How I Got Bizarroized

I read from a young age. I started with Agatha Christe, then I passed on to Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke followed. Bizarrely, I just got into the Harry Potter books at a later age, and fell in love with the series. The Lord of the Rings I read in three days as part of a bet (I know that today this don't seem like a big deal, but I was sixteen, and reading that colossus of a book was a big achievement for me).

I was getting older and continued reading books by renowned authors. William Golding, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin. Whatever caught my eye, I would read it.

When I was seventeen, I began writing.

Correction: When I was seventeen, I began trying to write.

I had infinite story ideas. Whole worlds bloosomed right in front of me, weird characters seemed to born from some uterus in my head.

I participated in a online writer's workshop, which made me friends I still have to this day. But I never produced nothing of quality, except for a story or two.

I had MS Word panic. That black cursor on the screen seemed more like crosshairs aiming at me. Things came out wrong, they hit the paper differently. The beautiful babies I spawned in my Mind's Uterus came out deformed. John Merricks in literary pieces.

There was a time I began thinking that I had no talent at all. This is common, different people had different talents. I played bass guitar, in bands, and I always thought of myself as a good musician, maybe my talent was that one. But then why did those ideas popped up so profusely in my head?

This year, I discovered Bizarro.

My God.

The things I read, they made me smile.

How did I not know about this? How could I lose time like this? Suddenly, it made sense: All the ideas I've ever had went through some sort of cultural filter between the uterus and the paper. I was trying to fit in some (let's say "mainstream") style or genre, and this was sullying my thoughts. This was the radiation that was deforming my beautiful, chubby, pink-cheeked babies.

Today I can sit down and write something I will not hate afterwards. I'm writing a novella, something that was unthinkable for me. I couldn't see me writing anything longer than short fiction. I'm trying to be part of a community that is, unfortunately, a continent away, but I still try. I friended a shitload of people on Facebook, just for being writers or people involved in the genre.

Please don't worry, I'm not some creepy psycho stalker.

I'm just trying to be a part of this wonderful community, that I just now found.

Thanks for reading

Pedro

Introductions + The Michael Bay (Prologue)

Hello!

This is the first part of my first novella, "The Michael Bay", which I'm currently writing. It's the very first draft, but I wanted to share it with the Bizarro community, and I also wanted to use it to mark my first blog post. I hope you'll like it.

Synopsis:

"A town with a warehouse filled with Michael Bay clones, ready to go out into the world and make awful movies. But their excrement, dumped into the bay, is eaten by tiny sea lice, and the lice become parasites that turn the people they infect into characters from Bay's movies."

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It’s sad, the life of a Michael Bay. Living in a warehouse, surrounded by individuals identical to you, eating some artificial paste from a filthy vat, having to eat it with your hands and fighting with other Michael Bays to not end up without nothing, shitting in a hole in the ground, bathing only once a week. The list goes on.

         The worst of it all is this void in my mind. Since I woke up twenty days ago, I remember only that my name is Michael Bay. And I also remember a bizarre quantity of knowledge on how to make melodrama-filled action films with poorly constructed characters. This will probably be useful to me, since I feel a enourmous urge to go out into the world and make such films. I’m thinking of a love story set in a space station that is being invaded by aliens. Or, a love story between a sailor and a female lieutenant set in a soviet nuclear submarine during the Cold War. I’m not sure that there were any female lieutenants in soviet submarines during the Cold War, but that’s just a minor detail.

New idea: A love story between two Michael Bays in a warehouse full of Michael Bays while the Earth is being threatened by a fatal asteroid. Though they were all identical, the two Michael Bays of the story can recognize one another only with a glance, strong as it is their love. I can include a tasteful sex scene, their naked bodies griding in the gray, shapeless eating paste.

Sometimes I want to die.

We can’t even see the sunrise. There are no windows here. The only possible way out is the hole where we piss and shit, in one of the corners. One Michael Bay tried to escape by crawling through it, and he came back all covered in filth, saying that there was a grid on the end, blocking the way. The food vat is filled automatically, by small pipes that dump the food there, and our bathing is nothing more than the flooding of the warehouse, which occurs through the pipes on the walls. The shitting hole is closed by a sliding lid, and after the bathing time is over, the lid slides open and the water is drained. Apparently, we don’t need oxigen, since we’re kept submerged for at least one hour.

New idea: A love story between a Spanish Civil War soldier and a tango dancer set during a elephant stampede in her village. This may have some geographical prolems, but that’s for the writers to worry about.

What matters is the story.

The days go by in glacial speed around here. Tectonic plates movement speed. We wake up, we stumble around for a while, we try to pitch movie ideas to each other, we remember we’re not big Hollywood producers, we get depressed, we eat violently, we stumble around a little more, we shit and piss and jerk off with everyone looking. And then we finally lay down on the floor, cuddled up with each other, dreaming of our multi-million dollar movies and all the adulation and acknowledgment we deserve. When we close our eyes, we dream of a wonderful life. Wonderful, because it’s not the one we have now.

Being a Michael Bay sucks.