FULL BLEED: WHEN YOU GIVE THE GAME AWAY WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING

Atwater Village, near LA, 2021

Happy New Year, everyone. It’s here whether you want it or not. Jury’s out on the decks of the mothership, though I sure got enough of 2024 by the time it ended, and maybe a little time before that even. It was a rough year in patches and those patches grew in size as they often do, becoming slippery and un-navigable where you just sort of keep a hold on the steering wheel and know that you’ve lost contact with the road and simply ride it out until things stabilize.

Sometimes they even do. Sometimes you just keep holding on.

Last year had some high points. I found almost fifty people who’d roll the dice on giving me money in exchange for my books, and one that had a troubled upbringing to boot. I’m thankful to everyone who bought a copy of All Waters Are Graves (and doubly thankful if you bought a copy of The Queen of No Tomorrows as well – a book that never really went anywhere, mostly because it wasn’t engineered to by way of writing or publishing.) My wife and I got to visit Paris which was an utterly amazing place and had I the means, I’d probably relocate there (I don’t; you’re stuck with me.) Cooked some nice meals at home. Got to LA in the early part of the year and saw people who I only see when I’m there, which isn’t often enough.

There was also a lot of wheel-spinning and frustration, only some of it having to do with writing and publishing. Which is a stone bummer because the world that we’re in is pretty hard on all creative folks, even if you’re not trying to make a living on it or even part of a living. I’d like to say that I believe we’re at the nadir of that right now. I’d like to say that. I’m not going to because I don’t believe it.

But what other choice do we have? Something about not doing a thing because we want to but because we feel compelled. Well, maybe you’re compelled. I’ve managed not to write actual words for almost three years. Well, blog and social media posts, but those aren’t longform narrative fiction. I did some revisions sure, but that’s not the something from nothing of drafting. Revisions are just putting patches where there’s leaks. It’s not writing. (Neither is pre-writing, which is essential but not the actual act.) Scared to hell of going back to it and finding that there’s no there there. Maybe I will surprise myself.

So, the work. In a landscape which is actively hostile to creative effort and is not likely to be any friendlier in the near future, I do wonder. Are we actively insane. I know I am. It’s about the only explanation that makes any sense. Insane or stupid. Or stubborn. Or recognizing that this is about the only thing I can do well that I can offer to folks outside say my immediate family.

But maybe I’m not so great at it after all, given my track record. Long time into this and I’m still a scrappy little indie writer with boxes of copies of my own work which is a situation I swore I’d never be back in after tossing a vanful’s worth of copies of earlier books into an actual landfill last year. And I still have some to get rid of. Yeah. Feels great.

I’m aware. We live in a new world now. Gotta define our own levels of success and failure and enduring when we fall short on both marks. Or maybe it’s just me.

So, engaging with failure as a benchmark, I started reading a book recommended to me on the subject. In this case On Writing and Failure, or, on the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer by Stephen Marche. I post the name and title as I suppose the author of the book has some manner of Google alert or the like on the title (an easy one to set up as that title does indeed stand out -- and he did repost my post about diving into the book on Friday.) I will perhaps engage with some of the book in ways that he wouldn’t be down with. Who knows. So if you’re listening, Stephen, I found the book valuable and… not.

I will say that within the first couple of pages, I could see an awful lot of myself in it. Particularly regarding the awkwardness and improbability of writers (and any creative laborer) even existing apart from their work and how failure is woven into the fabric of this manner of life. It’s pretty easy to look at things and see what is not, yeah? Or count up the hours versus the returns and invoices and yeah. Maybe we better not do that. Let’s not.

Because it’s not about money, right? Sure. It is. But it’s not. It’s not supposed to be. There’s just being seen. There’s the feeling that you got to your readers or viewers or subscribers or whatever makes up an audience now. At least you hope that. You’re hoping that what you were meaning to convey actually got to someone. Even in a world seemingly primed to produce bad-faith and clout-chasing reactions where interlocutors are happy to tell their viewers and followers what the work is actually about and oh, sorry, I’ve just described Hell. Yet we’re here.

And I haven’t even touched on the world of literature and the academy. Can’t speak to that, only to the rabble and hoi polloi of the world of social media and the froth of the everyday. Genre fiction. Common as dirt.

So anyways, I’m reading this meditation on failure and success and writing as a process and I’m understanding and feeling it and I figure out that… this book isn’t about me or to me. Though it is. Though I had a couple of oh shit, heart sinking because of all the lead in it ‘cause those shots hit and they hit directly. But that book wasn’t aimed at me at all. It was aimed at literature and the writers of that. Shakespeare, Confucius, Hemingway and Fitzgerald in this terrible combination that I wasn’t aware of before. These are writers I’m not fit to clean the piss of their shadows, yeah?

Oh, it’s true. No illusions there.

This made it difficult for me to keep going with the book. I ultimately did, though truthfully, the meat of it is laid out front, the black meat from the centipedes, you know, the stuff that Dr. Benway traffics in. What you (or I) needed to take away from it was there and early. Which is good, ‘cause I’m not going to be the guy writing for journals of any prestige (nor those fiercely snarl their independence from the legacy media). I realize that the level at which you find your work isn’t the issue at all. I know that. I keep telling myself that. It’s really about the process.

But I can’t help feeling that it actually is an issue. Probably because I’m not in that world and am not gonna be. But I better be careful here and not worry too much about the difference between literature and mere genre, other than to be wryly amused when one gleefully borrows from the other yet insists it is the purer strain.

So what if your dream ain’t to be represented in the pages of The Atlantic or the NYT or hell, even Rolling Stone (I know folks who’ve written for all of them. No disrespect to them. It’s a big deal. But like many kinds of big deals, it ends up being ephemeral in the endless churn.) I always knew the game wasn’t going to end up there for me. Nor should it. I refused to play. Hell, I refused to play by even the rules of genre. I’m still there, I suppose. I should be happy with it. Takes just as much effort to be happy as sad, right? Castaneda said that some years back. He also made up a bunch of the anthropological work that he got famous for. Makes you think.

But I looked at what was happening out there in genre and figured I just couldn’t do it. It seemed that all the market wanted was work that had been written before. Sure, you get cracks that let new things in, new subgenres, new amalgamations of flavor crystals to sprinkle over things. But the majority of things were copies of copies of copies. And I saw this decades ago. Now the world of genre is so small and the mainstream of it is so flat. Makes me think of that great dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico, the one where all the fertilizer from all the runoff from all the farms along the eastern watershed of the US of A have all spilled and settled, creating patches of overfed algae that have choked out all the oxygen in the water. Starved out.

Why not strike out on your own? Failure on that measure couldn’t be all that far from success in those addled waters. Even if that’s the dream, right? Making it in this world on your own terms, writing something new, not just something safe because that’s what publishers want. The trick is to not rely on oxygen, but to become anaerobic. To live off starvation. It’s not an easy trick. I haven’t anywhere near mastered it. Doubt I will.

Anyways, I’ve wandered afield. Back to success and failure. It does seem that the only way to win this game (I know, this statement fails at self-reflexivity, as does so much advice given in this field) is not to play it. Is that slicing the Gordian knot in two or just ignoring it? Does it matter if the knot is no longer binding you?

It is a strange business and a strange undertaking and a stranger profession, to write and create in this world. Even in the world of forty or a hundred years ago. Or thousands. Marche undertakes a brief examination of Jesus and failure, where the words attributed to him two millennia ago are instead reinterpreted and repurposed into the Gospels and you sure bet that the churches based on those truths are into peace and love and acceptance and refusal of worldly wealth weighed against the blissful eternity of the afterlife. It’s hard to argue any of this a success. And yet, these fictions are inescapable (at least in the Western world). But certainly not what’s intended, right there out in the open. They’re not particularly complicated words, but somehow “reject wealth, do good works, give to the poor” has become the prosperity gospel which is precisely zero steps away from Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s (now quaint and charming) Wall Street. Failure in success.

Of course, there’s the third option, being forgotten or never being at all. Hold up. Fifty buyers last year. I can’t say that. But not making a ripple in even the small world of genre that you inhabit, having given up on any of the bigger and more prestigious ponds. That’s a real thing. So I guess that’s failure. But I wrote the books. I’m trying to work up to writing the next one. I’ve been trying that for a while now. So, success?

So, neither.

It’s tough. It’s always been tough. Maybe it’d be tougher with a contract demanding books in a certain range and on a set schedule for an audience that may not be there for a publisher that is going to hope you put the book on TikTok and wait for lightning to strike else it’ll just get mulched into the machine that people will look to instead of stories by humans one day. It’s not any one thing, but everything.

And still to keep working in this.

Oh, but there’s kind advice from writers in genre who are successes and if only you do what they did, then you can taste success too. Perhaps if you had a time machine and could enact that advice when they themselves did (if they even did) and were them, then perhaps that success advice might apply to you. But daring to say that those kind words aren’t to be taken up thankfully and immediately? Yeah, that gets you kicked out of the clubhouse. Or harried endlessly by fans of said advisor. It happens. I've watched it.

Anyways, here’s to 2025. I hope to get a novel and more written then. I plan on getting a new book of Hazeland stories entitled Fake Believe through the Kickstarter process. Maybe I’ll even take a trip with my wife, if we’re able. I’ll watch my youngest graduate from college and that chapter will be closed. I try not to think too hard on the other chapters that will be closed as well, and what those closing will open us up to. My suspicions are that it will be something we’ve never seen before, and it will not be driven by kindness.

Take care of yourselves. Be kinder to your own successes and nurture your own failures. We’re going to need it.