FULL BLEED: YOU LOVE NOTHING

Don't worry. That's not a blanket statement of nihilism or anything, rather it's an excellent track from the excellent band LA Witch, whose debut I just snagged a little while ago. Closest easy approximation is Mazzy Star meets Deadbolt, but since it's on Bandcamp you can listen for free. Here's the link if you're interested.

Yeah, I haven't posted any new thought content lately. I'm kinda torn on that, really. Lots of it feels like writer as product brand burnishing and damn, that's the last goddamn thing we need right now. Writer as product is the path of grinding bleakness. Smash that like and subscribe. Pump up that engagement. Join the army. Don't even consider who the creator might be, just join the movement. Consumption as identity, yeah.

Just be careful who you sign up with because you might not really know them. At all. Even the nice ones.

As for what else is going on, I'm working on logo design for HAZELAND. Yeah, that whole post last week? It's already been superceded by the work this week. I'll throw a couple in here so you can see the process and the final. Doing a little more 3D modeling/design as well, more for a break from writing than anything else. It's still, however, staring at a screen, which isn't ideal. I don't know how to change that out, except maybe take up longhand writing and then type from written text. That sounds amazingly inefficient and physically taxing, though. I'm big on inefficiency but the physically taxing thing? Nah. Plus I can still type way faster than I can write and I'm okay with being crazy and sloppy in first draft territory.

Here's what I believe the final will be. Still need to do a full environmental rendering, but you get the idea.

That said, I should be at work on the ASPHALT TONGUES story collection for HAZELAND. I'm probably psyching myself out just a little because I gave myself a ridiculous deadline for delivering, uh, 12 short stories of 5k-10k in length and a 20k or so novella, that being the end of September. Actually, if I get this all out by the end of October, that would give me time to run edits on MY DROWNING CHORUS which I hope will be in my hands around then, and then let everything go berserk around the run-up to Christmas as it usually does.

The hope is to have ASPHALT TONGUES ready not long after MY DROWNING CHORUS hits, mostly because I don't expect my current publisher is going to be interested in a one-person-anthology. Maybe I'm wrong. So yeah, it'll probably be self-published and won't have a print book available. That may change if I can get a good price on a small enough run to make show sales viable -- that said, POD does not service that need. POD is great if you really want to have a physical book and don't have to be the resale agent. But if I'm paying to print the book POD and then ship it to a reader? Yeah, there's no money in it for me as the person who created the thing unless I make the cover price so high that nobody is interested in it.

And then there's BLACK TRACE. Look for another chapter next week. Then maybe one after that. It'll probably be offered simply as an ebook with little fanfare, more as an exorcism than anything else. I feel like I've been carrying it around since the year after I graduated college, which the first draft was finished right around that time, so... It's got lots of neat stuff in it (yes, I just re-read it) and a lot that I look at and don't know how to fix. Please don't say "Just hire an editor" because an actual editor will require (and deserve) actual payment on a book that might move 100 digital copies with Amazon eating a third of thiat right off the bat.

I know. I should have built an army. But that's the whole author as product/best friend thing again, and we all know where that leads.

Was running through some other thoughts on cosmic horror, evil, cosmology and its place in HAZELAND, but I think I'm going to run those another time, as another little nugget of brand burnishing. In the meantime, I should write some stuff for people to talk about instead of talking about what I plan on writing. It's a process that's pleasing, sure, but it's not getting the work done.

Wonder if those blackberries are ripe yet. Got half a pint yesterday.