FULL BLEED: GRAVITY WELLS AND CHICXULUBS

It's fall now, though the thermometer outside would probably have most of you thinking differently, a hundred yesterday and just a touch cooler today, cough stuck in the back of the throat dry and not much relent in that condition for the last nearly three weeks now. Yeah, the vacation was great but coming back sick and wondering if this is just Long Covid now was not so great. But this could be one of those "depressed or just hungry" things. Either way, it's a drag on things.

So I'll pretend that's why the ball hasn't started rolling on the new work just yet. Sure, I have some things to tie off with Fake Believe (that being the third and upcoming Hazeland book, going through funding in the Spring -- and when I say funding, I mean using Kickstarter as a way to do pre-orders and to directly talk to folks about the work.) I sent off a handful of ARCs of the book to friends and readers, all of whom I'm grateful for.

Like I said, writing is a lonely kind of affair. I've said that a lot and it's 100% true for me. Maybe it's not for you. Maybe you can write socially and get together with all manner of other folks who write and you can vent over coffee or drinks or whatever. That's not my case, 'cept maybe at shows and even those are fewer and farther between now. Lots of reasons for that, nothing I really need to go into.

Particularly a lonlier sort of proposition if you're out there self-publishing. Real John in the wilderness hours if you get what I'm saying. Rolling those stones and it's that the stones get any bigger but the passing years just make 'em a little harder to get moving and make that knowledge that if you slip, you're going to have to work that much harder to make up lost ground or step aside as that sucker just leans into gravity's pull and back to its angle of repose a quarter mile back. At least you didn't lose a limb, right?

No editors, little feedback, occasional attaboys from readers. That's your bread. And hey, it's tasty bread when you get it. But turning your back on the wider process, that's its own set of obligations. I won't say rewards 'cause it's far more double-edged than that. You get to do the work that you want to do. That's the reward. I hope that's enough. I wrestle with it being enough for me, I honestly do. Even though at this point in my life I understand that it's what I'm in for. This is the world that I've made for myself. And I best be happy in it, because only a fool makes a world for themselves that wasn't what they wanted, right?

And I wish, I sure wish that this was a matter of me standing by my principles and turning down contracts to write books that I don't know how to write or can't. That would at least indicate two different things. The first being nobility and the sort of stalwart regard for aesthetic purity and struggle that refuses the easy reward. Wow. That sure sounds goddamn noble, pure, unalloyed. Downright idealistic and iconic. Worthy of attention. And, the second, more important part in this world we find ourselves in, that I create work that someone thinks is worth rewarding or even paying attention to. Yeah, it'd be nice to have that problem. I thought I did at one point, but that ended so poorly (both reputationally and financially) that I'm reluctant to engage in that proposition ever again. Yeah, I know. That sentence honors myself to even suggest that someone would want to validate my work with their capital and reputation.

That's the rub, right? That's the money melon. That's the pursuit. Lotta folks out there seeking that as the end or thinking that once they're there, everything else will fall into place. This will fix them and their work.

I'm here to say that there's nothing wrong with your work. Or you. You're addressing a void that ain't ever gonna be satisfied. Sure, it's nice to have your work rewarded with a check that you can throw at rent and food and maybe go see a movie or pay for a new video game or some more books to read that you can toss on the pile of to be read books or even all those things. We're just in a world where that's a thing that happens less and less and less. Where all manner of artistic labor is devalued if not scorned (or worse, cleansed of any individual voice and processed into franchise content -- but at least the folks who worked on that got paid for it, I hope.) That's always been a cyclical thing, just that we lived through a hundred years plus of developing what we might call a mainstream audience and then having that snicked away with a thousand cuts and that was even before the Algorithm came along to serve itself. Before a time when agents posted wish lists of books they wanted to see (but were not in a position to publish) on social media. Before the multiple Chicxulub impacts that have come along.

Now, sure, Chicxulub was bad news for the dinosaurs (whether or not they were warm or cold blooded) and made things gloomy for a long time (but not as bad as any of the bid Cambrian extinctions which were in a word, whooof, bad for life on the planet.) However, it opened things up for the mammals. At least that's the conventional wisdom of this sort of thing. I'm not going to say that it's a good thing that it's actively harder to make a living with creative work (and it is, judging by what I see out on Bluesky nearly every day). Maybe, however, it will dissuade some creators from seeing that pursuit as the pinnacle to reach. Or maybe I'm saying this to make myself feel better. That could be it, too.

Truth is, we could always write whatever we wanted or paint whatever we wanted or make whatever free jazz skronk blackened powerviolence noise music we wanted to. Just that maybe we need to decouple the idea of the paycheck being the reward or the goal. Hey, I like getting paid for my work, I really do. I've had to stop worrying about it so much for my own sanity. And then I think about some of these things which became huge cultural touchstones, whether they were movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Night of the Living Dead which inspired literal schools of filmmaking but due to legal wrinkles or just plain theft, the creators never got paid for them. No. That's not noble. It sucks.

Or all the concert venues for nearly any music scene you could think of, barely scraping by on drink sales or operating gray-market at best in order to stay open to keep paying bands so the kids who couldn't afford anything more than two bucks cover could see something new to rip their heads open and maybe offer a path to doing things differently. Does it suck that these places couldn't succeed long or well enough to maintain their continued survival? Yup. That's not noble. It sucks. Same goes for record labels run out of garages or industrial spaces, for publishing houses that make an initial funding round but can't make it for more than a couple years. It sucks. It's hard for everyone out there. No matter what media.

And now I'm seeing that movie studios are trying to get fans to help the make movies by way of focus groups. Yeah, that's not gonna work, because as smarter folks than me have already pointed out, the fans don't even know what they want. And yeah, this gets me dangerously close to touching on AI, but let's just pretend I did in the whole "world that is rapidly devaluing art and creators of art" thing so we can spare ourselves a withering screed. Thing is, movies are in real trouble because they're so goddamn expensive to make. They're capital traps, which I wrote about, oh geez, maybe ten years ago. Why are properties so worried about being made into movies? Because that's the top in this world. They're spending money on a thing you like. They're thinking it's a thing that will get them some money so they try to get attention for it, etc etc. If your work becomes a big franchise, then you've effectively won, right?

Yeah, exercise left to the reader on that one.

And there's gonna come a time when the audience to support a couple hundred million bucks being burned up in two hours of projected frames on a screen or streamed to a television set just won't be there. That's gonna be grim times, for movies. Yeah, there's gonna be determined weirdos who go ahead and do it with a video camera and hopefully they can get distributed to more than their friends and family. Maybe it'll even mean a renaissance of strange and weird and people trying to make a mainstream movie but having no idea how to and making something wonderfully outside instead.

That's a lot eaier in books. Maybe in comics, too. I dunno, been a long time since I tried that. Music, too. Just so long as people can keep the bills paid apart from having to pay for studio time or editors or cover designers or whatever other ancillary costs there are. Maybe once the smoke clears, people will realize that it's easier to do this sort of thing than they thought and we'll have a panoply of different and new voices. I know for sure we'll have plenty of traditionalists trying their damnedest to maintain things as they were, plenty of genre purists doing what makes sense to them. I'm not worried about SF, whatever it might actually be, dying.

Anyways, went the long way around the mountain on that one. Sorry.

This is all to say that I'm trying to wrestle less with notions of success when it comes to my own work. Yes, I'd like to do good work and think that I do, given the constraints I operate under (Aside: I'd love to afford to pay an editor but my Kickstarters would have to be at least triple in size for that to happen, so I'm not holding my breath.) But I've turned my back on acceptance and the accompanying prestige that comes along with it vis a vis external publication. It's where I've put myself, even if I didn't really understand it, once I started writing prose again in 2011 or so (apart from a brief bout writing WFH). So I better stop fighting about it, because the struggle against the self is just another way to say self-destruction (and I don't mean in the transformational way, either.)

Maybe understanding that Publishing Doesn't Love You will pick up steam. Or folks will make their own co-ops and fight that uphill battle of acceptance even in genre circles. Again, if you're a self-publisher without a giant reputation to start with, it's a relatively foolish struggle to undertake, no matter how many independent media outlets say they want to hear new voices. That hasn't been my actual experience. That's part of Publishing Doesn't Love You, too. That's part of the multiple Chicxulubs.

This year has been a terrible year for my work, personally. Getting All Waters Are Graves released and finding that there's a (small) audience for this sort of thing was a big deal but that was just a little wind at my back rolling that rock uphill. I'm trying to turn it around and start on the fourth Hazeland book, that being The Missing Pieces (the third is mostly complete, as described at the start of this long ramble). And then the fifth, hopefully enough so that I can offer books three and four in the same calendar year. Maybe. That might be nuts.

It might. But maybe it's true that only the insane have the strength to prosper, or however that saying goes.