If you know me at all, you know that I am a sucker for kitty cats in the writing space. (Kitty cats anywhere, really.) Greg Olear, the founding editor of The Weeklings and the author of the novels Totally Killer and Fathermucker shares his space with this little guy. And also if you know me at all, you know that I am a sucker for thought-provoking, bold, informative writing. Greg Olear writes just that sort of stuff in his writing space…with his cat. And if you can’t find Greg in his writing space, you will certainly find him on Twitter, where he spends most of his time.
For now, though, here is Greg Olear’s View from the Keyboard:
Olear: I’m cheating a little, but this is my view this morning from my writing space. Titus, our new kitten, is sunning himself. My laptop is about nine inches away from his face. I am lucky because I have my own office in my house. Behind me are three gorgeous wooden bookcases, filled with books. There are also bookshelves built into the wall around the window that Titus is in front of.
I love this space because I can look out the window as I write onto the street, which is not busy busy, but not not busy, either. It makes me feel connected to the community. I’m not a “retreat into the woods by myself and drink whiskey and write” kind of writer. I’m more of the Samuel Johnson “tired of London, tired of life” variety. I write almost every morning, first thing in the morning. After 11am, I’m useless.
Lately, the fiction writing has been uninspired. We are in a moment of crisis in our country, our republic is under attack, and I am using my meager platform to inform my readers of the Trump menace. I’ve just published a book, on my own hastily-invented imprint, called DIRTY RUBLES: AN INTRODUCTION TO TRUMP/RUSSIA. I’ve been tweeting about this and writing about it for 18 months, and I decided to put it in book form. I did this because I feel it’s my civic duty to do everything in my power to get us out of this mess.
Here is an excerpt:
As I write this, a third of the country rightly recognizes Trump as a clear and present danger. A third will defend him no matter what he does, as a matter of blind faith. Whether the middle third is able to call out the naked emperor standing before us may well determine whether the United States survives this unprecedented crisis.
There are powerful forces working to silence these cries of “The Emperor has no clothes.” The talking heads at Fox News and InfoWars, the editorial writers at Breitbart and the Wall Street Journal, and an army of bots on Facebook and Twitter are adamant that Trump is wearing only the finest threads. Mainstream media outlets insist on giving equal time to the “Trump’s new clothes are fabulous” crowd, despite his indisputable nakedness. To too many evangelicals, to denounce Trump as a naked emperor is to renounce Jesus Christ Himself.
Furthermore, the story, the real story, strains credulity. Are we really to believe that a Russian dictator helped install his compromised asset in the White House, and is now exerting influence over said asset’s key decisions? That is the stuff of bad spy movies, surely; not the AP wire!
And yet here we are.
Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose the support of his voters. I beg to differ. If he did that, there would be irrefutable evidence of a terrible crime, a literal smoking gun, and that would (I like to think) sway the minds of even the most obdurate #MAGA apologists.
Trump/Russia, however, is not bang-bang. There is no single smoking gun. Instead, there are thousands of them, firing simultaneously, and the result is a noxious fog that hangs over everything, clouding our view.
This book is an attempt to see through the fog.
→Thanks, Greg, for a glimpse into your space and your work. Keep up the good fight, man. And as always, thanks to everyone for reading. ~PMc←
Patricia Ann McNair 