I Know Why The Buffalo Are Exploding

I have so much fun writing. But when I read the posts in the r/writing and r/scifiwriting subreddit on Reddit.com, and so many of them are about all the stress and unhappiness people go through when writing, I have to wonder.

For example, I am really enjoying putting my hot female Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin characters through the wringer in “Conquest of Incel World.” In the Rex Stout novels, Nero Wolfe really hates driving (or being driven, he can't drive) in cars, being certain that the car will crash momentarily. Archie is of course a very capable driver, the only one Wolfe trusts, and enjoys Wolfe's discomfiture enormously.

Well I decided that Nitro Wilde, my Nero Wolfe prototype, should also have a terror of being driven. And so should Moxie Maven, my Archie Goodwin character, because on Collar World self-driving cars are the norm, and accidents are exceedingly rare. They're both terrified when they wind up in a car driven by a human, what's even worse, a car driven by a human in heavy traffic made up of cars and trucks driven by humans. Moxie is much less terrified than Nitro, but she feels it, and for this reason is sympathetic with Nitro's terror, rather than simply enjoying it as Archie does with Nero.

(Well, also, Moxie and Nitro are women, who tend to be more empathetic than men.)

As a long-time voracious reader, it's pure pleasure to get in there and really fuck with favorite characters like Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. And doing it in a way that many Nero Wolfe fans would find deeply distressing, well that's just icing on the cake! How can you not enjoy that?


When I read other authors whining about how HARD it is to write and edit, I just have to roll my eyes. Get in there and have some FUN with what you're doing, maybe your readers will have fun with it, too.

Then again, sometimes I wonder if I'm like the Ed Wood character in the movie “Ed Wood.” Ed clearly loved his job, every bit of it, he enjoyed filmmaking, even though he was objectively just awful at it. Maybe when I write my stories, I'm like Ed, looking at random film clips and exclaiming: “The buffalo are exploding, and no one knows why!”

Or maybe I'm the one who knows why the buffalo are exploding.