Joe Peacock's Blog, page 5

The High Dive

I remember the first time I ever jumped off the high dive.

I was seven years old. Our daycare took a summer trip to what we Atlanta kids called “the nice pool”. It was a huge multi-pool park that had both a basic diving board and a high diving board — not the ten-footer you might see at other public pools… This was a 30 meter Olympic diving platform. And the right of passage, if you didn’t want to be mocked relentlessly and terrorized by the older kids, was to jump off The High Dive.

Before our first trip, the elder statespersons of our fellow daycare detainees explained that they only take a trip to The Nice Pool once a summer, and the standing yard rules of this particular prison is that if you didn’t want to be seen as a “total wimp” you had to jump off of The High Dive. We had only started going to this daycare two days before this trip happened. Needless to say, neither my sister nor I were adequately prepared for the hole that appeared in our lower intestines which our stomachs fell through when we first laid eyes on The High Dive. It was a monolith; every bit the towering, awe-inspiring structure that the Burj Khalifa is from the ground (or so I imagine, I’ve not yet seen it in person… But good lord, is it huge).

[image error] Actual photo of the high dive I had to jump off of at seven years old

The rest of the summer was, in a word, hell, both in the literal and the figurative sense. Atlanta gets very hot in the summer (hence the nickname for the city none of us who are actually from here will ever call it, because it’s fucking dumb — seriously, don’t call Atlanta “Hotlanta” because no. No no no. Just don’t), and the treatment we received from the other, more experienced, more permanent members of the daycare prison system was enough to make Dante wince.

The kids made “pee-mud” that is, you can safely assume, what it sounds like. They used in conjunction with stray sticks and other yard debris to, among other things, paint the chain link fence brown and fling the effluent at the lesser, weaker kids in the yard. We stopped bringing any toys from home because they inevitably ended up either in more pieces than they arrived in, or as part of some other older kids’ collection. Lunches were special because of the various items the other kids would introduce to our sandwiches and make us eat. Turkey and paint chips; peanut butter and snot…

And it wasn’t just us. It was every kid that was, by my perception, way too scared to jump off the high dive.

I never fought them. I wanted to, a lot. But my mother expressly forbade fighting of any kind. The few times I did, I was usually standing up for my sister, which made my mother slightly less angry and the punishment slightly less severe, but fighting was still such a terrible offense that my punishment at the daycare or school I was at was easily doubled or tripled in severity at home. Stand in the corner for an hour at daycare? How about a whole afternoon at home? How about a whole week?

I got sneaky, of course. I’d perform stealth attacks of my own. I worked in conjunction with a few other newbies or weaker kids to get our own back against the antagonists. It was never enough to get them to stop, and inevitably invited retribution way worse than the first offense. And in the end, the only avenue that ever seemed to make them stop was being brave enough to jump off The High Dive.

So that next summer, two weeks after school let out and we started daycare, I resolved that no matter how scary, how terrifying, how dangerous it might be, I was going to heave my big-little ass off that 10-meter-high platform and show those kids I wasn’t fooling around. Half the kids that were present the last summer were gone, either aged out of the daycare system or unable to attend because their likely only parent couldn’t afford it, or some other reason. But the half that remained had effectively passed along the ritual, along with it names of returning “summer kids” who failed the test the last go round.

For a week and a half, we were subjected to the same treatment as the summer before. I begged the kids not to fuck with us, swearing up and down that my sister and I would both leap off the high dive when next we took a trip to The Nice Pool. It didn’t help. If you weren’t a jumper, you were on the list, and that was the way of things.

[And yes, you’re probably thinking this daycare was horribly regulated. It was. What do you expect in inner city Atlanta in the 80’s, with nearly fifty kids being shepherded by two elderly women who were far more concerned that the checks cleared every week than they were with the overall happiness and safety of the kids that paid their rent? For better or for worse, it’s the way it was. It’s probably the case in some cities today. America .]

Finally, the day arrived. I remember it being hot before the sun even rose. The air rippled with heat waves as I stared out the front of the daycare bus at the long road which led to my redemption. I mentally prepared for the journey, reminding myself that if all these other kids could master their fears and leap off The High Dive, I could too.

Too bad I hadn’t physically prepared for it. I forgot my flip flops, and we weren’t allowed to wear our street clothes to the pool. Everyone changed before we left (which, for years, I thought was simply a convenience thing, but have come to realize that it was probably a very well thought out safety measure in the days of “Stranger Danger!” and kidnappings and child endangerment).

We got off the bus and the second my feet touched the black asphalt parking lot, I could feel my skin bubbling. I tried to take refuge in the white striped paint, and that helped, but as the daycare workers proceeded along with a line of kids toward the pool, I had to move. I leapt stripe to stripe for as long as there were stripes to leap to, but there was no avoiding the long stretch of black tarmac that separated the last parking space from the entrance to the pool. By the time we entered, my feet were blistered and bleeding.

But that didn’t stop me.

I was the very first in the line of our daycare kids who were up to challenge the high dive. The oatmeal I choked down for breakfast began coming back up as I climbed and midway up the ladder, I puked. It landed on some kid who wasn’t with us. The other kids from our daycare cracked up while simultaneously screeching in disgust.

Eventually, I reached the top of the dive. Little spats of blood from my feet made circled tracks on the white platform as I walked toward the edge, and then shrank back, round and round, at least five loops. I puked again, but nothing came out except for a little drool.

“Come on you pussy!” one kid yelled from the ground. I remember thinking how lucky he was, to be free to yell such things at a child taking a huge risk, from the safety of terra firma. Reminds me of the Internet more than just a little.

I finally realized, I had done the really hard part: I’d climbed up there. I prepared. I made the journey. I got to the point where I could finally find my freedom. There were only two ways down: climbing back the way I came, which led to another summer of torture, or swallowing my fear and taking the plunge, thereby securing for myself a summer free from pain.

I slowly walked to the edge of the platform. The treetops looked different from where I stood. I could see some of the eastern side of the Atlanta skyline from The High Dive. I looked down. The crystal blue waters swirled, making the black  swim lanes wave and swirl as the sunlight danced on the ripples. I remember thinking it didn’t look nearly as scary from up there, once you got there. I held my breath and pinched my nose, took a one-step leap, and fell nearly 30 feet into the pool below.

[image error] yee.

I don’t remember the actual fall. I just… Did it. But I remember the sound of the world shutting out as I plowed below the surface of the water. I remember my vision swirling from bright white to black as I clamped my eyes shut, to blurry blue as I opened them underwater, then back to black again because the chlorine burned my eyes. I remember thinking I needed to paddle my feet and wave my arms like I’d learned in swimming lessons several years before.

I kicked hard. I paddled hard. It felt like it took hours to reach the surface. But I was excited. My face parted the waters and fresh air washed over my cheeks. Some cheers entered my ear as the water poured from them. I opened my eyes.

None of the kids were cheering for me. They were cheering on a fist fight that had broken out near the ladder for The High Dive over who was next up. My sister was nowhere near the ruckus; she’d made her way back to the shallow end of the pool and was playing with some kid that wasn’t from our daycare.

I climbed out of the pool, disappointed that more was not made of my triumph. I walked over to where my sister was playing. “Did you see that?” I asked her.

“Yeah… was it scary?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I admitted only to her.

“I’m not doing it,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked, incredulous. “They’re going to pick on us if you don’t!”

“They’re going to pick on us anyway,” she said.

I felt somewhat deflated. Surely, the other kids would be more into what I’d just done. I left her in a huff and marched over where the other kids were, waiting in line to go up the dive, eager to join my new pack.

“Was it scary?” one of the kids who hadn’t jumped before asked.

“…No way,” I lied.

“Good,” he replied. “I just want to get it over with and not get picked on anymore.”

And he did, as did several others. The new or less emboldened kids who didn’t know what the true ramifications of not jumping were, joined my sister in the shallow end. Two groups formed by the end of the day, much as they had years prior: the jumpers and the non-jumpers.

Not much was said from one group to another, but everyone knew the score. The kids that jumped had passed the test. They ticked that box on the unofficial social form that denotes that they were now One Of Us. And that was really the extent of it. I never made friends with my new group. I was just part of it, because I did the thing they required for me to be in the pack.

That ended a few weeks later, when some kid threw pee-mud at my sister while making fun of her freckles. I picked up a Tonka truck (which back then were still made from steel) and smacked him in the face with it as hard as I could, crushing his nose and blackening his eye. I got smacked by the daycare workers (they still did that back then) and had to stand against the wall during playtime for an hour every day for a week. I got punished by my mom and had to stand in the corner every day after we got home, from dinnertime to bedtime, for a month.

That month of corner-standing turned into two months when, after a few weeks, another kid smeared a mixture of snot, spit, mustard, Sprite, and dirt on my sister’s sandwich and made her eat it. She told me about it after lunch, and I pushed that kid off the swingset and broke his arm.

All of the High Dive kids spared not even a second to sell me out. I was on the shit list for the rest of the summer. My mother almost had to pull us out of that daycare because I was a “behavior problem.” I was remanded to sequestered care with two other kids every day who had performed some manner of extreme violence on other kids. I still ended up with snot in my lunch periodically, because I’d turned my back on the ruling pack. But I will say, no one fucked with my sister again after that. Or if they did, she never said anything.

Looking back on all of this through adult eyes, the lesson is clear: fitting in isn’t something you can force. If the rules demand that you perform certain tasks to prove a loyalty you don’t truly feel, you can bet the group you’re joining is, at the very least, full of shit — but they’re probably some sort of evil at their core, because what they’re asking for is loyalty over what’s right. And any grand accomplishment you achieve for the wrong reasons will, inevitably, fail to fulfil you. Your way out may be a dead end.

What should have been a formative moment where I overcame my fear of taking leaps and climbing heights has nothing at all to do with those things. Instead, it was merely an escape route from societal condemnation. I did something pretty profound for my seven-year-old self, and I did it all for the wrong reasons.

There are situations in everyone’s adult life where they feel forced to do shit they don’t want to do in order to prove they are who everyone wants them to be. And we all do it. The High Dive was certainly not the last time I did something to prove I was cool, or to fit in, or at the very least to stop being picked on. But it was the first that I can recall.

I try to think back on that when I write. I try to keep that in mind when I give advice. It’s easy to be simplistic when you’re past a hard place and simply say “You can do it!” or “All it takes is time!” or “It’ll all turn out great, just believe in yourself!”

When you’re seven, or fifteen, or twenty-three, or even thirty, and you don’t have a sense of who yourself even is… How can you believe? How can you trust that you can do it, or that all it takes is time?

No one is wrong when they say such things. They’re cliches for a reason. But to the person actually going through it (whatever it may be; depression, anxiety, pain, loss, confusion); right now, I say to you: you are going to mess up. You may make choices that seem right at the time, and end up being benign — or worse, dangerous to you and others. You may act a certain way or do certain things in an attempt to get away from what you’re feeling. In that, so long as you’re not hurting anyone else, you need to know it’s okay.

It’s okay to be scared, it’s okay to be afraid, and it’s okay to not know what you’re doing. And all of that is because it’s impossible to know a thing before you know it, and the only way to truly know it is to go through it.

But the solace I will offer is this: you will get through it. And when you do, you will be wiser. You will know better. You will heal. And what you do then, after you’ve learned and healed, is what matters more.

For those who have jumped off The High Dive for all the right reasons (whatever your version of The High Dive is), that’s a major victory. So much is to be said about the bravery it took and respect you earned for doing something hard and overcoming your fears. Nothing will stop you in life, because you know how to overcome a hard thing and achieve a goal.

And for those who have for all the wrong reasons… that’s also a major victory, and has lessons all their own. Knowing things comes with a responsibility to not do them the same way again. And when you can, you try to share that with others who are going on their own journeys, hoping like hell they don’t make the same mistakes you did.

Of course, they will. They have to. It’s life, and that’s how it works. And so our responsiblity, having jumped off our own High Dives for all the wrong reasons, is to be there at the base of the pool to help the misguided among us to realize, what they did was brave, but not necessarily the right thing for them, and to not leave them isolated as they try to figure out what is the right thing.

At least, that’s what I think.

On Writing, Part 3: The Breakthrough Moment™

Last night, I had a Breakthrough Moment.

Every writer who has spent more than a day trying to write any particular piece of writing will tell you epic tales about their Breakthrough Moment if you but ask them. It’s a cliche at this point, but for a reason: They’re huge. They change your emotional state, your perspective, your worth ethic, and if you buy into the idea, your entire fate. They’re the moments you know you’ve got your book in hand and just need to get it out.

You didn’t ask about it, but I’m telling you mine anyway. The bad news: It’s boring. The good news: it’s short.

 

[image error] I searched Google for images related to “Breakthroughs” and this came up. Cheesy. Terribly edited. But for some reason I love it.

 

The thing that happened: the writing just started coming out. See? Boring, but short.

But there’s a lot that goes into that moment that makes it such a big Breakthrough Moment for me. Let me share some insight as to why it’s such a big deal.

Learning how to write fiction has been the hardest, yet most satisfying, thing I’ve ever done. Literally the hardest. Literally the most satisfying. When writing blog posts or telling funny stories from my past or doing op/ed journalism, the process goes something like this:

Make a point;
Preferably humorously;
Using aspects of your past, insight, opinion, or life to justify it.

That’s it. You dig into a wound, pull out the splinter, and either make people laugh or cry about it, or at the very least, understand it. The hardest part of the storywriting process in those pieces is done for me by the time I get to them, because I lived them. I was there, I know what happened, and all I have to do is choose a lens through which to look at it and tell you what I’m seeing through that lens. Hopefully, you feel a certain way about it, take something from it, and my job is done.

All I had to do was be honest in the writing. The rest takes care of itself. Finding that honesty is the hardest part, and it’s pretty easy when you’re willing to bleed on the page to get it out.

 

[image error] …What is it with dudes and sledgehammers breaking through walls that means “Breakthrough?” This looks like vandalism to me. I dunno.

Marlowe Kana, however, is Science Fiction / Cyberpunk. There’s so, so, so much more that goes into trying to tell that story. I haven’t lived in the year 2097, so a lot of “just tell people what happened” can’t happen until I invent, out of thin air, what happened. And making all that stuff worth reading, much less make any kind of sense at all, takes a lot of work. This work is comprised of world building, character building, plot creation, beats and their placements, reveals, growth of character, growth of environment, growth of narrative…

As instrumental as all of that is to telling the story, none of that is the actual “writing” part. It’s not enough to just say “this happened, and then this happened, and then they did this about it, and so on.”

I have to really get into the story. I have to organize it, lay it out, and get it to a place where the actual storytelling happens. In other words, I have to live it in my head before I can write it.

[image error] I dig this one — the glass ceiling metaphor is cool, and it’s not some guy breaking down some wall somewhere with a sledgehammer. This lady climbed that ladder by herself and did real work. This one’s pretty cool, as far as stock imagery for “Breakthroughs” goes.

I took a break after Volume 3 came out last year to get some air and focus on getting the rest of the work that needs doing, done. I knew I wanted to quit my day job and focus on Marlowe Kana (and writing in general) full-time. That meant putting my nose to the grindstone, saving some cash, and paying off debts. If writing were swimming, it would be like winning three swimming tournaments in a year, getting out of the storytelling pool, toweling off, and taking a hiatus from the sport for five months.

I dipped my toes into the pool a bit in january and february. In March, I began spring training. I started doing drills, building myself back up to do some writing. I figured I could keep up with the day job and writing novels at night like I did in 2017, and I did… but the thing I forgot is how much starting something up sucks.

There was a lot of important work done during those months — mapping out the story, outlining the beats, figuring out who does what, and so on. I am proud of the work that was done then, and I can’t wait to see it on the page. There was even some writing done. Several chapters were pushed out and some of what you could call “Volume 4” was well committed to the page.

Too bad it all sucked.

(That’s a bit hyperbolic. It wasn’t awful — not in the way the very first draft of Marlowe Kana Volume 1 was. One day I may even release that… It’s embarrassingly bad, though. I knew NOTHING about writing fiction. I cannot even begin to tell you how terrible it all was. Perhaps that particular bug should just stay under its rock. I dunno. I’ll think about it.)

[image error] I don’t really get this one. Why is this a breakthrough?

 

Deleting everything I’d written in Volume 4 to date didn’t take guts or bravery. It was the right decision. It needed to go. It was “getting the rust out” or “warm ups” or whatever other thing you want to call it. The bottom line is that by attempting to salvage what I already wrote would have simply resulted in a bunch of sub-standard parts being glued together, in the hope that the seams won’t show.

It was hard, but it certainly wasn’t brave. It was just another step in the writing process. I see it much like fruit-bearing trees; you don’t get much in the way of edible fruits when they first bloom, and it takes several seasons to develop the really juicy stuff. But once they start producing great fruit, you can’t stop them.

That’s what happened last night. The pruning finished, the first waves of bad fruit tossed, the tree began blossoming what I consider edible fruit. And through this, I will be able to get the book done.

It was like diving back into the pool, ready to swim again after months of training. And it felt good. It just took a lot of work, mental frustration, aggravation, and struggle to get all that rust out.

Given that Marlowe Kana is a three-act story broken into nine parts, each third (1-3, 4-6, 7-9) has its own arcs and story and growth. My good friend Casey Edwards told me “Volume four will be the hardest thing you’ve ever written in your life, up until it’s time to write volume seven.”

He wasn’t wrong. It’s been just like Volume 1 — starting from the beginning of another journey, to another destination. And I’m certain Volume 7 will have just as many challenges. But I’m excited and ready for them, no matter how damn hard it is to get the stuff to come out.

So there you go. All of this to say, last night was a win. Writing happened. And I’m excited about it. And here’s the Google Image Search winner for the featured photo for this post:

 

[image error]This “Breakthrough” image on a Google Image search was just cheesy enough to work.

 

On Writing, Part 2: Why I Deleted An Entire Book And Started Over

What a way to start my first day back to full-time writing.

The other day, I wrote a little about deleting things and starting again the other day. Yesterday morning, I deleted all of the writing I’ve done on Marlowe Kana Volume 4 to date and started over. Two-thirds of a book went into the recycle bin. It sucked. And by that, I don’t mean the writing I’d done sucked. I mean the process of realizing what I had done so far wasn’t working, excising it, and watching months worth of writing wisp to vapor… THAT sucked.

[image error]

It always sucks. I had to do this with Volume 1 three times, and Volume 3 once. The reasons vary. For Volume 1, I had to eliminate from the earth entire swatches of bad writing. Terrible writing. I mean, truly awful & repugnant scrawling of a rank amateur who wrote fiction the way one writes a blog post about going to the local “it” restaurant… Boring, procedural, and relevant mostly only to the writer in a way that stories about babies are relevant only to the parents telling them.

In this case, the writing itself wasn’t particularly bad. The plot points are still in my outline. The character progressions are likely not changing. The storytelling itself was competent — at least an order of magnitude above my first strikeouts on Volume 1. But re-reading the work… Something just wasn’t right.

It didn’t flow. It didn’t connect. It definitely got the points across and advanced the plot, but it just felt like there was no heart. So, I killed it.

I learned the hard way long ago that adding heart to a story after it’s written is like hanging a heart-shaped pendant around the Tin Man’s neck and hoping he passes for human. It doesn’t work. The story is stiff, and randomly juts into emotional territory in an effort to convince the reader that they are supposed to care. And it sucks.

But, the writing I’d done so far wasn’t worthless. There was a lot of great stuff in there. I worked out a LOT of things I’d been confused about or needed to elaborate on since finishing Volume 3. I developed characters well past where they were when I started. A lot of hard, necessary work was done. And that gets me to the most important lesson I’ve learned since starting the journey of writing fiction 2 years ago, and the larger journey of writing in general 20 years ago:

It all counts. 

This is the process, like it or not. Sometimes you have to recognize when you need to rewalk a path you thought you already trod, because you know somewhere along the way you missed a step (or, worse, skipped a few).

All the work I’ve done on Volume 4 is not wasted, it’s just not going to make the final draft. But it had to get done. It had to exist in order to build the foundation for the next draft, which I can already tell you is immeasurably better despite only being 3/4 of one chapter (so far).

I feel very passionately about Marlowe Kana; enough to quit my job and focus on the series full-time, hopefully for a very long time. I want to get it right — not perfect, but right. And that means deleting the writing that doesn’t work for the series. It means doing homework. Lots and lots of homework. It means rework. It means polish. It means learning everything I can, not just about the characters and the world and the plot but about the process of bringing those things to life.

It sucks. But it’s the good kind of suck.

It’s also not perfectionism. I am not striving for perfect. I don’t believe in perfect. I don’t think it actually exists, except as a mythical enemy against the process of making things. Perfect is an excuse. It’s a reason to give up. And what’s more, it’s boring. Even Brian Eno says so:

 

But that doesn’t mean I’ll settle for “good enough” either.

When Volume 4 is done, it’ll have flaws. It’ll be rough in places. I’m still figuring this whole process out, so of course there’ll be mistakes and places I could do so much better with, say, ten or twenty years’ experience. But that’s not what I’m after. I don’t want flawless. I want it to be right. And right now, the writing I’ve done so far is a step toward getting it right. I have to be okay with that. And I also have to be okay with the flaws it’ll ship with.

This journey is every journey. You know what you know right here, right now, because of what you learned along the way. You can’t know a thing until you’ve learned it. You also owe yourself better than settling for less than what you know is right.

So, you do the best work you can at any given moment, and never settle for less than that. When something’s done, let it be done and move on — but don’t call anything done until you know it’s the best you can do.

And I’m not apologizing for using another Matt Hardy gif. I love him, and will continue to use them as long as they’re relevant.

An Interview With Joe Forrest

I was honored to be interviewed by Joe Forrest, a really great writer, web developer, and overall geeky dude who found my books last year. He is a huge cyberpunk fan, and we hit it off immediately. We have been chatting for a while now and I’m delighted that he felt that I had thoughts and ideas worth discussing. Below is an interview he did with me this past weekend, originally posted on his blog. Thanks Joe!

JF – Hey, Joe! Loving the cyberpunk world you’ve created with Marlowe Kana. It’s definitely an impressive work in the genre. The mixture of influences you inject into the story, the pacing, and the plot itself makes it a hard one to put down. What made you lean towards this genre in particular?

I’ve always loved cyberpunk as a genre, since I was a young reader. I loved Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson… Movies like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell and, of course, Akira are foundational to me. But in my writing, I was always a “humorist” or “memoirist”, sharing stories of my life in an effort to get people to laugh (or at least feel better about their own situations).

I took a break from writing to do other stuff, and then my life upended on me. When the dust settled, most of the bravado and ceremony around my old life and old writing was no longer relevant. I was stripped down to my core. I learned to live a simple life and do simple things that made me happy. When I came back to writing, I decided it was no longer healthy for me to continue making myself the center of my work, so I decided to start writing fiction. Of course, the first genre that appealed to me was one that, when I started Marlowe Kana, wasn’t really en vogue: cyberpunk. In the last few years, the genre has made a comeback, which I’m super glad to see.

 But I want to do something different than what I’ve been seeing. I feel that the stories coming out now are simply reflections of the work that was coming out in the late 80’s and early 90’s, complete with Asian fetishization and a heavy focus on how the tech of that time would affect us “in the future.” Well, we’re IN the future now, if you look through the lens of the Cyberpunk genre when it started. But every story I’m seeing still starts from the 80’s and 90’s and fast forwards, disregarding the stuff that’s happened since the genre was popular. It feels more like tribute than advancement of the genre. So, with Marlowe Kana, I really hope to start from now — our social, political, environmental, behavioral, technical, and commercial lives as they are right now — and fast-forward 100 years to see where we’ll end up.

Instead of street vendors selling noodles and circuit boards side by side, or focus on how corporate overlords nefariously rule, I want to talk about how reliant we are on technology for everything from food to socialization. I want to really discuss the role government plays in a world where everyone’s basic needs are met by corporations, and how peoples’ day to day lives are when they no longer have to work to earn a living. What do they choose to do all day every day? What does entertainment look like when you no longer need to escape your “day job” and decompress? What role does that entertainment play on reality, and vice versa? Who pays attention when everyone can broadcast? What does it take to get that attention? How do you keep it? And what role does that engagement play in your strategy, whether you’re the monolithic corporation providing for everyone or just a kid down the street with your own Feed?

 

JF – Marlowe is up there with Ripley, River Tam, and Number 6 from BSG in levels of toughness in my mind. She has a certain “it” factor for me. The character is simply appealing. What, if anything, drove the desire to go with a strong female lead?

 

It’s tempting to invoke some bullshit Joss Whedon answer here! The truth is that in our near future, gender lines and gender identity lines, racial lines, sexual orientation lines… these things will blur in ways we can’t fully comprehend right now – especially if technology and nature give us something else to be afraid of, like cybernetic augmentation or environmental disaster. They won’t disappear – there will always be bigots, but they won’t be the dividing lines they are now, just as they aren’t the lines now that they were in the 50’s and 60’s.

When that happens, the idea of “strong female character” will simply be “strong character” and I wanted to explore that as part of my future.

 There’s also the fact that it’s far more challenging – and fun – to write a character that forces you to figure out difficult to understand topics and comprehend what life is like for someone who is not you.

 Being a white straight cis-male, I knew I would be inviting commentary in writing a non-white, non-straight, non-male as my lead character. I don’t have any canned response to the critiques. It’s important to discuss not only the topic of bigotry and social divides in fiction about our near future, it’s also important to discuss it right now. And it all starts with ourselves, asking our own minds difficult questions. I want my vision of our near future to represent my concerns as best I can, which also mI and exploring all aspects of society as deeply as possible – even in my own current-day socially programmed (but slowly being de-programmed) brain.

 

JF – Science fiction, specifically cyberpunk, seems to be oddly prescient when it comes to its predictive capabilities. We basically live in a world now that’s very similar to that of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic (minus the more outlandish elements.) Do you think your work has those qualities? How does Marlowe Kana reflect the current world we live in today back to the reader?

The emergent need for basic minimum income as automation becomes commonplace, technological solutions to our eroding environment, emerging hostilities among people in the same “First world” countries threatening global destabilization, American hegemony due to capitalism and luck… these are all concepts I feel are on our front doorstep, seconds away from ringing the bell. Alongside that, the technology we’re already immersed in — always-on streaming, citizen-celebrities, entertainment-as-news-as-entertainment, the idea that the average citizen understands the complexities of local, national, and worldwide sociopolitical change just because they can watch edited and carefully-curated clips of it on a little screen in their homes… Screens EVERYWHERE. All of this is here and now. It’s not the future, it just IS.

When Cyberpunk first emerged, that stuff was the backdrop on which warnings were hung. It all felt so far away back in the 80’s and 90’s… but when you go back and really look at it, nothing found in Stephenson’s or Sterling’s or Gibson’s novels was actually all that far off. Ghost in the Shell delved into artificial intelligence becoming self-aware and the degrading separation between mind and body, and it was interesting and terrifying at the same time — but that stuff was happening even then. It’s just more prevalent now. And that’s the trick to Cyberpunk, in my opinion: it’s the future based on NOW.

A lot of what is coming out right now… It’s still obsessed with the concept of Cyberpunk and the future based on how it first emerged back when screens and handheld units and downloading your brain to long-term storage was super far-off future stuff that may never happen. It still treats these concepts as “science-based fiction” and stops there as if those are the terminal points of our development. And it’s all based on tech, with only a slight nod here and there to the social ramifications.

 Bad news… We’re not only there, we’ve moved past it. SO a lot of new Cyberpunk material has nothing really new to say but to take the old concepts, dress them up in purple and pink neon, and say “hey, remember Cyberpunk? That was cool, right?” (Except possibly Black Mirror, which doesn’t classify itself as Cyberpunk, but I certainly think it qualifies).

It’s rare to see authors and creators in Cyberpunk asking new questions. I feel like that space isn’t being filled — or at least, not to my satisfaction as a fan of the genre. Cory Doctorow and Andy Wier are leading the way, and I’m excited every time they release new stuff. It breaks my heart that there aren’t any massively huge Spielberg-budgeted films based on their work.

I want to talk about the future based on where we are now, not some nostalgia-drenched illusion of what we thought now would look like 20-30-40 years ago. I want to perceive, anticipate, and even warn about what the future will be from here, at this point. And I want to ask those questions and make those assumptions and explore those spaces. Very especially, I want to not only look at tech’s effect on society, but society’s effect back on tech once they’ve adopted it and made it a daily / hourly / minute-by-minute part of their lives.

 

JF –  A common question that many writers get is “Where do your ideas come from?” Any writer worth their salt knows this is a loaded question. Where do you gather inspiration for your stories?

Everything I observe. The news. Journals. Life. It’s a tough one to answer not because the answer is complex but the opposite. Ideas are everywhere and no one has a shortage of them – the trick is doing something with them. Capturing them. Turning them into something besides just ideas.  It takes discipline and time. Those two things are the keys to having “good ideas” – everyone has good ideas, but it’s rare to the point of special to see anyone take them from simple wisps in their brain and turn them into something someone can see, touch, feel, smell or hear.

JF – Can you describe your typical working day and your working environment?

An interesting question to ask right now, as I’m in transition from writing part-time while having a day job, to writing full time (again). Currently, I get up about 7 am, get ready for the day job, and do a little editing or general note-taking during morning coffee. I work all day, come home, spend some time with my girlfriend and dogs and cats over dinner, then get to work writing. I try to write at least four hours a night weeknights, and at least 8 hours a day weekends and holidays.

Soon, I’ll be doing much the same, only my daytime hours will be spent writing as well!

As for environment – for as long as it’s above 30 degrees and below 90 (and not raining), I’m outside on my porch. I have a really lovely cyberpunk-themed office with incredible lighting and an amazing huge dry erase board that I love, but my heart is always longing to be outside.

 

JF – Some tech nerd/writer questions: What software do you write on? Do you write story bibles for your worlds? Do you also do your own design work?

These days I work mostly on Google Docs. I’ve tried Scrivener, Final Draft, Pages, ZenWriter, all kinds of things… Google Docs makes it super easy for me to get to my work anywhere, from any machine. My editor can work on it and make edits/notes/suggestions, and we can track changes. I can deliver a piece to anyone I need to because it’s worldwide and free. So, it works.

As far as story bibles: sort of, yes, but only after I’m so far along so I don’t lose track as I go forward. So much of what happens in my writing morphs and changes as I write it, and I feel that establishing the story beats and concepts and planning my destinations before I start my journey are super necessary… but the path I use to get to those destinations, and where I head after them, I like to leave up to future-me. He has a better sense of what’s going on at that point than I do!

I was a web developer and a designer for a living, so I do my own design and web development work. Where I need help, like with illustration or back-end server stuff, I am fortunate enough to have amazing and talented friends I can hire to do that work. And here’s a protip: I don’t care if it’s your significant other, your brother, your sister, your mom… Pay everyone who helps you with their time. It’s fair, it’s proper, and it saves hassles in the future. Even if that payment is in service or trade, pay them.

JF – For those aspiring writers out there, what career advice do you have for them?

Writing is not a get rich quick scheme, or even a get rich scheme. I make a very, very meager living with my writing — but it’s enough to keep me writing, and that’s all I need. I spent a LOT of my life working for nice salaries, and writing nights and weekends because I can’t not write. What I found is that every job you ever have, that isn’t your core passion, sucks at some point. Your core passion is yearning within you to be explored and performed, and if you’re not one of the fortunate few who have been able to make your work and your passion the same thing, you’re going to end up with conflicting voices yelling in your head at one another. And this will suck. So, you buy your happiness, because hey, that salary you command needs to be justified. Toys and trips and external fulfillment get expensive, and to keep the validation coming, you gotta keep earning that salary. It’s a trap — it’s working that coal mining job so you can afford the medication for silicosis.

 If you want to write full time, GET LEAN. Live small. Be enthralled by life, nature, adventures, human nature, people-watching… In other words, learn to be happy with stuff that costs little to nothing. Of course, there’s the Stephen King’s and J.K. Rowling’s and James Patterson’s of the world who have been fortunate enough to make millions doing their thing, but there’s also people every week or month or year who win lotteries, and they ain’t you, either.

So, to abuse a baseball metaphor: swing for the fences… But practice running fast, so you can keep making those singles count. If you’ve ever watched the movie Moneyball, you know that singles hitters are worth ten times what the home run kings are, anyway.

 

JF – What are your future writing plans?

I just quit my job and am returning to writing full-time starting May 1! To make that work, I’ve started a Patreon — http://Patreon.com/joepeacock – anyone who supports

me gets to see behind the scenes as I write my blog posts and novels and screenplays, and can ask questions about the process and see how the sausage is made.

On that note, I’m going to be blogging daily starting May 1 on my site, http://joepeacock.com – and focusing my days on continuing and finishing Marlowe Kana. Once that’s done, I’ve got another novel series that I’ve had on the back burner for years that I’d like to explore. In the meantime, I’ll be doing some tutorials and possibly YouTube videos on the process of writing a novel as I’ve learned it the past few years. I may not be the biggest authority or even a authority. But I’ve gone from writing a humor blog to publishing memoirs; from rants about cyberculture to full-on journalism; and now from exploring fanciful Cyberpunk ideas into a nine-volume novel series. I’ve learned a lot, and I hope to be able to share what I know.

On Writing, Part 1: “What, You Start With Your Final Draft?”

(Some call this kind of self-motivational writing “getting unstuck.” Others call it “kicking yourself in the ass.” I’m calling it a confession. So, I figure this might as well be the first part in a yet-to-be-determined number of posts about the writing process.)

I am “blocked.”

I can’t get any writing out. I want to, I really do. But every time I fire up the word processor, I just sit there staring at it. Some words appear. I delete them. Some more words, even a sentence. Another sentence. A third. All crap.

In the words of Woken Matt Hardy:

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And then here I am, once again, back at the beginning. It sucks and all I want to do is go play video games.

There are times where the last thing in the world I want to do is what I must do if I want to get anywhere. I haven’t made any meaningful progress on my novel series since I took a break at the end of 2017. I have tons of outlines and ideas and summary paragraphs and false-starts. But I don’t have any chapters written. Every time I sit down to do the work, I get distracted. Even when I can power through the distraction, I begin second-guessing myself and find every excuse not to do the work I know I have to do.

That early work is going to end up in the trash can. It’s inevitable. It’s part of the process. It happened with Volume 3, and Volume 2, and Volume 1. It happened with my first books years ago. It has to happen. It’s part of the deal — you have to get the clogged up, yucky, nasty writing out before the good stuff can flow through the pipes. But I loathe “throw away” work. I always have. Homework in school was a waste of time. Running wind sprints at sports practices was merely keeping me from quality time with my Nintendo. I could ace the test and win the game without all the boring crap. Just let me do the good stuff, and I’ll prove it.

That mentality persists today, only I know for a fact it’s not true. It’s self-delusion. You cannot achieve anything meaningful without a tremendous amount of effort, most of it unseen and unappreciated by anyone. If you fuck around during practice, then come game time, you will not have trained your body and mind to go to that place of instinctual performance when it’s the 4th quarter and you’re exhausted.

You’ll give up. Because that’s what you practiced, and you play like you practice.

The first draft. Stretching before workouts. Warm-up sketches. Painting class. Piano rudiments. Drumming exercises. Batting practice. It all matters.

So it comes to the point of doing anything: You have to do it if you want it done. One step at a time, one word at a time, regardless of what you may think makes it into the final draft, it all makes it into the final draft. Because without the preliminary work, there is no final draft.

If the writing I have to do right now results in merely practicing for the next round, so be it. If something special comes out and amounts to something that moves on to the next draft, that’s awesome — but that’s not why I have to do it. I have to get the book done, and I have to make it not suck. Part of that is throw-away writing. Part of that is working through a point or a scene or a character’s motivation just to figure out what it is. To quote one of my absolute favorite videos on the subject of writing: “What, you start with your final draft?”

(For you fans of Rick & Morty, Community, Dan Harmon, Justin Roiland, Jack Black, and those sorts of things: if you’ve never watched the Acceptable.TV tutorial series on making stuff, it’s a fucking treasure — and if you’re a writer yourself, it’s not only immensely informative, it’s encouraging as well. The link above has a bunch of their videos, look for the ones titled Writing, Editing, Structure and Rejection for the sweet spots.)

Do the work. Start typing. Don’t stop till it’s all out. Walk away. Come back, check it over. All the bad stuff:

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And keep the good stuff. Do another draft. Keep going. By the end of the process, you have a book. And the more fully you commit to the process, the better the book will be. But even the worst books cannot be written without words on the page.

 

 

“AVERAGE AND BELOW QUALITY MEAT” And The Internet

The other day, I was surfing the web for wholesale meats (when you quit your day job to write full time, it can’t hurt to save a few bucks on proteins and stick them in the freezer). The results are what you’d assume: companies trying to convince any Googler that their meat is the best meat, and you should buy from them. It’s what the internet is these days; a glorified Yellow Pages (except the ads manipulate you into voting a crackpot into the White House, and there are literal Nazis, and they’re concerned about frogs and for some reason, ethics in game jouralism. Also, there’s porn of literally everything).

Anyway, the third item in my search showed this:

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Uhhh… What?

 

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…Yeah, that’s what I thought it said. Weird. Why on earth would a website ever want to advertise that it sells AVERAGE AND MEDIOCRE QUALITY MEAT????

So I had to click. And I caught on very fast: someone, somewhere, doesn’t know how to SEO. This is the front page of their site:

 

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It’s actually quite a clever homepage. Reverse psychology. It’s pretty well written, too. Too bad the SEO engine they are using ignored the bulleted items and only pulled the first written copy from the front page.

I felt bad for them. They worked hard on their site. It’s well designed. It’s clever. So I had to write them:

 

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The next morning, I got a reply:

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A big oops, a shared laugh, and someone is going to make massive strides to improving traffic all because I wrote a quick email. I think that’s a nice thing. I think we could all use more of that on the internet; nice things for no other reason than to be nice.

I’ve been thinking a LOT about this the past few days; what the internet used to be versus what it is now. I’m not the only one, I know. Ever since Facebook was caught with its pants down (again — it’s happened a LOT over the last 14 years) over the whole Cambridge Analytica thing, it’s all Silicon Valley can really talk about: their ethics, and how they really do have them, and uh… Yeah, um. They’re not going to give up any — ANY — of the money they’ve made doing this shit, and they’re never going to change. But they DO HAVE ETHICS they swear. They pinky swear. (If you want to know more, read my series Precursor to Dystopia, which goes into great detail about all the ways we’re, as the title says, about to be a dystopia).

The internet is so, so, so broken. It put a despot asshole charlatan racist into the White House. It broke up the European Union. It routinely festers and erupts its dark pus onto our mood, almost by the hour, just by the sheer nature of how it has been allowed to be used and abused the past, oh, I dunno — however many years since the first pop-up ad showed up. A quick Google search reveals this essay, which says it showed up between 1994 and 1999 at Tripod.com, so Let’s say between 20 and 24 years. That’s how long it’s been allowed to be treated like shit.

But at first, there weren’t as many nefarious folks doing nefarious things, I think, because the volume of the internet was so low. That meant the opportunity to squeeze a dime (or steal it) was also low. So why bother? But as people caught on and saw that the internet was cool and had tons and tons of potential, so did the money, and the advertisers were the first prospectors.

TED just occurred, and all everyone can talk about is this amazing talk by one of the smartest, most insightful people I’ve ever read or talk to, Jaron Lanier. Please, take 17 minutes and watch it:

 

It will wake you up.

We can do better. Old to the internet or new, avid user or occasional Googler, we can ALL do better.

I’ve discussed at great length my leaving Facebook (these days, I only use it for my book and author pages — and God, it sucks even for that. But it is far, far healthier than it used to be in my life). I think the next step is to actively try to be better, by doing the things that used to make the Internet so great: helping. Discussing. Sharing. Playing nicely. Collaborating.

So, if you want meat that is not AVERAGE AND BELOW QUALITY, check out Allen Wholesale Meats. I like sharing that with you. And I can tell you that I’m committed to sharing more and more great things with you, both in the form of stories and things I make. I want to use the Internet for what its best for, not what it’s become good at.

 

MKULTRA, Semantic Change, and how writers should use words

 

[NOTE: This is the first blog post I’ve written while people watch via Google Docs! It was fun, if a little nerve-wracking. If you’d like to see this process and join in the conversation, support me on Patreon!]

My friend Joseph Rhodes (of Marlowe Kana soundtrack fame!) reminded me that today is the 65th “birthday” of MKULTRA (also called the CIA mind control program). Very shortly, MKULTRA was a program of experiments on human subjects centered around mind control using drugs, environment, and other factors to — among other things — extract confessions, implant suggestions, and otherwise fuck with people. It’s pretty gnarly shit, and well worth the read through the Wiki article (and deeper exploration is certainly fascinating, but get ready — it goes deeeeep).

He reminded me of this because, in my book series Marlowe Kana, the title character uses a flying “Superman Punch” move affectionately dubbed the MK ULTRA. He felt that was a neat correlation, and that I should make mention of it.

It brought to mind the whole point of my calling her flying punch the MK ULTRA: Because it sounded cool, and because her nickname in the books is MK, I felt that in the books’ future (100 years from now), people would have long forgotten what the actual MKULTRA Program was or what it entailed, and instead just consider it a cool sounding vaguely military-related name for a badass finishing move that their favorite soldier / celebrity used to humiliate her enemies.

It’s called “Semantic Change” and it occurs when words are redefined mostly by the way they end up being used, versus how they were originally defined. For example: we no longer use “decimate” to mean “Behead every 10th captured soldier to sow the seeds of doubt and fear in our enemy” (or, simply, “Reduce by 1/10th”). We don’t use “penultimate” to mean “the second to last item in a list” — we usually mean “MORE THAN ULTIMATE!” in the same way Ultimate means “MORE THAN EXTREME” (especially in taco and deodorant commercials). Fortuitous (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dicti...) does not mean “lucky” — it just means “by chance.” And BAE now means “my significant other” instead of simply being an acronym for British AErospace (seriously, look it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bae), or a Korean surname. (Interestingly enough, I just discovered that Seth Godin covers some of this in his blog post today).

Hell, even the word “Literally” LITERALLY means “Figuratively” now (even though Mirriam-Webster tries to gloss over why, it’s still a travesty).

Language is weird. But, people are weird, so it follows that the thing they predominantly use to communicate with one another would, by default, also be weird.

So, that brings me to the point of this whole mental exercise: as a writer, do I have a responsibility to use words how they were intended to be used, or how they are colloquially used? Do I have an obligation to be right, or to be understood?

This topic is a fascination of mine. In fact, it’s the entire core of the podcast I did with Joseph in 2016 called The Joe And Joe Show. The idea: a podcast made in 2096, meant to emulate the culture, technology, and authenticity of the podcasts made in 2016 (arguably the heyday of podcasting). Much the way there are people who painstakingly recreate R&B studios to record music with the exact fidelity and sound of the classic recordings, or recreate 20’s radio dramas as accurately as possible to capture the period, we wanted to show that it is nearly impossible to recreate a time period accurately, including the vernacular and terms and social meaning behind them.

Think about how you remember, say, 20 years ago — 1998. You likely remember aspects from it as they happened, in context. I can remember three very distinct cultural acts in the 90’s — the holdover neon and metal days of 1990-1991, the shift from that into pure grunge and hip hop from 92-95, and the glossy repackaging of literally any band that wore plaid or copy the Wu-Tang clan. But if television and Netflix are to be believed, anything made now taking place in the 90’s like Everything Sucks!, Everclear and Nirvana’s Bleach shared the same airwaves. People wore neon green jumpsuits while others wore plaid and cargo shorts and Doc Martens, while still others were in JNCO jeans and Hot Topic shirts.

These things did not occupy the same space. But they’re all “The 90’s” to anyone who understands “The 90’s” through a vaseline-coated lens of either sub-preteen youth or Google searches.

If you want to refer to the 80s in shorthand, you say stuff like “totally!” And “gag me with a spoon” and call people Brad. And the truth is, no one really ever said gag me with a spoon, it was one line in one movie that people satirically began using as if it was a real term (and speaking of, as if is another of those delicious 80’s-isms that I just love bandying about in conversation to see if someone remembers it. The faces that I get from both boomers and millennials is usually worth the time it takes to explain what it means).

So, in hindsight, terms that developed in the 80’s and 90’s as jokes or simple in-jokes for shows, and terms that were used in general parlance, blend together the further you get from them. No one was actually telling teachers “Eat my shorts!” a la Bart Simpson. No one really asked “Where’s the beef?” (but ironically enough, WHASSSSUUPPPPPPP! Did become a full-on cultural phrase and my God, am I glad that shit’s over).

 

And this leads me to MKULTRA’s use in the Marlowe Kana universe.

There are a few avenues I can use to try to explain my use of the phrase:

I’m so clever, I can see 100 years into the future that certain terms — in this case, MK ULTRA — lose context and blur into whatever meaning is grafted onto it much like our understanding of penultimate or decimate,
I felt like Marlowe Kana’s nickname of MK would call to mind even the most infinitesimally small nugget of memory deeply lodged in passed-along history from parent to child, such that someone thought it was a vaguely government related term and she is a military person so it makes sense,
It sounded cool, and then when the topic of it comes up, I retroactively attach all this weight and gravity around the topic of repurposed words and semantic change to justify it.

Believe it or not, three is not the answer. I know, normally I get super self-effacing when this kind of thing shows up, but no, really, it’s 2. I think it’s a strange yet prevalent enough thing that words change meaning over time that I wanted to include some aspect of it in the book. There’s also the devilish novelty of something so heinous as a government agency experimenting on humans with drugs to control their mind, willfully being made “cool” by attaching it to a military celebrity who competes in future corporate-military games like Next Top Soldier. Much like Jake the Snake Roberts’ DDT, or Adam Bomb , who wrestled in Japan quite often (Don’t even get me started on “heel culture” in Japanese wrestling — we’ll be here all night).

So, what’s the right call? I have to go ahead and say that my goal as the writer is to be understood. I think that it’s incumbent upon me to share with people stories that get them to a point of acknowledgement, rather than semantic correctness. If using a word colloquially does that, then I’m all for it. Of course, this does not give me license to simply use any word any way I want. That’s not the point.

The point is that sometimes, meaning is fluid. And sometimes, you try to let the fluid flow where it’ll do the most good, rather than where someone somewhere thinks it should be.

So, happy birthday, MKULTRA. Thanks for being so deeply disturbing that my books’ future finds it cool.

Okay, Let’s Do This Patreon Thing!

A lot of my creator friends (including my amazingly talented girlfriend Meghan Hetrick) have convinced me to use Patreon as a platform to build my “full time writer” business. So, I drafted one up, and asked them to check it out and give me some feedback. I plan to launch it May 1, and I wanted to accomplish two things: 1) explain the mission, and 2) offer people something exclusive at each tier, from $1 and up, that they would find valuable and interesting.

Not only did they like the rewards at each tier, the mission, and the layout, they even started contributing! So, it gave me a really great idea: I’m going to do a pre-launch signup bonus!

Check out the Patreon — let me know what you think of the write-up, the rewards, the tiers, and the offerings.
sign up before May 1, and you’ll get a copy of The Art of Marlowe Kana – Patreon Edition, an art book containing work from cover and concept artist Meghan Hetrick, character and animation artist Casey Edwards, and the genius website art of Alex Monik!

Even if you don’t sign up, I’d love your take on what I’ve offered and what else I could offer. Any idea is welcome, as is all feedback (and of course, donations!) And thank you very, very much for all your help and support!

Want To Fail At Your Goals Immediately? Confuse Reach And Impact! (IT WORKS!)

If you want your passion project to fail before you even get out the gate:

Combine “Make an impact with readers” and “Number of readers impacted” into the same goal.
?
FAILURE!

I have a reader-friend, Rachel. She is on her third run through the first three volumes of Marlowe Kana. She loves the main character. She loves the dynamic between Marlowe and her sister, Jen. She loves the involvement of the President and the social commentary provided in his actions. She loves the universe. She loves that I let people figure it out as they read instead of providing massive infodumps and expository footnotes and technical manuals. She’s a fan. She’s precisely the person I’m trying to reach. 

And you know what? Having reached Rachel, I am happy. Very, very happy. I have also reached Luca, Jessica, Joseph, James, Justin, Scott, David, Renick, Travers, Meghan, Rowena, Brandon, Chad, Jennifer, Nicole, and a few hundred others who have bought all three volumes of the book, left reviews, and dropped emails giving me feedback, almost all of it praise. This isn’t bragging. This is an admission. I never set out to do this.

Of course, this was a hope. But for the first time in my life, it was NOT the point.

Reach is not the same as impact. Even Steve Jobs knew that, and he changed the entire world three and a half times with his projects. He didn’t set out with the goal of creating Apple computers that end up on every desk right away. He had to iterate. First, build one thing. Make it the best you possibly can. Then, iterate on it. Make it better. And better. And better. Then, scale. Move up in numbers. Get your thing into more and more hands. And this is the most important: Make sure your thing is so good, people don’t drop it once its in their hands (metaphorically, of course… accidents happen, and I’m certain there are people who have physically dropped my books on the floor, but my hope is that they’re decent enough that they’ll pick them back up instead of leaving them there).

When I started Marlowe Kana in 2015, I didn’t expect to quit my job and focus on it full time. In fact, there was a time not too long ago where I thought my days of writing full time were over forever. I was satisfied with this. I was glad to have a good job, happy to have rebuilt my life, and pleased to be able to spend nights and weekends creating and writing about a universe that’s been in my head for years.

I think that’s the difference: I never once tied a metric to Marlowe Kana that wasn’t 100% about the quality of the writing. I simply wanted to learn how to write fiction that wasn’t pallid, hollow, self-serving, or boring.

Now, I am not saying I am the best I’ll ever be, or even great comparative to any other writer in the Cyberpunk genre or any other.

What I will say is that there was a bar I set for myself when I began this project, and I failed to reach it across several iterations. The version of Marlowe Kana that became Volume 1 is the third iteration on the universe and at least seven full drafts after beginning the process of writing it. I learned so, so much writing the first book. And when I was done, I read what I wrote and compared it to my checklist for passing quality:

The universe makes sense.
The characters each have their own motivation.
No one is a vehicle for wish fulfillment.
Everyone has their own voice, personality, morals, and objectives.
The tech — arguably the most defining part of Cyberpunk — is not in the way, and has a clear path from something existing in today’s world.
It discusses, through the plot, all of my concerns with today’s political, social, technological, and logistical concerns in a far more constructive way than blasting Twitter and Facebook ever did
It’s FUN.

I am super, super proud that I reached those goals. And when I started on Volume 2, I created a new set of goals:

More clarity.
Divergent paths for characters and their motivations.
Interruption of core motivations and surprises.
Challenges to the genre and to the reader.
No easy paths to victory.
No expected endings.
Constantly challenging my characters — and more, listening to THEM as they spoke in my head and keeping honest to who THEY are, not who I as an author want (or even conceptualized) them to be.

For Volume 3, I iterated up again, and decided I wanted to surprise myself with the ending. And I did. The ending of Volume 3 was a shock to me when I came up with it. I never saw it coming. It just… Happened. Because that’s where the story took me.

Now that they’re written and out there, I have new goals for all three volumes — find new people to introduce them to. Get them interested. Seek out the audience that’s ready and eager for what Marlowe Kana has to say. Sales figures, traffic, and reach are only NOW becoming a part of my strategy, because I want to do this with every hour of my day every day, and I have to be able to eat.

It’s a huge, huge difference. I believe fundamentally that the goals I set were vital to the success of the series, because my definition of success was never, ever once measured by any factor outside of itself. And I assure you, that will be true for volumes four through nine as well. I will concern myself with sales once they’re done and out in the world. For now, I only have one goal for the upcoming books: Make them worthy successors to the last ones.

I honestly feel that judging how important your work is by how many people have it is asking to be punished. If I can’t make this work financially, I’ll go get a job and write nights and weekends. I will not stop telling this story, because it’s saying what I need to say, and I’ve fallen completely in love with the vehicle I’m using to say it. Of course, I hope that I am able to sustain and keep this going as my daily, full time gig (and I’ve leaned up my daily life in order to achieve that. It’s a good thing I love ramen and peanut butter sandwiches…).

But if I can’t, that’s ok, because that’s not why I started. My definition of success for Marlowe Kana is not tied to reach. It’s all about depth. And if Rachel, Luca, Jessica, Joseph, James… All of them are happy with all nine volumes, I’ll have done my job.

My Review Of Far Cry 5, In The Form Of A Letter To Drew Holmes, Lead Writer Of The Game

Joe Peacock

PO Box 962

Atlanta, GA 30030

7 April 2018

Mr. Drew Holmes

Lead Writer, Far Cry 5

Ubisoft Montreal; Ubisoft Toronto

5505 Boul St-Laurent #2000

Montréal, Quebec H2T 1S6

Canada

Dear Mr Holmes:

Fuck. You.

 

Very Respectfully,

Joe Peacock