John Newt and the quest for the golden ribcage

So.

It's been a while since I've posted.

But fear not! I'm back for now with some tea about my book which I'll call John Newt from now on.

It's a book that might need a bit of explaining.

So every once in a while, I like to go back to a few of the same videos on YouTube, and have a fun time watching them again. One such video, that I'll link to at the end of the post, is Jacksepticeye's playthrough of The Beginner's Guide.

The Beginner's Guide, if you haven't heard of it, is a surreal sort of narration-based game that came out in October of 2015. It's a really interesting game, and it's pretty hard to explain, so I'd suggest that you go check it out for yourself.

Anyways, every time I watch the video, it reaches me in a unique way. I can't describe exactly what it is, but I think that it's the closest to inner peace that I will ever get.

Actually, that's not a very accurate description. It's more like a mental void, an emotionless state of being where I don't really think, and I don't really feel, but at the same time I'm thinking and processing and trying to make sense of the wonderful and complex piece of art that has been presented to me. So yeah. That's pretty much why I keep coming back to the video. That and one other thing.

Whenever I watch the game being played, I get inspiration for the strangest books and stories ever. And when that inspiration strikes, I don't write out plans, I don't think if the plot makes sense, I just write.

And I write until I feel that the inspiration has left, and I've written a good enough piece that really makes you think.

I don't know what it would make you think about, because that's kinda up to you, but I just write these really surreal stories that to me represent what The Beginner's Guide is to me: a crescendo of emotions and potential theories, framed as a game and sent out into the world to be interpreted.

So the latest time I watched the video, I paused it about fifteen-ish minutes from the end, and started to type. I didn't think about what I was writing. I already had the idea in my brain, and I just let the words flow out onto the screen as they wished, and the story took shape.

On the surface, it makes very little sense. It's a short story about a guy named John Newt, who really likes this book called Junkvik and His Eleven Pies. He reads a chapter of the book every day, because something fascinated him about it, but he can't really say what it is. So he keeps reading the book, over and over again, hoping that an answer will appear over time if he reads it enough.

Meanwhile, a girl named Lila Pince is also reading a chapter of the same book every day. She reads it over and over again, because something about the book is unnerving to her, but she can't figure it out. She's reading it over and over again, just like John, hoping that answers will find her if she reads it enough times.

Lila eventually realizes why the book was so disturbing to her, because it insinuated that the protagonist murdered his friend three years after losing contact with him. John also realizes why the book fascinated him so much: the author's views on love changed dramatically from the first chapter to the last.

John and Lila both get the chance to meet the author of the book at a convention, and they both are able to ask him one question. They both get vague and seemingly unrelated answers to their questions, so they decide to derive their own meanings out of the book.

John and Lila team up and write a bestselling book together, and when they go to a convention and answer questions about the book, John gets a straightforward question and replies with the author of Junkvik and His Eleven Pies' answer to his own question, while Lila gets a simple yes or no question and gives a simple answer.

They then wrote another book, and it was banned in quite a few countries because they thought that it was offensive to world leaders. But that wasn't the real meaning of the book, so John and Lila didn't really care.

'If asked, John would have said that the book was about failure, and learning to accept it and move on. Lila would have said that it was "the spiritual sequel that everybody deserved but nobody needed."'

Shortly after writing their second book, they both disappear, and leave nothing but a small note with a pie on their kitchen table.

That was all written into one chapter. I copy pasted it into twenty-nine other chapters, and then in chapter thirty wrote a short note explaining what the heck was going on.

'Hello.

Thank you for reading this book. I really appreciate you sticking with it for this long.

...

If you haven't noticed already, I didn't respond to any comments on this book at all.

I will not be responding to any comments on this book.

I will not be discussing the meaning of the book here.

That's something you need to figure out on your own.

If you really want to talk to me about what I've made here, message me.

But the point of this book is not for me to tell you what to get out of it.

That's not the point of any book.

You figure it out on your own.

...

Don't worry about me.

This book isn't something that I wrote because of any intense feelings that I need to address in a private yet still public manner.

There's another reason.

Once again, thank you for reading this book.

Your patience is valued.

Good-bye for now.'

This note basically explains that I won't be giving any information about what the book is supposed to mean. But here in this blog post, I'm going to share my interpretation of what I think I wrote.

The interesting thing about this story is that I wrote it in that emotionless, almost thoughtless state of mind, and so even I don't know if this is supposed to have a deeper meaning or if it's a troll and there's nothing to take away from it. I intended for it to be something to dissect and speculate upon, so even I don't really know what was going through my head as I wrote this.

So just keep that in mind as I theorize about my own work.

I think that the start of the story, the part about John and Lila reading Junkvik and His Eleven Pies over and over again is supposed to symbolize me returning to the Beginner's Guide video over and over again, looking for deeper meanings and more stuff to take out of it.

The next part, where the characters understand what about the book was so interesting that they kept reading it over and over might symbolize some subconscious understanding, and that stroke of weird inspiration that prompts me to write these strange stories.

I"m not sure about the convention and the author's answers, because they made sense when I wrote them, but then a few seconds later I looked back and said "okay wait, no, that makes no sense," but the point of the story was partly to keep moving and not stop and wait for mistakes, so I left them and worked it into the story.

I think that the book Junkvik and His Eleven Pies is most probably a representation of The Beginner's Guide. It would make a lot of sense if John and Lila are meant to represent the fans of the game.

The titles of John and Lila's books definitely have meaning to them, because this was one of the few parts of the story that I consciously thought about.

The first book is called Passion, That Rich Slaver. This title is meant to represent how people work so hard to follow things they're passionate about, sometimes to an unhealthy degree. If it was someone else making you do all of that work instead of just your own brain, then it would probably be considered slavery.

Their second book is called Miscommunication at its Finest. This book title is extremely ironic, because it's the book that most people misinterpreted as a jab at world leaders instead of seeing the bigger picture. I think that on a bigger level, this book is some hint to the readers of John Newt that there's a bigger picture to be grasped from the story.

John and Lila disappearing at the end of the story is possibly a signal for the chain of events to start again in the next chapter: the story repeats, because the characters aren't in it anymore so nothing overlaps. Each chapter ends exclusively so that the new one can begin in its place.

Chapter thirty is probably the most straightforward of them all. It states my intentions in creating this book very clearly. There's nothing to interpret there.

So there you go! That's my interpretation of the book. Feel free to tell me about any other interpretations you might have about this story of mine.

Beginner's Guide video

John Newt book