FULL BLEED: I’LL COME RUNNING TO TIE YOUR SHOES
Hi there. My name is Matt Maxwell, actual living breathing human being and not a branded entity, not a registered trademark, not a talking head or wind-up monkey on a video channel. Picked up a bunch of followers on Bluesky recently and this is way too long to post there, so I’m making up an introduction post here. Maybe it’ll even get read.
I’ve been on the internet since about the time I started writing. Mostly since that was about the time that relatively normal humans (ie, not operators of mainframes) could be expected to be online. And online I was. I bet if you really tried, you could find posts by me on alt.cyberpunk and alt.music.alternative and rec.arts.comics. This was January, 1991. Okay, I lied. I started writing about six months before that, not long after I graduated from college (UCI, double major in English Literature and Social Sciences.) I wrote my first novel back then. Even submitted it. Got a nice letter back from a big SFF editor saying it was good but the market wanted more fantasy. I wrote a fantasy novel awhile after and they weren’t interested. Nobody way, really. This was back in the days of mailing a big pile of paper and it cost fifteen bucks back when that spent like closer to fifty and it took months, several of them, to hear back if you were gonna hear back at all.
Today you send an email query and you can get ignored immediately. It’s much improved, really.
I wrote half of about three different novels before quitting and then going to school for design and animation. After which, I actually got a job in animation and VFX at a shop in Hollywood (okay, North Hollywood at the corner of Lankershim and Magnolia) and worked there at the end of the nineties and the early months of 2000 back when the world was gonna end because of floating point math or some such foolishness. Instead, the business collapsed. No, seriously. Take a look at all the VFX companies who worked on the Oscar-winning film Titanic and check out what happened to them the day that job wrapped. I moved back to San Diego and awaited the birth of my first child. Then the second a couple years later. I played Mr. Mom for several years, taking a day a weekend and some mornings to write a comics script or several.
Most of those went nowhere. But I got two graphic novels out of it, under the umbrella title Strangeways. Weird westerns, both of them. Cowboys and werewolves, cowboys and vampires. Put them out myself, offered through Diamond distribution (it’s a much longer story than just that), sold in stores, a few copies. Sold at comics shows, a few more copies. It didn’t make back its production costs. Everyone besides me got paid up front. I learned a lot about writing comics and that comics people are really the best. Selling and marketing? Yeah, not that much. Some, but it’s tough to move those needles. Besides, things have changed so much in the last decade-plus that any advice I could offer you would be outdated. Other than this. Start small. Don’t expect to pull off a multi-graphic-novel-volume series off the bat. Write an eight page story with a beginning, middle and and end. Then shoot for a full twenty page story. Do those for awhile. Then worry about big stuff.
Hell, even a single comics page where you explain a simple narrative. If you really want to do this, you’ll start small. I realize nobody wants to hear this. Just like my kids never wanted to learn under-drawing when they decided they were kinda serious about drawing stuff. And that’s fine. It’s good to have a thing that you’re good at that you don’t have to worry about succeeding with.
No, you can’t buy copies of Strangeways anywhere anymore even though I still have boxes of them. Hint: Amazon shipping sucks. I was losing money on every copy I sent to their warehouse for them to then send to customers. No, you don’t have this problem with POD books, which is why I can offer copies of my books there still. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
About the time I was offering the second Strangeways book (and had started on a third, which has a handful of pages drawn that’ll likely never get shown) I began to write short fiction again. I should say that for the five-six years before this point, I’d been writing a lot about comics and my reading of them, published at a handful of websites including the first iteration of this one (domain lost and I don’t feel like paying the ridiculous thousand dollars that the current owner wants for it). I wrote enough to fill two books on it. They’re there over on my Amazon page, The Collected Full Bleed and Highway 62 Revisited. I wrote a lot of words for zero pay other than knowing that folks would read them because it was early days on the internet. Ish.
So, back to writing short fiction. I wrote several short stories and mostly novellas because that’s my natural length. Which sucks in a world of small outlets who pass on anything over 5000 words or want to do flash. I can’t do flash or microfiction. If that’s your thing, great. I don’t care to read or write it. Pitched to some anthologies. Got rejected a bit. I posted one of the stories online and asked William Gibson to give it a read, as it was based on a tweet of mine in reply to a thread he’d started. He RTd it and that became the first line of a short story called “Tug On the Ribbon” which I think is still one of the best things I’ve written. He liked it, but it’s not the kind of thing I could use as a blurb (even if I tried.) I ended up putting out a couple collections of short fiction. None of it went anywhere. Closest anything came to was me being invited to write a story for Blizzard Entertainment in the StarCraft universe. I went and pitched a bunch of ideas, they picked one and it was back and forth until I had an idea of what they wanted. I wrote a draft that was twice as long as it needed to be and spent two weeks whittling pieces off until it fit. It paid real well. Even got to write another one for ‘em, but it never got printed. Got paid real well, better than any SFF magazine would’ve. It’s probably still online if you look for it, called “The Teacher.” I know it was included in the Project Blackstone anthology volume which is still for sale.
Most of the pitches that I sent to open anthologies never went anywhere, but for one, around ten years ago now. It was for a set of Cthulhu/HPL-inspired stories in a futuristic setting. I wrote a real mean story called “Chunked” which I didn’t expect to go anywhere. Crazily, the publisher liked it. It went out in an anthology called Tomorrow’s Cthulhu which is still in print I think. As for why “Chunked” is so mean, well, nobody but me twigged to it. Is that because I wrote a great piece or because I suck as a writer? Exercise left to the reader. Did another story for this outfit and finally was asked to pitch some ideas for a serial they wanted to run. So I came up with a story about a book forger who instead creates a working occult tome complete with otherworldly god. Some of you might recognize this as The Queen of No Tomorrows. You’d be right. I wrote it in 2016 and it came out in 2018, even got paid real well for it, all things considered. There were plans to do more, notably a second novel to come out in 2020 under the name My Drowning Chorus.
That… didn’t happen. Two years of back and forth and long periods of being ghosted and I ended the relationship with the publisher. I paid for cover art that was not going to get used and paid the editor for the time they’d put into the book. Whoops. There went the advance I got from the first book a couple years ago (that and taxes). I sat on the new book for a long time. Mostly because I knew that going full self-published as opposed to indie-published is a great way for you to get your book ignored. There’s lots of reasons for this. We all know what they are, but much of it comes down to marketing budgets and prestige. Seriously, look at all the outlets out there who have “I will not read self-published books” as part of there “About us and if you want to get reviewed” pages. There are people out there who do. They are not the influencers who monetize their channels or show off stacks of books sent to them by publishers, indie or otherwise.
So earlier this year, I ran a Kickstarter for the book, under the new title of All Waters Are Graves (a title I like much more anyways.) I put up a modest ask and was surprised when it went three times over (don’t get excited, that’s $1700, and I barely broke even on postage and printing.) This kickstarter is the only reason why I kept going, honestly.
It sucks to follow anthology queries and get blown off. It sucks to have your publisher crumble in front of you. It sucks to get only a couple of reviewers to pay attention to your book. It sucks to work on a thing for more an a year and have it not really go anywhere. At least with the kickstarter, I know there’s a level of interest in the book.
I’ll do another one. Hopefully more after that.
I’ve been at this a long time. I haven’t made more than a mortgage payment out of the work I’ve been able to put my name on. Yeah, I’d done some well-paying ghost writing that I can’t discuss other than to say it happened but that’s all long in the past now. I don’t have much patience for folks who say that if I’m not willing to do it for free, than am I even really a writer? I don’t have any patience for folks who say what my art should and should not be. That’s a good way to catch a block from me.
I’ve also talked about and folks have asked “Hey, you’ve mentioned some personal challenges as a drain on your work and I wanna know.”
If I know you in real life, you probably know what they are. I don’t really feel like speaking to them beyond that other than their reality and accepting how they shape my time and energy. You can accept that or not. It’s not for me to worry about.
As for the now, I work on a series of books under the shared title Hazeland.Go ahead and click that if you want background info and anti-manifestoes. There’s two of them printed so far: The Queen of No Tomorrows and All Waters Are Graves. There’s a thing called Fake Believe which will go out for a Kickstarter early next year. I’m working on a fourth book called The Missing Pieces. After that will be a book called Asphalt Tongues. They all take place in the Los Angeles of the eighties, a place and time I’m familiar with as I lived in both. I market them as horror but genre labels are tiring otherwise. They are novels of the fantastic, sure, but not urban fantasy as it’s sold. Place them somewhere between Chandler and Calvino, only they ain’t ever going to be taught in lit seminars. The books themselves are about language and magic and time and what it’s like to live in a world you only sorta understand. There are no vampires, no secret world of faerie, no government conspiracies. There is no multi-season Netflix adaptation coming. There is no army you’re joining by reading these nor is there an identity to reinforce.
I've written in nearly every genre that is. I am tired of caring about genre purity. I don't care. There's fantasy and then there's non-fiction. None of these books ever happened. They're not describing things that are actual. They're telling you the truth as it applies to them. This is not literature.
But then lit seminars seem like a quaint afterthought in the today of STEM-driven curricula. Oh yes, I know, there’s still English Lit classes that are out there. Still departments surviving even though the chancellors of the universities are being pressured to put out more business-friendly degrees. And what company or political organization wants writers to do anything more than be a friendly marketing arm? That’s not hard. You can teach a gibbon to do that.
Maybe this answers questions you might have. Maybe this just makes you want to ask more.
Here’s some other stuff that I’ve done and some of which continues on:
Amazon Author Page. And honestly, I don’t want to hear about how you’ll have to hold your nose or anything else. Nobody is making you click on it.
I have an Insta account that I barely use. Don’t send me stuff there.
My Twitter has been deactivated for some time.
Facebook? Ha.
I don’t have a newsletter or a Patreon or anything else. I’m out here running probably realistically annual Kickstarter campaigns for single books. I will never run a campaign unless the book is substantially done (which in common parlance means at least a second or third draft.) It’s just me. I’m not a movement. Reading my books is not praxis. If you saw me in real life, you’d think I was just another normie not worth bothering with. I’ve been an outsider for basically as long as I’ve walked the planet. Too much attention will likely make me shut off and hide.
Other stuff? It’s in the books.
Until next time.
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