Machine Man - Max Barry [104]
AN ARM LOLA
“I’m kind of stupidly proud of it. I mean, it’s so basic. But it’s a start.”
A START
“Yeah.” She lay her head on her arm, her free hand continuing to stroke my camera. “That’s what it is.”
It was odd, seeing her through a lens. But not as odd as I would have thought. Perhaps people could adapt to anything. Now I thought about it, it was pretty strange that human beings felt comfortable walking around in bodies mostly made of juice. That was actually bizarre.
CAN YOU SHOW ME THE ARM, I said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One day a guy on my website took me to task for dawdling between books:
What do you do all day? I read Twilight for frack sake. I’m so bored. Books! WRITE BOOKS! Short stories … anything.
I had been working hard, I felt. I had written lots of things. Novel openings that never went anywhere. Screenplays that were never made. Manuscripts that needed twelve months in the desk drawer before I could stand to look at them again.
I decided to prove I wasn’t sitting around on my ass. Wasn’t just sitting on my ass. I had a few pages of a story that wasn’t going anywhere in long format, and wondered how it might work in lots of little parts. On March 18, 2009, I posted the first section, 200 words, to my site. This was Machine Man, page 1. The next day I posted another hundred; the day after, 150 more. Then the weekend. I took a break. On Monday I continued. In the early days I had a dozen or so pages up my sleeve, but pretty soon the live feed caught up to me, and I wrote most pages in the twenty-four hours before posting them. Each day I read comments from readers and pondered their feedback. By December I finished, with a story 54,000 words long.
This novel is much longer than the serial and departs from it in several ways. That’s partly because the serial was a first draft, and therefore terrible, but also because the formats are so different. The serial was a collection of cliffhangers; the novel I hope is deeper and less tricksy. But this book couldn’t have existed without the serial, so I’m indebted to everyone who spent nine months reading it, one freaking page per day. Thank you to those who stuck with it despite the fact that I was sending out a first draft, which is a kind of crime for a writer, or should be. Thank you for the comments, which turned the website into a meta-work (The Annotated Machine Man) with ideas, predictions, and explanations. And enhanced, artificially augmented, thanks to those who contributed many, many comments, the most prolific of whom were Pev (still interesting), gStein, CrystalR, Toby O, Electrichead, David, Ben, fredzfrog, Stygian Emperor, Mapuche, coolpillows, Chemical Rascal (puns and haiku on demand), Alex, Ian Manka, Felix, C Leffelman, SilverKnight, Yannick, dabbeljuh, Abgrund, Alan Westbrook, SexCpotatoes, regtiangha, Neville, Adam Speicher (a.k.a. meta-Adam), tim, Katie Ellert (“Where’s Lola? Where’s Lola?”), Ajna, Isaac, Joe M., Justin, towr, Morlok8k, Ballotonia, Sander, Ted, and Robert Bissonnette. Many times I clicked through to the previous day’s page with dread, sure everybody must have hated it, but found cheers and jokes and spin-off ideas that buoyed me forward. Before I began, I had considered a warning on the comments page, something like: “Being critical of this thing while I’m still writing it may cause me to lock up creatively.” I didn’t do that and didn’t have to. Readers were far nicer to me than I deserved.
I used many reader ideas. I wasn’t sure I should admit that in print, but my legal advice is that you can’t copyright ideas, so thanks a lot, suckers. Wait. You didn’t type that, did you? Good. Because people would kill for your job, you know.
Thank you to everyone who tossed me an idea. Even the ones I didn’t use helped clarify the boundaries of my story’s world. My favorite was from Meredith Course, who educated me about brain plasticity and free-roaming