Well-behaved women rarely make history…but well-behaved monsters might!
Well-Behaved Monsters concerns a bunch of twentysomething singles out on the nightlife scene, attempting to navigate the dating minefield. Specifically, the unavoidable deception that always accompanies this courtship ritual, the baked in layers of cultural b.s. that comes with it, but more importantly the differences in how guys and girls think and then also how what everyone’s responding to often clashes sharply with what they purport to find attractive. Plus how these views are slippery ones to begin with and often shift quite a bit over time.
Conventional wisdom is dead, and so are they if failing to adapt. But what battleground tactics will lead them to the promised land instead? The answers to this riddle prove as shocking as the strategies employed. For they will soon settle upon a series of outrageous stunts, meant to make them stand out from the anonymous rabble – while it’s true that smacking random strangers on their backsides is perhaps not working as well as hoped, most standard icebreakers have been trod so far into the ground that there’s no hope of standing out otherwise. Much more original approaches are therefore required.
Sid talks some of them into bogus wedding rings, purchased for ten dollars at a department store. Dylan wonders about dressing the part and learning the lingo necessary to invade the country music, hip-hop, and beach bum scenes. Pete swears by his trusty Looney Tunes themed Pez dispenser, and insists anyone dating women over 97 pounds is slumming it. Phil goes positively bananas if anyone dares turn down drugs offered to them by females, insisting this is the winning formula. Joe meanwhile is the lone holdout swerving in the opposite direction, going the respectability route, although this involves gaslighting his targets by insisting he was never involved in any of these stunts. Marvin will tell them they’re overcomplicating things by thinking and talking about anything but sex, all the time. Robbie dares to ask, is wearing an eyepatch totally out of the question? These and many other timeless mysteries are among those this intrepid group investigates at length and acts upon.
As for the women caught up in this tempest, Maggie instantly spins every comment and development to delusional extremes to believe whatever narrative she wishes. Lily thinks herself better than all of them, and that she doesn’t need this crap, yet continues to remain involved just the same. Alice has a potentially bright future and a wonderful head on her shoulders, but can’t resist the siren song of a slippery slope regardless. Miranda on the other hand navigates said slippery slope just fine, and seems to enjoy herself considerably in the process. Jenna continues to get more and more impatient to settle down pronto, though these panicked efforts only lead to increasingly worse results. Shoniqua scoffs as she considers anyone still single past their mid-twenties patently ridiculous, is herself a much more advanced species now that she’s engaged. Even as Debbie comes off as possibly most composed and assured out of everyone, insisting alcohol plus sex are the only ports in a storm necessary for survival.
Controversial or not, the new facts emerging from these feverish field studies are enough to make their heads continually spin, each proving more argument inciting than the last. When some of them eventually discover what angles truly work, the results are as unexpected as their outlandish ideas. Still others will refuse to believe in their successes, despite the causes and effects parading around in plain sight. For most, however, in particular their hapless targets, once these concepts catch fire, they have considerable reason to wish this mischievous, costumed genie had never been poured from its mid-range liquor bottle. If only they could return to a quainter day, when everyone was screwing around with silly props instead! Because when it becomes irrefutable what kind of twisted behavior acts like a magnet in attracting mates, these findings are legitimately monstrous, and give everybody involved a dimmer view of human nature.
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I recently stumbled upon the above section in an old box and thought it too coincidental not to share, considering that it’s an early draft snippet of what became Well-Behaved Monsters. With some handwritten notes up top, after I printed it out for a writer’s club meeting.
It’s interesting to look back at old drafts and compare them versus the finished product. What almost always happens – and is the case here – is that you inevitably think, eh, I probably mostly was correct with the edits I made over time…but man, there’s a line or two I kind of wish I hadn’t changed.
And this brings to mind other related topics, too, which I either hadn’t gotten around to mentioning yet, forgot to mention yet, or else forgot about entirely. In the first version of this entire project, it was actually two fully completed books that took the same material and characters and themes from this era and had them separated out, depending upon a few loose categories. As you might gather from the handwritten note above, one of these was titled Flirtation Device. But that “half” of the project (they weren’t sequential, but literally fully segregated, where each book has no “knowledge” of the other) for example didn’t even include the Lily character, not at all, which now seems completely preposterous. As it should, which you will see when reading Well-Behaved Monsters in its final state. So I totally made the correct decision there in threading them together and combining them.
Others, however, you’re never entirely sure about. Like one consideration is what might happen when you decide to change a memoir-type project into a work of “fiction” instead, that’s shall we say just maybe possibly loosely (sure, that’s it) based upon your actual experiences. I’ve done a little of both, and there are pluses and minuses with each. The memoirs are great in that they allow you to mention specific people, places, and things, and pin down certain events for (at least your interpretation of) historical posterity. But they’re also somewhat surprisingly limiting. A good example is that even when attempting to be bold and brave and tell it like it is, you still find yourself in certain philosophical knots that leave you to conclude it’s better just to delete certain passages entirely, or edit them down a great deal, in the name of maintaining the peace. Another limitation is that if you don’t know specifics about something, you can’t just make them up, which rears its head most prominently for me in dialog – the conversation is often somewhat lacking in my memoirs, because I frequently didn’t write down exactly what someone said.
Taking this same material and fictionalizing it can be surprisingly freeing. For starters it allows you to take some minor characters and lump them into a composite. You can also play with the timeline a little bit, most notably by compressing it. And then if you have the general gist of what was said, you can construct a conversation that flows in realistic fashion around that, which also makes for a more well-rounded project, instead of little isolated quips floating around in space here and there. So this curiously in some respects ends up feeling more like reality than typing up a factual report ever would.
Also, well, another by no means small concern revolves around the use of real vs. fake names. As some of you may have already suspected, long before reading today’s newsletter, yes this is a project largely based upon a certain period of my life. Did some of us single guys go around wearing wedding rings and pretending to be married? We sure did. But, alas, I’ve been told by a handful of naysayers over the years who didn’t especially care for my memoirs, that if I just changed everyone’s name, it would make everything magically all better, and nobody would ever get their panties in a bunch. So we shall see about that.
Moving forward, I will surely continue to do a little of both, depending upon the project at hand. The printed out scene I excerpted in the photo above runs about 2 1/3 pages, but I’ll spare you having to look at the entire thing. Particularly as I already included this snippet of the finished novel in my newsletter a few weeks ago. One other thing this does bring to mind, though, is an interview I caught years ago with Bukowski, where he was saying thank god he’d been rejected so many times in his early years, by every publisher under the sun, because who knows what kind of dreck he might have cranked out otherwise. At the time I was thinking this was just false modesty, and there’s no way he could possibly mean that…but then after you do this for awhile yourself, and enough time passes to look at your own earlier work, it totally makes sense. I too have countless occasions glancing back at this stuff now, and am saying to myself some variation of yikes! I’m glad this junk never passed through the wickets!
Get your copy today!
- ASIN : B0DST72CYV
- Publisher : Exquisite Noise Publishing
- Publication date : April 9, 2025
- Language : English
- Print length : 759 pages
- ISBN-13 : 979-8306573137
- Item Weight : 2.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.9 x 9 inches