Newsletter from Jay Wilcox, November 2018: On Emotion and Convenience

Good morning/afternoon/evening!

I'm working on another round of edits and additions to my novel Music for Parasites. Here's the elevator pitch, as it stands: 

When his daughter goes missing, an exterminator moves into the attic of a former client—without them knowing. A close reading of middle-class suburbia, Music for Parasites explores loss and desperate love, projection, and the quest for heroic redemption. Can you love someone who doesn’t know you’re there?    

I welcome any and all feedback on this.

I've been adding to manuscript, writing things out by hand before typing them up. I'm using a legal pad and all my favorite felt-tip pens. I've used my grandfather's old typewriter, too. It's good to write in other media, away from a computer screen. Do something less convenient. Do whatever you can by hand, and maybe you'll notice things you didn't notice before.

I've been thinking a lot about convenience and media lately, which leads me to think of some of my favorite stuff from TV and movies. Remember the "I am the one who knocks" monologue from Breaking Bad? What about the replicant Roy Batty's "Tears in Rain" soliloquy, or Aragorn's battle speech at Black Gate?

If you're not familiar with any of these, I'm sure you still have a ton of frisson moments from your favorite media. And now, with the internet, you can access these moments any time, anywhere, back to back to back. You can slow down the clips and replay them over and over, pinpointing the exact moment your amygdala lights up. This convenience, however, comes with a cost. Ever seen Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory? It's so damn good because of its ending, and I refuse to search for the ending on YouTube. What oomph can a moment have if we don't do the hard work of building up to it?

Some things are beautiful in the work it takes to get to them. If you're texting/tweeting during a movie, the movie's made lesser. Period. More often than not, you have to experience a work in its entirety to be so rewarded, so commit, dammit.

Thank you for reading my newsletter.

Infinite Regards,

Jay