Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Aimee Picchi’s “The Only Writing Advice You’ll Ever Need to Survive Eldritch Horrors,” first published in Lightspeed Magazine in July 2024. Spoilers ahead!
Our narrator writes in second person point-of-view, so let’s call her “you” below.
Your ex-boyfriend, who hesitates to call himself a writer because Rejections, thinks 2P-POV is “limiting, even off-putting.” Regardless, you write to him in this mode. You’re not trying to be off-putting. It’s just he hasn’t answered your emails or texts, and he’s sent your letter back unopened. Since he constantly reads writing advice articles, you’re composing one intended only for him, to slip under his door. Stupid idea? Maybe, but you’ve just gotten off an exhausting night shift at your real job of combatting eldritch horrors. So…
Error #1, demonstrated throughout the article: Second Person POV.
Error #2: Starting with your main character waking up.
Your ex thinks such openings are “boring and unoriginal.” But the tension in your relationship began with all the mornings he woke up alone. Last Sunday, he texted at 3 a.m. while you were fighting off an “absolute monstrosity,” so the exchange didn’t go well. He didn’t buy it that you were handling a work emergency—what kind of middle-of-the-night emergencies do accountants have?
You should have told him you were a cop or crime reporter. It didn’t help that you came home with glop in your hair. He declared he’d had enough of your lies, then broke up with you!
Error #3: Listicles.
Your ex thinks they’re “cheap tricks” (…not that he won’t sneak-read them). Here are his reasons for breaking up:
- You’re lying about your work.
- Your phone has an encrypted message service that pings every time you vanish.
- Whenever you’re dealing with “accounting emergencies,” people die gruesome deaths.
- He deserves better.
Error #4: Purple prose.
Overly ornate descriptions kill narrative flow, your ex contends. You know there are worse things plaguing your “adored conurbation,” which bathes in “crepuscular beauty” even as “rapacious monstrosities” swim up from their “underworld of hunger and horror” to “haul their twisted souls onto the metropolis’ fair streets” and “fill their gullets with the flesh of innocent citizens.”
Error #5: Flashback!
Ex says no one likes being pulled out of the main storyline for dives into the past, but you can only explain your situation by flashing back. See, you were twelve and on a school trip to the Metropolitan High-Energy Collider when an earthquake caused dark matter to spew out over you and twelve classmates. Later you’d learn a disturbance in the undercity eldritch portal created the quake. Following hospital stays, you and your friends were transferred to a special school that stressed martial arts instruction. The dark matter had left every synapse in your bodies brimming with power. Not quite human anymore, you and the other “Lucky Thirteen” were the only ones who could combat the monstrous invaders.
You had to maintain secret identities to safeguard your loved ones. You and the rest of the Thirteen had enough trouble keeping yourselves safe; two decades after the Collider accident, only five of you remain.
Error #6: Spare your darlings.
You must be merciless, your ex believes, in editing out characters, plotlines, and details that don’t further your story. You, however, wish you could have spared your seven dead colleagues. You wish you could continue to spare your ex from the hideous truth, but you must be candid. It’s your only shot at redemption.
You can’t stand to lose anyone else.
Error #7: Telling instead of showing:
Show story action, don’t tell it, your ex insists. But you have to tell him about your work. To show him up close would endanger him.
Knowing about your real job, he may utterly reject you. Still, for him to forgive your lies, the truth must be told. You made mistakes, but with the best intentions. Think about how best intentions can justify even the cardinal writing mistakes above. Look at the great second person stories, stories that meander with beloved characters and purple prose, that pack in listicles, flashbacks and exposition that are perhaps unneeded but so wanted. Sometimes rules are better broken than observed.
So you hope your ex will give you another chance. If you survive the coming night of horrors, you’ll tell him about your battles. But you’ll show him that “your character and love run deep.”
This week’s metrics:
What’s Cyclopean: There’s a whole section on/of purple prose here—the city is an “adored conurbation” of “crepuscular beauty,” under attack by “rapacious monstrosities.”
Weirdbuilding: Once an earthquake at a high-energy collider can create superpowers via dark matter, we are definitely in the realm of comic book physics. If you could get clearly detectable dark matter out of a collider in our world, what you’d have would be a Nobel Prize.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
For many unfortunate weird fiction protagonists, the unimaginable intrudes into ordinary life just once and breaks their comfortable paradigm into smithereens. They are forced to correlate the contents of their mind and, despite all efforts at denial, to admit the reality of things that make humanity seem puny and trivial. They can no longer retreat into the comfort of surface appearances—everything they know has been proved a tissue-thin illusion.
Sometimes, though, an author needs an excuse for a series—and at that point, reality-breaking abominations get penciled into your Tuesday schedule after the stand-up meeting and hopefully before lunch. The hazards of the professions may be high, but at some point the capacity for shock dulls. You can get used to anything.
Thus Buffy. Thus Blackwood’s John Silence, Shaw’s Devin Stacy, Le Fanu’s Hesselius, and McGuire’s Fighting Pumpkins. As Blackwood’s editor pointed out, a shared character can tie together many disparate stories, while single-story clients can all go as mad with revelation as you please. But then, as Buffy points out, you can’t get through seasons’ worth of that sort of thing without developing more complex trauma than a single episode permits. Nor can you live as a constant protagonist without serious wear and tear on your relationships. Especially if you’re so unfortunate as to have a secret identity.
Picchi’s unnamed narrator has that misfortune. Even beyond the secret identity, she was drafted as a hero in childhood, has been losing compatriots steadily, and has a terrible cover story. Accounting? Only in Stross’ Laundry Files universe, where elder god incursions regularly result from mathematical errors, would that be a good match.
Our narrator has also clearly heard her ex going on extensively about his work, or she wouldn’t know enough to put together this little listicle. It does make me wonder what the eldritch-battle version of introductory writing advice looks like:
- Denial is not a river in Egypt; the sooner you acknowledge what’s happening, the sooner you can both fight it and get therapy.
- Check sources besides the Necronomicon, and make very sure of your translations before invoking anything.
- Avoid mushrooms.
- When you’re out of options, never assume that you can’t ram Cthulhu with a boat. It just might work.
Et cetera. But this is a story about breaking well-meaning rules, and about the possibility of something working out in spite of obvious mistakes. “Think of all the glorious stories written in second person, novels meandering with beloved darlings and purple prose, stories told via listicles and stuffed with flashbacks and exposition that might not be needed but are still desperately wanted.” Indeed, not everything needs to be, or should be, spare and streamlined, and for some topics that prose style is as bad a match as accounting and superhero schedules.
There’s one important fact about writing that the Narrator doesn’t seem to have picked up: Writers are always eager for new material. Her ex might be frustrated with her hidden life, but he may well be utterly delighted with what she’s finally revealed. Every Holmes needs a Watson, after all. And every struggling author needs a Holmes—or a Silence, or a Stacy—to come home from a hard day at the not-office, get their feet rubbed, and provide fodder for the muse.
Anne’s Commentary
The song “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” written and performed by John Ondrasik (aka Five for Fighting), saw much play after September 11, 2001 as a tribute to the victims of the World Trade Center attack and its first responders. It was also featured in the television series Smallville, which centered on Clark Kent’s teenage trials. So you wanna be a superhero, with powers far beyond those of ordinary human beings? Better listen to this song first, because the superhero gig isn’t all fancy red capes and the adoration of your particular home metropolis. I bet the narrator of Picchi’s “Only Writing Advice” has “Superman” as her cell ringtone.
It’s sure not easy being her.
For twenty years, she’s accepted her fate-ordained task of defending her city from eldritch monstrosities. In the beginning, she had twelve super-colleagues, the classmates who were exposed to the same collider-failure blast of dark matter as herself. The superkids, giddy over their cool new powers and hero roles, called themselves the Lucky Thirteen. It would probably take quite the flowchart to illustrate the intimate relationships that formed within the group over the years. Given the need to maintain a cover identity, where better to find mates than among your fellow secret soldiers. With them, you didn’t have to maintain the illusion of a “normal” life. You didn’t have to be afraid they’d be unable to understand your situation.
You didn’t have to lie.
Lies are slow poison to a relationship, their toxicity building with each dose of falsehood. Then may come the Big Exposure, too likely to be the fatal dram. Picchi’s narrator hopes that her ex-lover may be able to understand why she’s been lying once she tells the whole truth and nothing but. She hopes he’ll be able to forgive her. She’s got to hope, doesn’t she? The Lucky Thirteen have dwindled, violently we must fear, to a Not-So-Lucky Five. If four of those supercolleagues have already paired off or proven otherwise ineligible, where’s the narrator to look for love if not among “civilians”?
Whatever organization is behind the Five had better start creating more abomination-busters. Was the event that caused the original dark matter burst a singular one, not to be reproduced by mere humans, or even souped-up not-quite-humans? It can’t be that ethical issues are the problem, not when Beasts From Beyond are nightly reducing the citizenry, aka the Tax-Payers.
Man, I’m sounding as cynical as our narrator has an arguable right to be. Yet she still has hope. Her character and love must “run deep,” indeed. They are what deepen “Only Writing Advice” from a thoroughly enjoyable mash-up of stock writing How-Tos and stock cosmic horror to a moving testament to resilience which silenced my snorts of mirth.
Do I think Mr. Ex is likely to react well to the narrator’s truth-telling? No. The last item in his “listicle” of reasons for initiating a break-up is that he “deserves better” than her. Here’s another writing truism: To be self- and goal-centered with regards to your work-in-progress may be a necessary mindset. For example, living with a beyond-human freak who too often spends the night fighting monsters is bound to distract you and disrupt your writing process.
On the other hand, think of the firsthand (or safely secondhand) material you could garner from such a mate. If you’re a weird fic writer, that’s got to offset the annoyance of slime stains in the bathtub and chitinous bits left in the washer and dryer. Also, if this as yet “minor” incursion from the depths becomes a full-scale apocalypse, who better to have at your side than a certified Abomination-Buster?
Something to think about, Mr. Ex.
Next week we’re taking a break for American Thanksgiving. We return on December 4th for Chapters 40-42 of Pet Sematary, where everyone acts sensibly and follows advice. I mean, I’m assuming? The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
