Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

Did a reading in front of people yesterday, very scary but went okay I hope.  Also had a workshop in the morning, and one of the exercises was to take your favorite novel and write about what happened before it started.  I chose Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut, and wrote the following:

Before I was Timequake I was Kurt Vonnegut.  No, wait.  Go back you fraud!  Vanessa Vitiello is trying to say something about Kurt Vonnegut.  Sure she is.

Kilgore Trout, the famous alter-ego of Kurt Vonnegut, the famous alter-ego of Vanessa Vitiello, woke up one morning and decided he was tired of having all the shots called for him.  Instead of being written by Kurt Vonnegut he came up with an insane idea to have Kurt Vonnegut as a character in a science fiction story of his own devising.  Also Vonnegut’s sister, who committed suicide.  So Kilgore Trout came up with a contraption, half-typewriter, half-time machine, half-zombie, to trap Vonnegut as a character in one of his own novels.

Before Vonnegut was Kurt Vonnegut in the not-as-appreciated-as-it-should-have-been novel Timequake, he was a guy called Kurt.  Vonnegut, as it happened.  But you don’t really believe that, do you?

The zombie/type-writer/time-machine tried to say something deep about the character of human existence.  Being a machine it got it wrong, of course, but since the character of human existence is to get things wrong nobody minded.

Also, World War II.  Just so you know how serious this is.

Right, that’s it then.  Gosh I wish I’d been Kurt Vonnegut, a a writer!  I never try to actually write like him because that’s just pathetic, but when I had an excuse I was pathetically eager to try my hand at it.