Recently, I had an argument with a diehard Trump supporter about the effectiveness of a border wall. I presented objective facts, such as the fact that 58% of all illegal aliens are “overstayers”-people who came legally and overstayed their visas. In addition, 95% of illegal drugs are snuck in legally (well, not “legally,” per se, but by legal immigrants, usually smuggling them in food containers). Also, illegal immigrants are 25% less likely than natural-born Americans to commit homicide of any kind, so it won’t really help prevent murderers and rapists from getting into the country. (As an aside, Colorado has legalized pot and is seemingly about to decriminalize shrooms, and a Colorado man recently brutally murdered his wife and children. By conservative logic, we should build a wall around Colorado. But I digress.)

How did this Trump supporter, whom I shall call Kurt, react? He told me that he did not believe the liberal media. While I do believe much of the media is unfairly biased against the GOP, it’s very difficult to get away with fake statistics. They’re very easy to verify. In addition, I cited sources that were not at all liberal, such as the Coast Guard and the Cato Institute. (In fairness, many Cato researchers and military men would describe themselves as classically liberal, but when they do so, they do not mean liberal in the way Kurt means it.) He still chose not to believe me. Finding that he could not convince me with facts, he shared a picture with me-a picture of a man who had been brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant.  He attempted to play into my emotions. While the image certainly stirred up anger in me at the man who committed this atrocity, I see no reason to direct that anger at all illegals. Maybe it’s naïve of me, but the facts have convinced me that most of them just want a better life and a better future for their children.

 

Why am I writing all this? Well, as it happens, Kurt is a factophobe. He is one who would rather believe his heart than his head. He’s not a bad guy. As angry as he might be, I can tell you that he doesn’t genuinely hate anybody, having known him for quite some time. (On second thought, he might hate Nancy Pelosi. I don’t really blame him, though.) Factophobia is the most prevalent social phenomenon of our time, spanning all races, ages and political parties in nearly equal measure. The left fights, among other fears, the fear of homosexuality and the fear of Islam. The right fights, among other fears, the fear of guns and the fear of Christianity. My political orientation is far simpler: I wish to fight the fear of facts.

 

I think this is why our political landscape is so divided. Rather than attacking others’ impersonal, objective logic, people attack each others’ deepest fears. Having your fears attacked feels like being attacked yourself. Fear is a very sensitive emotion. Thus, while I don’t believe people mean to attack each other’s personalities, by attacking their fears we do just that. I choose not to attack fears. I see terrorists like Osama bin Laden and progressive psychos on CNN, and I can understand why Islam and homosexuality are so feared. Likewise, I see school shooters and hateful bigots such as those at Westboro Baptist, and I empathize with those who are afraid of guns and Bibles. Fears are illogical and emotional, and I find that everyone has their own illogical fears. I, personally, am afraid of the government, the news, dentists, and basically every white politician over sixty. I can’t exactly attack Kurt’s irrational fear of illegal immigrants when the mere mention of Jeff Sessions scares me spitless.

 

Facts will not only help us to have better-informed opinions (and thus, better-informed voting records and therefore less idiotic politicians), but they will help our debates to become more civil. I’d rather have my facts attacked than my fears. When, as the greatest rock band of all time warned, we use people’s fears as weapons, any political forum immediately spirals into a s***show. Facts are not weapons but tools. They carve away stupidity, emotionality and simplicity and leave accuracy, wisdom and rationality. The difference between a fact and a fear is merely the difference between a sword and a scalpel. Regarding the above paragraph, I absolutely understand those who are afraid of facts. I was a factophobe myself for many years. A fact that goes against your opinions or your feelings is scary. It’s not easy to accept that you may be wrong, and it’s even harder to accept that you are wrong. But it’s important. Government is important, so I suppress my fear of it and obey the law. Dentists are important, so I suppress my fear of them and see them on occasion. So too must we all suppress our fear of facts, especially those that invalidate our dearest opinions.

 

Peace out.

I’d like to proudly announce that I have just published my second novel, The Evolution Of Superman, to rave reviews (from my mother)! I have wanted to write a dystopian since my middle school days, when I began (but did not complete) The Oath Of Life, an insanely depressing dystopian work about a government that thinks they own everything (as most governments do). George Orwell, Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley and Suzanne Collins are all personal heroes of mine, so it was only natural that, at some point, I would follow in their footsteps with a dystopian novel.

 

Here’s a description of my book:

 

Aron North is a genetic researcher at Eagle Hill Scientific Campus. He dislikes almost everything in his life-his unfaithful wife, the incompetent government men for whom he works, the crazy socialists on TV and the crazy capitalists they complain about-except his work. Day after day, he continues in hot pursuit of the Melbourne Gene, which will, according to his bosses, be the most important discovery in years. It is the gene which causes individualism.

 

It is the year 2049, and all science, including medicine, is now government-run and taxpayer-funded. The government now devotes much of their time and money to scientific inquiry and practical medical care, which is free to all citizens. The socialist’s dream? No, not quite. When Aron discovers why his work is so important to the government, he decides that something has got to change.

 

Phil O’Halloran, author of “Faces In The Dark,” has applied his distinctive, cynical voice, his sharp wit, and his emotive descriptions to a novella whose plot is quite different from his debut, but which is no less philosophical. “The Evolution Of Superman” is a dystopian, but its true power lies in its similarity to modern America. Its goal is to show, by use of a striking example, what happens when Uncle Sam plays God.

 

And last but not least, here is where you can purchase it.

 

Peace out. Buy my book.

I am a capitalist. Not just a capitalist, but an Ayn-Rand-reading, Rand-Paul-voting, free-trade, laissez-faire capitalist. I don’t trust the bums in Congress and the White House to spend my money better than I can! I am rather a rarity, in a sense; I make minimum wage and I don’t want my wages to be raised by the government. I think private citizens with monetary incentives, without exception, do better work than government agencies with no qualifications but the vote of the people and the ability to take any amount of money from hardworking taxpayers.

 

Why am I telling you this? You, too, can partake in the glorious economic system known as capitalism by exchanging your capital for my labor (a.k.a. my book). Here’s a link to the page where I’m selling my writing (which I can’t quite seem to put on the menu at the top).

 

Peace out. Buy my book.

“If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” That’s one of George Orwell’s rules for writing, and it’s a rule I followed religiously during the early stages of my writing career. After all, who wants to read a pile of crap about absolutely nothing? Nobody! So my writing, at first, was sparse, austere, and very Orwellian.

 

Then I had to write 50,000 words.

 

NaNoWriMo 2017 was a cathartic, though traumatic, experience, and it saw the birth of my intellectual spawn, Eric Soderberg. Eric is based on my younger self, in many ways, and if I ever decide to write a sequel (which I don’t imagine I will), he will probably resemble quite strongly my present self. He likes the same rock bands as I (which I really mentioned way too often), he thinks along the same lines I do, and he’s also unattractive and lonely, though his unattractiveness is quite different from my own; whereas he is fat and balding, I am a 5’4″, hundred-pound shrimp with a colossal nose and noticeable acne scarring. Faces In The Dark was written during a difficult period of my life, a period in which I was sad and angry and anxious and didn’t know why. I had (and have) no good reason to be sad. So, as a way of inventing an excuse to present to my superego, I created a character with every reason to be sad. He turned out to be rather endearing, if I do say so myself. But he wasn’t the kind that one writes 50,000 words about. So I had to resort to (the horror!) writing crap about nothing! As I later understood, it wasn’t crap about nothing. It was crap about minutiae. Still crap (everything I write is, after all), but not crap about nothing.

 

I received an epiphany shortly before NaNoWriMo 2018, when I read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The entire novel, as you may know, is set in a single day. As I savored the elegant (and very British) words employed by Woolf to tell the story of Clarissa Dalloway, a high-society woman, and Septimus Warren Smith, a World War I veteran living with PTSD, a thought occurred to me. If you were to go about a normal day in your life with a notebook, recording every sentence you hear, every event you witness, everything that happens, every thought that crosses your consciousness, and every detail that strikes you as important, and then go home and type it up in complete sentences and paragraphs, you’d have a full-length novel! Depending on what sort of day you had, it might be rather a boring novel, and certainly many of the characters would inquire as to why the protagonist was carrying around a notebook, which would be rather queer, but it would be long enough to be published and sold as a novel.

 

So here’s the question that every novelist must ask: which details will improve my book, and which will bore the reader? Ideally, I like to add all the details necessary to help the reader grasp the vibe. I think I did a good job of that when I described Rad Crud Thrift Store, the business that Amanda opens in Faces In The Dark. I added all the details to give the reader an impression of cozy clutter and do-it-yourself capitalism, without actually out-and-out saying either of those things. I don’t think I described the industrial part of town where Plato Plumbing & Electricity (Eric’s workplace) was very well. I vaguely described the emotions those kinds of places bring me, but I didn’t include enough details to recreate those emotions in the hearts of my readers.

 

My advice to writers is this: when it comes time to (horror horror horror!) edit, read your book as if you were a reader, not yourself. If you didn’t know what the vibe of the book was, would it have enough details to cause you to feel the vibe? Does your writing have a vibe? If your book doesn’t have a vibe, add details-details that make sense together. If your book has a vibe, but you don’t think an uninitiated reader would feel the vibe, add details that fit in and add to the existing vibe. Details aren’t about the plot; they’re about the vibe. You have a solid plot? Great! You need a vibe. A plot is your novel’s skeleton; the vibe is its body. You wouldn’t find a skeleton attractive. Too much of my early writing was just a skeleton, with very minimal details. Give your book a full body without making it obese (cough James cough cough Joyce cough). That probably doesn’t make much sense. But to those who read Orwell, Vonnegut and other bare-bones writers: details are okay. They help the reader feel the book.

 

Peace out.

Good afternoon, and Merry Christmas to you all, except to those of us who do not celebrate Christmas. In that instance, Happy Hanukkah. To those who do not celebrate anything, I wish you Merry Moping. This is the blog of Phil O’Halloran, who wrote Faces In The Dark, a novel that has been praised liberally by all three of its readers. It’s the story of Eric Soderberg, the lonely electrician, and Jason McKagan, America’s most popular writer, and how Amanda Kirkland, Soderberg’s coworker and McKagan’s biggest fan, discovers that they are one and the same. Having fallen in love with McKagan years prior, she learns to love Eric as well, and the feelings are returned, but…things do not end well. I’m not really a cupcakes-and-rainbows type of guy. I won’t tell you how they end, though, because that would be a sucky thing to do. It’s like sitting in a crowded theatre and yelling, “Romeo kills himself, thinking Juliet is dead, and then Juliet wakes up and kills herself, thinking Romeo is dead!” Except that everyone knows how Romeo and Juliet kick their respective buckets, so I don’t think the audience would be livid-just slightly ticked.

 

I’m not really going to share many stories from my personal life; mostly, I’m going to discuss my favorite books, how I write my books, when my next book will be available for purchase, how you, too, can give me cash in exchange for my stupid words, music I like, and cheese. This is a shorter post than I’ll be writing in the future. People are annoying me right now. Let’s close with a few words from Frank Zappa:

 

The muffin man is seated at the table in the laboratory of the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. Picking up an oversized chrome spoon, he gathers an intimate quantity of dried muffin remnants, and brushing his scapular aside, proceeds to dump these inside of his shirt. Then he turns to us and speaks:

“Some people like cupcakes better. I, for one, care less for them.”

Arrogantly twisting the sterile canvas snoot of a fully-charged icing anointment utensil, he poots forth a quarter-ounce green rosette at the crest of a dense but radiant muffin of his own design. Later he says:

“Some people? Some people like cupcakes exclusively, while I say there is naught, nor ought there be, nothing so exalted on the face of God’s green earth as that prince of foods…

“The muffin…”