great. It’s been a few years now, and their project has remained dead, probably because they spent all their development time bitching at other creators. The same has happened with stories about political divides. Someone said I couldn’t write a joke about the politics in America because it would offend their particular side. This motivated me to power through the story, and to make it even spicier. It’s only a simple story, about a red vote and a blue voter creating a purple offspring that pisses them both off, but it’s a lot of fun. That story will pop up in Hologram Kebab soon enough, and I am adding more spice each day. So forgive me if you ever tell me I can’t write about a thing. Because it means I definitely will (doesn’t mean it will be good though, that’s an entirely different problem).
So here is my idea.
It was going to be a tweet. Since JK Rowling is trending all the time now, it seemed well-timed.
Would be quite amusing to learn that Robert Galbraith privately donates loads of money to teens on tiktok for "teetus deletus" (thanks to cool and trendy Dr Sidhbh Gallagher for popularizing that term)
It is really a joke about pen names, about the current fiery debates about “separating the art from the artist” and about how our pen names can be in competition with themselves.
It has layers, which makes it funny to some people, but utterly obscure to most. It has three or more things going on in such a confined space, that it doesn’t really work. So here I am workshopping my own writing.
But explaining a joke probably means it isn’t that good. Right?
Here’s the explanation…
Would be quite amusing to learn that Robert Galbraith privately donates loads of money to teens on tiktok for "teetus deletus" (thanks to cool and trendy Dr Sidhbh Gallagher for popularizing that term)
Robert Galbraith is one of JK Rowling’s pen names.
JK Rowling is the author of the Harry Potter books, and among other things, is very critical of 'top surgery' on young people.
"Teetus deletus" is a play on "Fetus deletus"
"Fetus deletus" is an old meme about why none of the teens in the Harry Potter books have magical abortions. It is the name of a proposed spell for abortions, and it first showed up I think on a tumblr post around 2013, but don’t quote me on that.
Dr Sidhbh Gallagher is a plastic surgeon who rose to fame for making quirky tiktoks aimed at kids, and has at one point performed a cosmetic double masectomy on a 13 year old girl. Sidhbh popularized the term “Teetus Deletus” as a way to make the medical language around ‘top surgery’ more accessible and funny for her primary audience; trans-identified teenage girls.
I don’t have a sixth point but that last one was so mind-numbingly grim that I felt obliged to put something pithy and witty here. Go look at a gif of a kitten or something. I’ll see you in a minute.
Okay so, we have the “joke” so let’s chisel away at it.
Would be quite amusing to learn that Robert Galbraith privately donates loads of money to teens on tiktok for "teetus deletus" (thanks to cool and trendy Dr Sidhbh Gallagher for popularizing that term)
What’s wrong with it? Firstly it is convoluted. It brings together a handful of seemingly unconnected things (Galbraith, Tiktok, Sidhbh Gallagher).
Secondly, it is about a controversial and sensitive subject. This is reason enough for most people to avoid writing it entirely (they don’t want to be ‘cancelled’). But as I said earlier, this is a valued part of my process. The thing is here. I am making it public for the first time (you should see the original God stories from WBTH. They got dark fast. There was one deleted story called THE LITTLE METAL CHOIR BOY and you can guess how that went). The point of this imaginary tweet is as a piece of creative writing, something to get me to write better things in the future.
Thirdly, it doesn’t have much universal appeal. It has a very small target audience, and that means it would probably collapse in on itself or just result in some unfollows (ooh scary) or angry messages (ooh scarier) on twitter, if it was ever posted.
It’s also a bit wordy.
So let’s polish it.
Would be funny to find out Robert Galbraith privately donates loads of money for “teetus deletus” and this whole thing was an attempt by JK Rowling to re-separate her pen names.
That’s better. We know now that RG is a pen name of JK. Most people are aware of (or at least have imagined their own version of) her stance on this issue because inexplicably, it is always on the news. I’ve also avoided having an opinion either way here, which is good because in truth, I don’t know what to think about a lot of this. The discourse moves fast and viciously. People tell you that people have said things to people who upset other people. You can never find the beginning of arguments. Twitter is just a room of screaming people you sometimes wade into. Maybe one kicks at you, maybe another sheepishly holds your elbow. But they all say the same thing.
“THE OTHER GUY STARTED IT!”
Writing that little post was fun, though I do feel this new version is a bit… neutered.
You just got to see my writing process at a very early point. I used to put this stuff on my Patreon (no link, it’s not ready) but now I am polishing it so that donations are optional, and the content is permafree here. That’s my way of saying thanks for an amazing few first years as a full-time author man person thing. I am very almost making a living out of this.
Here it is again. Any future TV interviewers now have no questions to ask me. This is my entire thought process. This is me. You could bring me back from death with this.
Have the idea, put it in the slab
Research the idea
Write the story, referring back to point 2 when necessary
Tie it all together and make it entertaining
Refer back to point 2 again, making any real-world stuff as accurate as possible (for Nori Furukawa, this included researching Japanese immigration to America in the mid 1950’s)
Bury the clever bits (this is the most important. The immigration research isn’t in the book at all, but it informed how characters reacted to Nori)
Refer back to point 1, weave in more ideas
Polish the story
Sources
“When you can’t get a woman sacked, arrested or dropped by her publisher, and cancelling her only made her book sales go up, there’s really only one place to go.”
- JK Rowling, responding to a pipe bomb threat on twitter.
(half the development time for Who Built The Humans? was turning my heavy concepts into easily consumable stories, and putting entertainment first. A third of the total time was taken up with the simple arranging of stories, so that no two would ‘clash’ in a way that wasn’t purposeful. Anyone who reads it front-to-back gets a uniquely different experience to those who get swept up in one universe)
Working on nine books right now. I know, it’s a lot.
Note that my pronouns / sexuality / gender / religion / favourite coffee, are not featured on any social media, unless as wordplay or parody. I could easily be a non-binary, bisexual, demiromantic atheist (I fit those terms about as well as the average person fits their horoscope), but I find all of those labels so anxiety-inducing and limiting that it causes me chest pain. I’m not joking, the whole thing is anathema to my existence. It is dehumanizing to me. I am Phillip. I write stories. Everything else is secondary (and usually, private. Get your eyes away from my sex life.)
I’m certainly ‘gender-nonconforming’ as the term is so nebulous, so catch-all. But so is my mum, and my cat, and the guy in the supermarket. I’ve been asked what my pronouns are, if I’m “Non-binary because of your hair,” and told I was ‘transphobic’ for the simple crime of sharing a Jordan Peterson meme. All of this very personal information is probably quite good for dating bio filler, or for wasting valuable word-space on the banner advertising your upcoming spoken word book, but what it doesn’t do is say anything about you, at all. People might convince themselves that their ‘identity’ (in this new meaning of the word) conveys something about their personality, but it doesn’t. I’d prefer to hear what music you like, what art you hate, what your favourite colour is and whether you prefer to build castles or cave bases in Minecraft.
Whatever happened to people sharing the art they liked rather than the genders they would like to touch? I’ve never had a dating profile, but if I did, it would go like this:
“Do you like David Bowie? If not, then why the hell are you here? #bowiesexual #labyrinth”
This smells a bit churchy to me. Jokes are seen as harsh criticism, and criticism is seen as something only the church itself can dole out. Sure, jokes often can be criticism, and in some cases a joke about a subject like this is really just someone being a dick and claiming it’s a joke when nobody laughs, but that doesn’t mean no joke can ever be written about it that isn’t good. To suggest so would be to imply you have wrote all of the jokes and checked. And you haven’t, have you?
Thank you for reading all this way. As a special reward for the 4 of you who are patient enough, I want to tell you that I will be launching a big Kickstarter soon, and making Hologram Kebab free! As well as a poetry collection, if I have the time.
Stay innovative
-Captain Carter