D.T. Neal's Blog, page 14

Halloweenie

Snowy Halloween over here in Chicago, which is kind of weird to see, although I've seen it sleet on Halloween, so there's that.

Still in a bad place, so nothing much to report. I'm coming out from a cold of some sort that was afflicting me, adding a bit more meh to my lackluster days.

No new words or works from me, beyond anything I'd mentioned before. That fire has been burning out badly this past year, no doubt reflective of my situation, which has not improved. As I said before, I can't write in the midst of a disaster, but only after the fact. Inasmuch as I'm still in the midst of a disaster, I haven't been writing.

Stressful year.

Ghost Story

I'm at the point in my -- what to call it? -- writerly existence where the people who've not-read my books might be half-wondering "Where's What's-His-Name? I haven't seen him posting about his books I won't ever read. I miss the opportunity to not-read his new work."

No worries, Gentle Reader -- there'll be a couple more novels from me coming out in '24, albeit under pen names, as they're in F/SF.

This year has been a bear, and as I think I've written before, it's hammered my process (and self-conception/deception as a writer for the past three decades) into a shallow, unmarked grave, but I still have a number of works that'll come to life in the next couple of years. So, there's that.

As the Twit finally sinks beneath the waves, it'll be interesting to see how the social media landscape evolves for the folks who more adroitly manipulate it for their promotional purposes.

Books are Old Media, sadly. There'll always be readers, and they'll always be niche. The days of some across-the-board literary blockbuster are long behind us. Now it's just the survivors squabbling for the scraps.

So, I'll be serving up some scraps in the next few years, which I hope people enjoy. They're good works, I believe in them, even as I am certain they'll vanish in the void like everything else.

Soundtracking

A year since losing my job (anniversary was September 2 -- honestly didn't expect to still be unemployed this far out into it), I'm bemused that some specific bands have been my go-to job-hunting soundtrack, for whatever reason. They include:

The Doors
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
The Kinks
Mudhoney
Screaming Trees
Soundgarden
Steely Dan

Those are the ones that have most consistently been on my playlist over the past dozen months. I don't exactly know why, except that they bring me some measure of comfort while dealing with my current situation.

FALLOUT 4

I played FALLOUT 3, NEW VEGAS, and FALLOUT 4 years ago, with the third of these sort of languishing (I tag-teamed playing it with my kids, in that we shared the Sole Survivor character, would take turns).

Anyway, for whatever reason, we never actually finished F4, so I had, on a whim, started playing it again, and remembered why I'd enjoyed the game so much back in the day.

I even played through to the end of the primary narrative (siding with the Railroad faction, focused on liberating the android slave caste tethered to the sinister Institute).

It's interesting to me that the game keeps going on, even after you've finished one of the various primary avenues of story. F4 is a wonderful blend of first-person shooter and sandbox game. Bethesda did a great job with it.

And that's what got me thinking about how games really are the future of entertainment, versus books. A well-structured video game has an immersive quality and (re)playability that you don't get with books.

For example, how often does one reread a book? How many times? Contrast that with replaying a game.

I would also say that the moral stances one can take (or not take) in F4 are interesting. You can be good, bad, or ugly in it. The participatory, Choose Your Own Adventure style of it is fascinating. As one who has written stories, I look at what Bethesda did with F4 with wonder -- because they mapped out several rich (and interwoven) narratives that play out depending on what you do. I'm sure the flow charts they used in the creation of F4 were mammoth. I can't even imagine it.

There's more to be said about it, but for now, this'll do.

Adoring The Doors

It's funny for me -- a band of yesteryear that's continued to hold a place in my esteem is The Doors -- I will always love The Doors. Some people hate them, but I love'em. The way they straddled the line between 60s pop and psychedelia will always be amazing to me.

They were the first American act to get eight certified gold albums -- they managed to cultivate mainstream & countercultural appeal simultaneously.

I suppose for me, there's something of an aspirational appeal to me in The Doors. They're like the soundtrack of the alienated outsider who's somehow able to captivate acclaim (and, yeah, controversy).

Jim Morrison retains his Dionysian appeal. I mean, he was basically destined to be iconic the moment The Doors happened. And sure, the band apparently had erratic live shows, but Morrison's magnetism is undeniable.

It's funny for me, because I love so many UK bands, far more than US bands (with a few exceptions), but The Doors resonate with me because they're so quintessentially American in some weird way. Only America could have spawned The Doors, and I love that about them.

I also like how in addition to the poppier tunes, they'd write these expansive mood pieces like "The End" and "The Unknown Soldier" and "When The Music's Over" -- I enjoy those journeys every time, no matter how many times I've heard them. They retain their epic power.

Anyway, I'm grateful for The Doors, and will until the end...

Adoring The Doors

It's funny for me -- a band of yesteryear that's continued to hold a place in my esteem is The Doors -- I will always love The Doors. Some people hate them, but I love'em. The way they straddled the line between 60s pop and psychedelia will always be amazing to me.

They were the first American act to get eight certified gold albums -- they managed to cultivate mainstream & countercultural appeal simultaneously.

I suppose for me, there's something of an aspirational appeal to me in The Doors. They're like the soundtrack of the alienated outsider who's somehow able to captivate acclaim (and, yeah, controversy).

Jim Morrison retains his Dionysian appeal. I mean, he was basically destined to be iconic the moment The Doors happened. And sure, the band apparently had erratic live shows, but Morrison's magnetism is undeniable.

It's funny for me, because I love so many UK bands, far more than US bands (with a few exceptions), but The Doors resonate with me because they're so quintessentially American in some weird way. Only America could have spawned The Doors, and I love that about them.

I also like how in addition to the poppier tunes, they'd write these expansive mood pieces like "The End" and "The Unknown Soldier" and "When The Music's Over" and "Riders on the Storm" -- I enjoy those journeys every time, no matter how many times I've heard them. They retain their epic power.

Anyway, I'm grateful for The Doors, and will until the end...

Writerly Theme Song

This Kinks tune often feels like a personal writerly theme song...

I'm Not Like Everybody Else

Everybody thinks that, but I actually am, in terms of my work.

Uncritical Mass

Good GUARDIAN piece talking about how influencers (aided and abetted by the studios, naturally) are undermining film criticism.

I'm not going to recap it here, since one can simply read the article to see what they're talking about, but I will say that the problems indicated are also endemic in book review territory (minus only the incentives provided by the movie studios).

Book reviewers are definitely over a barrel these days, running up against book boosters (the sea of 5-star reviews on Goodreads being Exhibit A, naturally).

Actual reviewers (who, *gasp* might not like a book) run up against the wrath of book boosters (who can always be counted on those 5-star hyperbolic reviews).

Is everything awesome? Are all books stellar?

No. Hell, even the book boosters must know they're full of shit when they cart out bushels of 5-star reviews.

What book boosterism does is create an ocean of false positives, a virtual red tide of hype that makes it harder for actually good work to stand out, or (perhaps worse) for readers to get burned by junk books presented as 5-star extravaganzas, which puts them out on taking the "risk" of reading someone new (or someone who hasn't been hyped).

The goal of book boosterism is to sell books, obviously, and involves friends, confederates, and allies to boost each other's books in hopes of catching reader interest.

The important safeguards of objectivity and honesty are jettisoned by book boosterism. No book booster will ever honestly say "Why do I claim to love this book? Because my virtual friend wrote it, and I love them!"

Maybe because I've worked a long time in worlds where conflict of interest (COI) was always a consideration, I see book boosterism as a raging COI wildfire.

Perhaps, in the end, it doesn't matter -- with a very few exceptions, boosted books don't ever get the kind of elevation that actually makes them matter. And the book boosters just flop around, flinging 5-star boosts mindlessly, making each other feel good about their respective works.

But I think of those ponds choked with bright green duckweed (usually a result of fertilize runoff, it seems), turning into those gross, rancid things, because the duckweed blocks the sunlight and kills off the algae needed to keep the pond clean naturally.

Book boosters are like digital duckweed, killing off actual book reviewing, and that's a disservice to all writers and readers, whether they know it or not.

Doomsayer

We're in such a strange time, and, as a writer, I feel it keenly. Speaking only as an American (although one with an eye on the world), we're in the middle of a failing republic, or one that's going to be forced to either collapse, mend itself, or become something radically different than it has been before.

It's surreal to be living in these times, to see things careening along these paths. I have my own problems, what I am dealing with, and gods know I've commented plenty about the perils affecting publishing, and on top of that, the world's facing a true existential crisis.

Keeping in mind that Earth'll outlast and outlive humanity -- that part gets lost in the handwringing. People say "we're destroying the Earth" but we're really only making the planet unsafe for human habitation. That'll cost us dearly if nothing's done about it.

That Great Filter wall that threatens us all is looming ever larger in our view. What's an artist or writer to do?

What we always do: we create. But creation in the shadow of oblivion & extinction is trippy, scary stuff. It's almost too big to think about, or it's difficult to wrap one's head around it all.

Despite being an optimist, it's very hard to envision a world where enlightenment triumphs over ignorance -- mostly because ignorance is EASIER, and humans are profoundly lazy when they can be.

How does a writer honestly explore the human condition without laying bare the brutal realities of our existence? That we're primates, first and foremost. We're not divine godlings, and we're certainly not the pet project of divinity. Everything wrong with us stems from our primate past. We behave like primates, still, because we are.

And our acts of creation that push us past our animal heritage? Those are great, made civilization possible, but we're still tethered to the brutal man-ape monstrosity we've always been. It's why things like fascism thrive -- they tap into that basic brain aspect of our biology, using the trappings of (post)modernity to enable barbarism. That's scary stuff, like a virus we can't eradicate. Fascism will always appeal to a certain kind of human -- one who believes we're somehow super-special, while still tapping into the visceral, hierarchical savagery inherent in the human condition.

While that's all going on, we're seeing civilization straining under the burden of billionaires -- I've said that before, too, that we can have a world safe for billionaires, in which the rest of us are slaves to their whims (we're already largely captive to that), but that's a dystopian disaster that harms us deeply as a species.

There's AI, as well, marching mechanically into our lives.

It's a crazy time, with all of this stuff roiling about at once. And while it's all going on, writers of imagination are left confronting it, observing it, cataloguing it, contemplating it.

People seem to view philosophy with contempt, but I never have. I respect the work that philosophy has done over the millennia to explain who we are to ourselves, especially using the tools of observation and inductive reasoning (which I respect more than deductive reasoning, which can bake in bias, if one isn't careful).

Anyway, as a writer with a philosophical bent, these are very trippy times. I don't believe our species will survive, although I still hold out hope that it does. If we do, however, the world as we know it must radically change from what it was. It's the only way forward.

Hats Off & On

As a hat lover, I relate to this article about the hat they had for Cillian Murphy in OPPENHEIMER, replicating JR Oppenheimer's signature hat.

I love a good hat, and they nailed it with the one they made for Murphy.