Okay, no use of hiding my ardent envy, way back, of the demigods who could casually flash their IDs of membership in Writers Union. And yes, I cherished a vague dream to earn a living by my books printed sometime by someone somewhere. Later, I just spat at the hooey, openly and profusely (hard to describe how willingly it went out) and now I write for my personal entertainment and then publish the books online for free downloading. The Russian Litres library brands them with the obnoxious «18+» mark while the overseas Smashwords platform use a more civil definition – “books for adults”. Whichever way no kid can decry my products as means their grannies used to molest them at bedtime with.

Thus writing became my instrument of pleasure to fill the educational gaps tracing back to my adolescence years.

Nowadays it’s just a mouse-click away, this or that kind of tutorial ‘Masturbation for Dummies’ or, maybe, ‘Headfirst Crash Course…’ and so forth, I am too lazy to find out the exact tittle but tutorials are there 100 per cent. Not a chance the stuff pulled for so hotly by Hollywood and Italian cinema will remain uncovered.

I mean, the learning curve looks too steep and makes me hesitant to follow the ever modish way in dealing with unhealthy amounts of spare time. Seems like, my innate laziness prevents my grabbing anything weightier than a quill.

And it is when we, at long last, arrive to the final question concerning the subject in hand. (If you still follow.)

How to write?

The question is too abysmal to answer it before the upcoming blackout (because of the blockade which we’re living thru here the electricity is supplied in rational 3-hour fragments to make the endemic life-style as harmonized as possible). For which obvious reason I’m gonna consider the question under the next heading in this here preface under the cloak of a dissertation.

e. The awl pricks out of the knapsack for all to see!

We are a mighty enviable crowd. Look around to get proud what an unparalleled stretch of time we‘re living thru and recollect the verse from the high school curriculum: “Happy are they whose lot it is to visit this world on its fateful days…”, and so on because no one remembers the following lines even less the name of the poet. Yet, some deep thought sits there, maybe.

The world we’re visiting now is on its cut and run, globally, innumerable streams of refugees plod on along the roads all over the earth’s face both accelerating and slowing down (by their counter-directed movements in treks dispersed too chaotically for a meaningful account) the spin discovered and declared by Galileo.

Messy madhouse everywhere. Yet, there still are places for sober people to reach out to each other. One of such spots provides proza.ru – long live the site! It’s where I can meet so dear to my heart compatrio… er… sorry, guys, I revved overmuch at this point because at proza.ru I, actually, have none of the kind.

The site whose visitors’ majority do share the mutual historical past. Our dads and grandpas stomped in the same columns to the front lines, and extermination camps, and demonstrations on Mayday and on the Great October Revolution Day. Our genes got accrued with a special chromosome, odd yet useful bugger, for composing false reports and giving bribes to the established cadres.

Deeper than the unenlightened rest of the world comprehend we the famous address of N. Khrushchev to the UN General Assembly—off tore the the berserk hero the shoe from his left foot to hammer repeatedly at the varnished rostrum top in time to maddened chant, ‘I’ll show you the motherfucking Kuzka’s mother!’

That’s when even the most experienced synchronous interpreters scratched their well-trained heads: who’s Kuzka?!

(*Note for the Generation Z: Khrushchev was the head of the Soviet Union. And what a clever head he had! Even at hangover spells. He could announce the precise date of Communism coming in its own right all over the USSR or give out a motivational divination, like, ‘We’ll catch up America and overtake them!’)

And after the indestructible USSR collapsed disintegrating into separate states sprung up from our mutual Motherland fragments, I was left without countrymen and my relief and consolation comes mostly from the same language users who roll out their literary works at proza.ru each one with their own spelling innovations.

To them, my lingua-roomies with acute graphomaniacal addiction, address I my question—

How to write? Tell me!

‘Write’ not in the sense of poking the keyboard with a finger or two but as regards quality – how? So as to reach an effect stronger than the moonshine shooting down to your very heels, the quality awakening self-admiration, ‘Bastard SOB, you’ve done the real thing!’ That’s what I crave for.

Well, okay, you know as well as I do there’s a slew of courses, master-classes, and webinars all anxious to sell you all kinds of know-how that ‘just works’. However, no use in hooking us, the lingua-roomies, with spangle glitter and chaff stuff that makes us retch.

I think, when I think (not constantly yet prolongedly), that a forum-like approach is what we need here combined also with willful sharing of personal experience. All of us have this or that trick begotten in hard labors, some ‘scribbler’s charm’ to run the sought result down and fixate for readers’ gratification. This here prologue is the cornerstone which I put, in full command of my sane and sober (as of yet) frame of mind, into the foundation of the edifice of gratis dispensation assets amassed concerning how to write so as not to feel ashamed in the long run.

You can do writing in different ways – sober, drunken, giving free reign to your loco-motion reflexes, and etc…

(*The user of LMR, the third from the above mentioned methods, should equip themselves with a couple of ball pens and a pack of copy paper (A4, 500 sheets per pack) and start writing without watching what they, actually, write. Neither plot nor story line, nor characters’ names are needed. All the details are decided by the skeletal-muscle parts of the author whose mission during the creative act is to bring themselves to and hold on in the state of ‘automatism’ which, by the way, is the name of this particular method.

In the morning, the loco-writer checks the thing produced while they kept the pen replacing the filled-out sheets, and choo-chooing on, swoony and enthusiastic.

Well, well, well, let’s see what I created this night? Oh-oh! What the… Well, I never… I be damned if it’s not… Yes! It’s the fourth volume of War and Peace written just overnight! O, fuck! The fourth volume for the fourth time in one month!

No wonder, and no use hitting the roof when you let the outflow gush on its own accord, uncontrolled, like, AI throwing together programs for its private entertainment.

Up front, I have to disenchant you, the trick described here is not my choice, I prefer “in absentia” digging. The idea was picked up from a prominent Soviet author from the period of stagnation in the USSR.

So he instructed (I don’t divulge his name for human reasons but those interested indeed might contact me by email), ‘It was Chekhov to tutor me. I opened a book of his stories, and began copying, line after line’.

Even though Chekhov failed to steel him into Chairman of Writers Union of the USSR (not coach’s fault obviously, the trainee should have licked himself into shape under tutelage of Comrade Sholokhov) still and yet the guy got trained enough for the position of Manager of War Prose Department.

Weird as it seems, we still can see a scintilla of sense in his reasoning – when you follow someone’s back very closely, step after step, the trick decreases the wind slaps into your own mug…

And now the last fig leaf falls off my winding perambulations, it only remains to confess who namely was chosen for the paragon of artisan while producing the work that follows after concluding this here prologue which I still cannot shut up with.

The tricky subtlety of the question in no way succumbs to its importance, however, one more detour.

A line-by-line copying author’s text (who’s a worthy candidate? naive gull, you!) is for dummies. I prefer translating. But over again: who from? After Joyce and Pynchon to pick up some 50 Shades of Murky Shit? The like tender-mindedness doesn’t stand to reason…

Well, on the second thought, a possible undertaking, hypothetically, the Shades, yet practically I’ll doze off halfway thru any moony-wooly para…graph… (Yawning.)

Damn, enough! I choose this one. The Algorithm of Chaos published online quite recently and by a trustworthy writer, in my personal estimation.

And here we reach the happy end of the prologue, congratulations to the survivors in the trek. You’ve shown you mettle with flying colors, guys!

2023-05-03

It’s not an epigraph but the uttermost warning to the over-pedantic eggheads trained to sniff out anachronisms, stylistic lacunae, regressions from the sacrosanct spelling rules and other trifles like the use of anti-normative 4-(xyz)-letter lexicon.

‘And you, Most Esteemed High-Muckety-Muck, would you kindly shut the book so as to once again peruse the title, please? Think it over before coming back if you’re, nonetheless, ready to put at risk the sanity you’ll need for getting on in your accustomed world so far away from our day to day life…’

His viber bleated its antediluvian yawps because V didn’t give an eff about tweaking the factory settings in his electronic devices and/or household appliances. The manufacturer’s vanilla defaults, staple chow from the microwave, amiable blondes were just fine to go on with, why to ask for more?He’s not racing after the mainstream frills in things of common usage. The simpler, the better was his long-standing life motto. He’s not a nitpicker to wrinkle his nose in the attitude of a seasoned geek because of the already mentioned eff not given about the cutting-edge trends and opinions entertained in the crowd of enlightened mudaks.

Not that V pulled for return to Nature – back to caves, and stone axes drastically simplifying your views and values. Not yet. He simply kept away from buying selfie sticks, and scalp ticklers, and stuff like, well, you know. And even though not affiliated with any branch of the cult of Simpletonians maintaining that Simplicity is the ticket to your peace of mind, deep in his heart he agreed to their Ace argument—you certainly would watch a windmill up the hill on a breezeless day much longer than a remote control on your lap during a sudden blackout. Simple machines do have some charm about them, if you think of it.

However, opening paragraphs are not the right spot to pump up sermonizing. It’s a discourtesy towards unsuspecting reader in their expectation for the initial rush of adrenaline by the sixth line, at most, thru their system… Now, V, reach for your non-tweaked stone ax! Do something! Act, V, act!

He grabbed his Samsung from its prostrate position upon the desktop to slightly tap the “answer” sign. Huge pan-cake of a map diffused over the screen whose edges cut away the caller’s ears. The operation was counted for by the contact who, in a well-trained manner, kept the phone too close to his phiz, like, it was a hanky for him to sneeze out his cold picked up a day before, the very next sec, ‘Apch!. Aapch!. CHWHOO! This motherfuc…Apch!. Aapch!.,' and so on.

However, in a perfect state of health, the pan-cake-faced guy was, as always. Keeping the phone too close to the map was just a simple trick of his to hide from contacts the bumped up protuberances of his ears.

So a simple-minded gull for you. Blessed with such a generous handout from Mother Nature he long ago could become a megastar in movie comedies. Yeah. Cooler than Mr. Bim. Or Bum? But certainly not Bam… though, on the second thought… hmm.

Yep. V obviously has ditched film-going for a considerable stretch already.

“Shame on you, Mr. Moron! Still stuck in your quaggy complexes? Scumbag teener! With your God-sent edges you should by now be running for the second-term presidency! What a compelling image! The ears so attentive, pleasantly round, warmhearted ears they are! A catchy slogan for your preelection picture, like, “We can hear the voice of the people!”, and no dirty tricks with ballot boxes at polling stations, like end-day blackouts, are needed.”

None of that was told by V to the face in Samsung, he merely thought it to it. Healing anyone’s psychic traumas caused by agonizing procrastinations with getting rid of their virginity within the framework of society demands to be quick at it and become a clear-cut market-target pruned properly, and compliant with the political dictate to succumb and uphold the all-accepting dumbness was not his job. Even less wanted V act the voice crying in the wilderness. That’s why he simply said:

‘Hi, Lex. What’s up?’

‘Hello, V. Still toiling for half a zilch? Wish it left you before you got munched to mash, that your silly hope to rip a lincoln off theprozza.com. Typing a ton of hooey per day for a goose egg in the buff, huh? Forget it, bro! They fork it out only to their kin mobsters, alphabetically, while you’re no relative there, not in the least degree. Don’t cut the figure of a dark horse knocking at the Ku Klux Klan’s door.’

‘For prozzas I care no more than for pizzas, Mein Herr. They’re a simple tool for whetting my skills and personal style. A propos, their Challenge of Month is a good spur to get over the damn writer’s block, “Half kingdom for a plot! All topics are sucked out dry. A-fucking-priori!”. While there, you don’t strain yourself, “Hi, scribblers, here the theme for you. Saddle up!” The guy collecting more likes and reposts gets $100. Pretty simple.’

‘Quit screwing both the keyboard and yourself. How much green have you corralled from those monthly literary races so far? Come on! You spend on doping more than the prize itself!’

‘Twice I was in the group of 20 in the lead.’

‘Wow! Attaboy! With 20 racers flagged off at the CoM start, right?’

‘See, the audience there is different. They think along the lines fixed by Disneyland and Steven King, the slightest step aside from the deep-seated rut and their emergency brake gets fired off. Every single like I glean there is a beam of hope for us to understand each other over the barriers of stereotypes dividing our nations by the endemic peculiarities in our respective debilities.’

‘Here! Here! Aye and yep! Over again! Seems like the patients at funny farms for their privileged cuckoos are allowed to frisk in grazing grounds of the Internet. Hence the splash dung of the couple of inadequate likes you’ve raked up so far. Or, maybe, from rehabs. Hold out, bro! Our objective is not money but the principle, right? And then, what is a piece of paper $100 worth? It won’t burden your pocket for any longer that the first maverick blonde in you way, will it not?’

‘Shut the fountain of your sermon, Padre.’

’Well, in short, there’s a friendly offer to you, V. Some real something. Nobody would ditch the suggested deal even convulsing in St. Vitus dance, V. It’s a bonanza, some fucking oil fields. BP and Shell would tear hair from each other scrambling for the exclusive right to hummer lullabies on you 8 nights a week. Improvising jazz, follow me?

‘What?! Drilling their wells in my private parts? Screw you, oilman!’’

‘Come on, man. I was purely metaphorical… What matters is that such a chance turns up once in a life-span.’

‘A-ha! I dig it now. You’ve sampled a shot of metaphorical shit from that bonanza and completely forgotten that I’m straight.’

‘Since when?’

‘I see. The stuff’s been way too strong for you. Call me tomorrow after you’re back from the strawberry fields.’

‘Wait-wait-wait! I mean business!’

‘Then talk business instead of balling it up with goofy drivel of an upstart pimp.’

‘Well, look… There’s some stuff that’ll make you famous, V. Wanna be a celebrity like Joyce or Pynchon, or Hemingway?.’

‘The third guy from you’ve just mentioned. Who? Again?’

‘Hemingway? I be damned if I know. My ex-girlfriend was once a month drenching his paperback with an outpour of tears.’

‘Girls and books? Things incompatible. You’re still not quite steady on your pins. Moreover, the mankind en masse have given books up… So you felt jealous and memorized the guy’s name?’

‘A girl from the hinterland might very well keep an extra Ace or two up her sleeve, believe me, buddy. Anyway… I’ve got a big file whose content will shatter the world in three days at most. The hot thing is only waiting for a lover boy to edit, sign it with his name, and become famous overnight. How’s the perspective, huh?’

‘OK, I’m in. Just for the sake of saving old man Lex from OD. Drop the file to my email box.’

‘Nah, handsome. Forget it, I don’t have anything to do with emails.’

Which is absolutely true. For some time already Lex has grown too concerned about his personal data privacy and stuff, you know. His case acquires symptoms of an unhealthy aggravation, more and more so. The guy got hopelessly stranded, nautically speaking. You might one whole week wheedle of him something as innocent as, ‘Hi. Catch the link: http://sweet-granny/bedtime-tales-for-grand-kids/introduction.html,' before he freak-and-feints out at the last moment. Maybe, because of his employment at some hazy firm working for the government.

A row of squat buildings behind the steely mesh of high fencing, the guarded iron gate, thick growth of surveillance cams, grim Rottweilers walking their trainers three times a day about the outside parking lot.

The best way to make Lex shut his non-stop jingling yack is to ask how was his work today and—abruptly—you’re blessed with a ten-minute break, as a minimum. Not a peep. Lex all in thoughts. Full of gloom, shut up, introvert.

Seems, like the fate of that Jewish couple impressed him deeply, nice people also worked for the government before were roasted in the chair for leaking the know-how and formulas of A-bomb to the Soviets.

‘Take it easy, I was kidding. Don’t wet your bed tonight. There-there, kid. Say, what is your want?’

’How about 6 pm at Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Suits you?.

A guy needs a heart of stone to say “nah!”to their old-time buddy. Except, maybe, for that nymphomaniacal slut on the throne of the Russian Empire. In her estimation it were your enemies and not friends to be hold close to your bosom which attitude let you feel the slightest movement of their souls and thought and whatever else would spring up.

Though cunning, foolish was the bitch. It’s your friends who you should keep your eye on, 24/7. It’s they who know your weak spots better than even you yourself. They will not miss, their stab would be smack into, precise and to the hilt.

O! Brutus! And you too…

Some goofy gander, ain’t it? Your friends are the best at croaking you. Rest in peace, stupid asshole.

‘By me, it’s okay,' said V.

* * *

(Notwithstanding the establishment’s name, stay assured that no one has ever spotted any Uncle Tom about. None of the trust-worthy old-timer patrons would recollect him if you ask. Still and yet, hardly any one was made nervous or otherwise uncomfortable by the fact because his nephews visited the place not frequenter or else incognito. You never can tell.

Ma'am Harriet runs the establishment, an oldie but bitchy shrew with the response-time reflexes of a rattle snake that won her a profound veneration in the neighborhood. No gunslinger from the Most Wild West will hold a candle to her briskness. Although instead of a weighty Colt the old lady keeps in the holster of lace-trimmed patch pocket in her apron a tube of lacrimator spray. That her preference demoted a baseball bat to the rank of a ludicrous old-fashioned exhibit. (The survey undertaken lately by Forbez Monthly claims that barmen in the Middle-Wild West connected in some or other way to the Russian Mafia prefer a gorodki stick for the purpose.)

Additionally, her knack canceled expenses for a bouncer on the premises—with consoling laments, this black mamba would lead the tamed hooligan (his ear pinched with her thumb and index finger) to the exit and show him the nearest fire hydrant, in a God-sent Samaritan grandma’s manner as if he could see a goddamn thing thru the tears and mucus slopped all over his mug.

And then she’d creep to the kitchen, that cape cobra, like, to wash up her hands for hygienic considerations, yet actually to collect the usual share of sycophantic compliments from her subordinate employees…

In the daytime Uncle Tom’s Cabin turns a cozy family diner to keep up with that kinsfolklike varnish in its name and at night hours it is a restaurant of a fully deserved repute because of the excellent food by Ma’am Harriet’s kitchen (eluding the slippery ground of any racist shade—we are over and above propagating the slightest extremes—it should be mentioned that, yes, the chef’s skin color conformed to the environs because it was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, after all).

Thus, the superb grub multiplied by that pleasantly mellow atmosphere in the style of an old-time estate in one of the Confederation States, say, Virginia, Alabama or, maybe, Georgia which is on my mind… though not in that enraged roar by Charles Ray but in the classical form of this number composed back in 1930 (which in about twenty+ years became the Song of the Year), the way it was sung in 50s by the vocalist at the band of the Gypsy virtuoso guitarist Django, nicknamed Sultan, well, you know what I’m about, so don’t miss visiting the eatery even though the old hag with her assault spray tube pays me not one red cent for the advertising. No, Sir, nothing exept a cup of tea once in a blue moon, just tea without pastry, that old stingy bellicose biped reptile.)

V sat down in the rearmost stall and leaned onto the padded back of the double seat in the attitude of serene repose. His right arm stretched out over the slightly convex protrusion run along the seat’s backtop buffed in the gleaming skin the color of… well, the skin color also suited the room’s decor and feel.

Fortunately for those who too soon get weary with the easy flow of relaxed descriptions like the introductory paragraphs in the current chapter, Lex’ plump frame showed up thru the entrance door. Good timing…

His ample jowl spread widely out the club corners of his shirt. The spruce dinner jacket taken off and spread over or rather hung onto his left shoulder draped the left half of Lex’ torso. Yes, hanging it was and with certain a dare-devilish cheek to it too—no safety rigging at all while the well-rounded shoulder had no hooks to clutch at. It takes a desperado jacket to choose such a brash yet risky position.

On the other hand, hanging in so unorthodox a way filled the clothing item in question with a visible spirit of reckless laxness, when watched from aside, which conveyed to Lex’ voluminous roundness a hint at potential erectable standing. Maybe. In case it were needed.

On the whole, he cut a fine picture, like a hussar of the Czarist Army in their parade uniform tunic which was donned in just one sleeve, leaving the second one to freely dangle about. Every commissioned officer shoved his arm into one and the same sleeve, even if you were a left-handed hussar. No excuse would do. The elite troops should keep to the uniform regulations.

However, this here gutsy Lex left all the hussars far behind letting both his jacket sleeves empty, besides, he had no mustache so dear to heart of any cavalryman or pedestrian of a highwayman disposition…

‘Some intriguing puzzle is,' announced Lex, who managed to ferry his jacket to the stall occupied by V, and drop it on the opposite back whose seat he collapsed into, close by (next to his dinner jacket, for those who joined us right now), ’ why you, Pretty Boys, are so predictable, eh? Nearing the Cabin I knew that you’d be sitting in the corner. Does not matter which—right or left—a corner remains corner. But why?’

‘To give the commoners a chance to gape and admire our nifty appearance, maybe,’ suggested V.

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