I probably don’t have much English Major cred left at this point in my life, mostly because I actually enjoy comedy, and spend an inordinate amount of time dreaming up clever T-shirt slogans. Still, I’ve always been proud of the fact that I never went through a Stephen King phase. I have never read any of his novels. I take a perverse pride in that confession — it suggests (falsely) that I have never sullied myself with popular fiction.

I’ve seen movies based on Stephen King’s work, of course; everyone’s seen Carrie and The Shining and The Shawshank Redemption, and probably some others that I’m forgetting. More recently, I’d been following Marvel’s comic book adaptation of The Stand with some interest. I figured it was worth a shot, what with my fondness for comics that aren’t about superheroes. And that’s where my troubles began.

In January, they published the fifth issue of the planned 30-issue series. The story was finally starting to get good and weird. I, like generations of comics fans before me, wanted my next fix as soon as possible. When I checked Marvel’s website, I discovered the next issue wouldn’t be out until the middle of fucking March. If I wanted to see what happened next, I had three choices:

A. Wait until March like a fucking caveman.
B. Track down the crappy early-90’s TV miniseries based on the book, which seemed cool when I was 13 but which I can’t even remember now.
C. just read the goddamn book.

I kicked my principles to the curb and chose “C”, dreaming up rationalizations the whole time. “I’m not really reading this book,” I told myself, “I just want spoilers for the comics! The fact that I’m willing to slog through this 1200-page doorstop just shows how committed I am to comics as a medium!”

Turns out, the book isn’t half-bad. The story isn’t bad, at least; I frequently take issue with King’s choice of words, and his fondness for old cars and Americana in general. I’m not here to talk about any of that. It’s an old book, and my feelings about it are neutral for now. Anyone who wants to read it has read it, and I’m still not sure if I like (or hate) it enough to make a case for (or against) it.

Instead, I want to talk about what King doesn’t do. Specifically, he doesn’t just dump exposition on us at the first opportunity. He waits until it’s appropriate (or at least he did at this phase of his career). The more I considered it, the more fully I realized that most of my complaints about “genre fiction” — horror, mystery, science fiction, “thrillers”, etc. — trace back to authors’ inability to pick their moments.

For example, how many books begin this way:

Max Douchington was having a bad day. At 41 years old, he wasn’t quite as fast as he used to be, but his 6′2″ frame carried his 190 pounds well, and he still had his hair, even if his temples now showed more salt than pepper. He was handsome enough — that’s what Cindy had always said, back when she was still willing to talk to him: “handsome enough” — but he had always preferred to spend his time alone. Anyway, he was having a bad day, so let’s try to swing back around to that subject again.

Why the fuck are we learning this? Are sitting there, watching it happen, or are we reading a story about it (written in the past tense, no less)? This is no way to tell a story! If Mr. Douchington is running around by himself, apparently under duress, he’s not going to fill out a mental eHarmony profile just in case there are readers spying on his thoughts. If I was pitching a movie, yes, all this information would be helpful: male, 41, 6′2″, 190 pounds, going gray, kind of a loner, used to know someone named Cindy. Got it? Great! Now let’s put some lifts in Tom Cruise’s shoes and make this movie! But in a book? It sort of blows.

If Max Douchington is going to be the subject of a longer story, there will be plenty of chances to tell the readers what he looks like. Maybe he’ll meet another character, who will take note of his appearance. Maybe his bad day involves getting arrested, and all that information will appear on the paperwork at the police station. Maybe he’ll get into a car accident and lose a leg, and spend the next five years spiraling ever-deeper into an inescapable depression, just sitting around the house eating terrible food and getting fat and never washing his hair, until one day when he’s hobbling his one-legged ass to the store to buy another fucking box of Ho-Hos, he catches his reflection in the window of a parked car and thinks back on how much better-looking he was five years ago.

See? Those are all better than “man having a bad day pauses for no reason and talks about how sexy he is.”

So to all you English Majors, all you aspiring novelists and memoirists and bloggers and Star Trek fanfic writers, I say this: Stephen King knows better than to write about Max Douchington. Stephen King, the guy who writes books about haunted cars and sells them to angsty teenagers and their doughy, suburban parents, knows more about how to construct his stories than you do. And more than I do, to be fair.

And that, my friends, is a humbling thought for anyone who wants to write respectable books someday. Learn your lesson, and leave Max Douchington out of it.

Over the last few months, several of my friends have had some rather unkind words for the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. I couldn’t see why they were so upset. I mean, teenage girls were reading! And not just reading, but swarming bookstores to get their hands on these 600-page monsters as quickly as possible. Could I really disapprove of that?

Yes. Yes I could.

The series tells the story of Bella Swan, a barely-defined teen cipher who moves to a small town in Washington and falls in love with Edward Cullen, a boy in her class who turns out to be a 100-odd-year-old vampire. And that’s… basically it. I mean, the author tries to sandwich a plot into each of the four books – the first concerns a rival group of vampires who come to town and stir shit up for no discernable reason – but for the most part, they’re just very long, flowery explanations of how wonderful it is to be hopelessly infatuated with a vampire.

Seriously, go read the plot summary of the first novel. Somehow, Meyer managed to stretch that out to over 500 pages. How, you wonder, did she work such magic? Simple: by padding out the text with endless swooning over the sheer prettiness of Edward Cullen (in a perfectly chaste way, of course). But so what, right? It’s a supernatural love story for teenagers, and teenagers are stupid and overdramatic when it comes to love*.

Well, it’d be great if it was that simple, but no. Instead, like Homer Simpson before her, Bella just gets dumber and dumber as the series progresses. The second book, New Moon relies entirely on an Idiot Plot, which the legendary Turkey City Lexicon defines thusly:

Idiot Plot

A plot which functions only because all the characters involved are idiots. They behave in a way that suits the author’s convenience, rather than through any rational motivation of their own. (Attr. James Blish)

Seriously, at one point, Edward finds out Bella’s dad is at a funeral. Instead of asking, you know, who actually died, he just assumes it was Bella and runs off to kill himself. And vampires (in this universe, anyway) are tough to kill. He has to go to fucking Italy to do it.

Let me drag this out a little more: Edward goes through all the trouble of traveling to Italy and meeting with some kind of vampiric Dr. Kevorkian, but never once stops and says, “Maybe I should’ve asked some follow-up questions about that funeral.”

And stupid protagonists aren’t even the worst part. No, that honor is reserved for the books’ romantic view of abusive relationships. Yeah, vampires? Apparently they’re very, very bad boyfriends. To call Edward jealous and controlling would be a tremendous disservice to all the jealous, controlling men who, though assholes, have never actually gnawed a fetus out of a woman’s abdomen. Seriously, that shit happens in the fourth book.

It’s not just the torso-nibbling (hey, even the best of us have our moments of weakness and/or bellybutton fetishism). Edward is the very model of an emotionally abusive boyfriend. He forbids Bella from seeing her friend Jacob because he’s a werewolf** — and probably because he’s a male as well, which makes him a threat to Edward’s dominance. He berates Bella, sends her away or walks out on her, and then comes back and apologizes and promises that things will be better from now on. Bella’s primary character traits are low self-esteem and hopeless devotion to this douchebag, to the point that she’s willing to become a vampire, leave her old life behind, get married at 18, and squeeze out a vampire-child that nearly kills her.

That brings me to another problem with these books: Stephenie Meyer doesn’t know shit about vampires, or how to write about them. Every vampire story uses a different set of “rules” for their undead characters. Can they go out in sunlight? Can they be driven off with garlic? Can they eat people-food, or are they on an all-blood diet? And so forth. Most authors try to select rules that provide a nice balance between the traditional vampire myths and the demands of the story they’re telling.

Meyer, not so much. She seems to have given some thought to how they avoid killing people (they subsist on animal blood), but beyond that her vampires’ powers seem limited to handsomeness and teen-soap-style brooding. As Bella’s pregnancy suggests, they can have babies, and those babies grow up into adult vampires. Which is to say, her vampires age. You know, just like people who fucking aren’t vampires.

Also, Stephenie, you aren’t supposed to turn your lead character into a vampire. When you do that, your story crosses the line between “forbidden love” and “together-forever bullshit wish fulfillment.” And then, just to make sure everybody gets their happy ending, you made Jacob the werewolf fall in love with a baby. Sure, he’s gonna wait until she’s 18, but dude. Dude.

Plus there’s a bunch of anti-abortion shit in the last book, which I’m not even gonna touch because my head is already close to exploding. Point is, millions of teenage girls (and their moms) are going crazy for these books. They’re falling in love with the controlling, womb-chomping vampire. They’re envying his dead-eyed, dependent human girlfriend. And most of all, they’re wishing they could have a love as pure and wonderful as Edward and Bella’s.

Now the first book has been turned into a movie, starring Cedric Diggory and Some Chick, and the die-hard fans are already gearing up for multiple viewings. If it makes enough money, sequels will become inevitable, and Harry Potter’s martyred friend will be forced to act like an abusive dick in front of everyone. I hope he enjoys acting off-Broadway, because he’s gonna need to do a lot of that to get his reputation back.

*“How can you break up with me? You said we’d be in love forever! You even wrote it on your binder!”

**Of course there are werewolves!

The big news out of President-Elect Obama’s Operation: Fix Everything agenda is the possible appointment of Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Obama and Clinton met on Thursday to discuss the offer, and according to CNN,

“Senator Clinton’s response is unknown, although multiple sources agree that Hillary Clinton was left with the impression that if she were interested in the post, it would be hers.”

Which makes it sound like it’s all but in the bag, which would of course make a lot of people very happy. If Clinton doesn’t accept the post, possibly for reasons related to Bill Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative, the post would likely go to Governor Bill Richardson and his awesome new beard.

In following all of this, I’ve noticed a number of pundits have mentioned that Obama seems to be getting his ideas from Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who you’ve probably seen appear several times on The Daily Show. If you haven’t read it (because I haven’t either) the book is about Abraham Lincoln filling his cabinet with his political enemies. Basically, the exact opposite of George Bush’s cabinet. Now, Obama certainly isn’t going to go as far as hiring Donald Rumsfeld and Bob Barr to high offices, but Hillary Clinton is a good bet, as well as probably a handful of moderate Republicans.

At any rate, in hearing all this, I kept thinking to myself, “I gotta read that fucking book.” But I haven’t. And if you’re feeling the same way, here’s a clip of Ms. Goodwin telling Jon Stewart about the book that is apparently Obama’s new team-building bible.

Here’s an obituary written by someone else.

I’m in an unenviable position here. One of our era’s genuinely important authors is dead, and I don’t know his work, despite having wasted my life getting a useless English degree. If I start reading Infinite Jest now, it’ll seem like a feeble attempt to play catch-up. There’s a nasty bit of irony in there, considering that much of Wallace’s work dealt with the unfortunate way in which honesty and sincere appreciation had come to be perceived as uncool.

Prior to this, the only reason I didn’t read Wallace was because I had other things I wanted to read. Now, the issue is tangled up with paranoia about how the other hipsters will see me, even though none of them have actually read his books either.

I demand David Foster Wallace return to life and write a book about this conundrum.

Anyone who has read Douglas Adams’ work, or been forced to tolerate someone who has, is familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s running joke about towels. To “know where one’s towel is” is to be a really, amazingly together guy.

It’s easy enough to guess that I am a fan of Douglas Adams. Just look at the evidence. I am an unapologetic nerd, and I throw around adverbs as though that was still allowed for writers on this side of the Atlantic. However, I am a long way from being a really, amazingly together guy.

I’m not expecting books, especially fiction books, especially a comedy/science-fiction series, to change my life or anything. But how can I go around dispensing advice from those books, and even believing that advice on occasion, without following it myself? I should know where my fucking towel is. Indeed, I should start carrying a towel with me whenever possible.

I am aware that this is just about the nerdiest thing I could possibly do. It’s on par with wearing a Star Trek uniform in public, except you’re paying tribute to something a bit more obscure, and a lot more British. Star Trek uniforms, though, serve no practical purpose beyond that served by more socially acceptable clothing. A towel is useful, and not just for the outlandish sci-fi situations outlined in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. And while a Star Trek uniform (or a LARP costume, or whatever your geek-vice is) is on full display for anyone who cares to look, a towel can be folded up and stuffed into a backpack, far from the prying eyes of the dude who used to pants you in gym class.

Then again, maybe I’m just saying this because it rained today, which destroys my chances of finding a comfortable place to sit outdoors for the next 24 hours. A towel could fix that.

Holy shit! Cory Doctorow has a new book out? How did I miss that? I listen to his podcast and everything!

Sure, it’s not a novel, but he already published one of those this year (Little Brother, which you should read, and buy for you kids/younger siblings/cousins/whatever). And now we get Content, a collection of essays on all the topics you’d expect from the caped-and-goggled King of the Bloggers.

Like a lot of my favorite writers, Doctorow is just damn good at explaining things. In the space of a short column, he can give you a decent lesson in the politics of DRM, or completely change your position on copyright law. He’s a master of providing the perfect link for a given situation — no matter how esoteric the subject, he knows the right place to learn about it. And, most importantly, the dude’s an insanely prolific writer, speaker, and blogger, so you’ll always have something to read.

Of course, if you’ve found your way here, you probably know Cory Doctorow’s work already. As such, you know he makes all his books available free on his website via Creative Commons, and Content is no exception. And this isn’t just some vanity project that only exists in digital form; it’s also a real book that you can buy.

Look, the guy’s a genius, and he has more to say on the future of publishing, copyright, and technology than I could even imagine, so get your ass over to his site and read the essays. And some of his novels, if it’s not too much trouble.

Next time, on Doctorow Watch: I sit around waiting to see if his legendary, never-published novel Themepunks is coming out anytime soon.