D.T. Neal's Blog, page 22

Shroomed & Doomed

I'm admittedly ambivalent regarding the well-deserved pop cultural moment fungi are having with the popularity of the video game-turned-show THE LAST OF US. "Sporror" is having a moment, clearly.

Cordyceps Fungus Pesticide

I'm ambivalent because my novel, THE CURSED EARTH, is 100% fungus horror-centric -- specifically from a folk horror/cosmic horror comedy thriller angle. I crushed it with this concept, ran with it, went all over the place with it.

THE CURSED EARTH is woefully underread and underappreciated, and it came out ahead of this HBO-fostered boom. Yes, the video game has been out for a long time (since 2013), but the "sporror" is now apparently hot, and my novel came out ahead of this wave.

THE CURSED EARTH is a strong addition to this subgenre and it's just not getting seen or appreciated, which bothers me as a writer and creator. Maybe my biggest failing with it was making it too big a novel (480 pages) and putting too many characters in it (not really, but in the world of fleeting attention spans, maybe too much to track?)

It's a good book, and it's destined to be overlooked as this sporror moment comes and goes. Maybe it'll be discovered 20 years from now, and people will realize I wrote a kickass fungus-centric horror novel in 2022. I dunno. It's demoralizing to do good work and have it lost in the void. That's true horror.

Daylight Savings

I hate when Daylight Savings rolls back around and they force us to lose an hour as we "spring forward". That whole thing persists because lobbyists for retailers continue to push for it.

It's weird for me, because I'm a natural earlybird, have been so my entire life. I always wake up before dawn, usually anywhere between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. No matter how late I might be up the night before, I'm up.

I've made that work for me as a writer, however -- the predawn hours are my prime writing time, when my brain's ostensibly fresh and nobody else is up and can't bother me. I can get a lot of work done. I've written steadily in the margins of my day that way since 2002, and it's invaluable.

So, strictly speaking, Daylight Savings doesn't exactly impact me, except for the time-theft of an hour. I'll still wake up early, except for the manufactured reality of me making at "5 a.m. to 7 a.m." because of the rolling forward. I still make use of that quiet early morning time to write.

Anyway, off to do my fiction writing....

Misgnomer

I'm no fan of gnomes -- they've always annoyed me, in fact. I have an implicit bias against gnomes. So, there's that.

Like Tom Bombadil, while ostensibly not being a gnome, he's sufficiently gnome-like to earn my ire. Yeah, I'm just that way.

To that point, many years ago (heh -- my last post was 2015) -- I made an anti-gnome blog entitled "Misgnomer" (get it?)

Anyway, it's still out there if you want to see my jeremiad against all things gnomish:

Misgnomer

I've parsed out my loathing of gnomes, and near as I can tell, I think it's the gleefully pointless whimsy of the gnome that galls me.

Which is funny, because I love to laugh, love to make people laugh, greatly enjoy humor. But the zaniness of gnomes bugs me. I like funny; I don't like zany.

I haven't thought about that old blog for a long time, but after eight years, I'm thinking maybe I need to make another post or two, if I can.

Now, keep in mind: I don't actually hate gnomes. I'm just mocking my own self-confessed loathing of gnomes by finding and documenting all the gnomish things I see that annoy and vex me.

20-Year Plan

This is kind of a strange admission, but I'll talk through it, anyway -- people in the "writing community" talk about whether they're planners or "pantsers" -- basically, whether you map out the book you're going to write (aka, outlining, etc.) or whether you write on the fly and see where the story takes you.

There are credible arguments for both approaches, and I don't judge either of them, even though I'm a total "pantser" in how I write books, and I'm good at it. Planners are far more cautious and careful in their approach, and are likelier the ones for whom writing is more of a painful struggle.

For me, a story starts as an idea, a concept, some characters, and a general sense of where I want to go. And off I go, writing that first draft. Often, I make discoveries along the way as I get a sense of the story that the book wants to be. I always push to the end to get that critical first draft. Then I go back and revise as much as necessary until it's done.

I like that approach because it keeps the story organic, fresh, and interesting for me -- if I already knew where I was going, it wouldn't be as fun for me to write it. That's my process on that first draft. I basically trade future rewriting and revision time for it, banking on my speed as a writer not to make it too onerous a task.

There is some risk with the "pantser" approach -- you might come up with a story that doesn't work, and bake in a lot of rework or even have a story you can't quite make right. It happens sometimes, and it's rough.

However, it works more often than not for me, and most importantly, it lets me complete books smoothly.

The analogy I make with it describing the two camps is you have one group who needs to see the map and know where they're going, and one group who's happy to hop in the car and go for a drive and see where it takes them.

Another comparison would be between musicians who need sheet music to play a tune, versus, say, jazz musicians who have an idea of where they want to go, and improvise their way through a song. I'm very jazzy in my literary process.

I know exactly which camp I'm in. Now, here comes the promised contradiction I led with, the admission -- while I'm a veteran "pantser" in my approach to my fiction, I do lay out the projects I want to work on, and in so doing, typically lay out a literary landscape far into the future.

For example, I can say that I know what books I'm going to write over the next 15-20 years! These books are just ideas/concepts at this point, but there's enough "there" there for me with them that they're projects for me to work on, versus just notions.

I can say that I have about 45 books I intend to write over the next 15-20 years (I say 15 because I'm planning to write three books a year for the next 15 years, but I'm allowing 20 for the ceiling in case a few new stories pop in and want to join the parade).

That currently means about 14 trad-targeted thrillers, around 18 science fiction books, and around 13 fantasy books.

Once I have those book projects jotted down, then, for me, it's just a tactical matter for me to work my way through the stack, book by book, until I get through them all. And I will.

There's some irony for me in this, in that I know roughly and globally where I want to go, but, when it comes to each individual book, I don't know where I'm going until I hop into that particular car and take it for a spin, and see where it takes me.

Live Free or DIY

One thing that definitely informs my writing self is Punk. Not in the strident stancemongering of latter-day punks these days, but in that my youthful roots (christ, a lifetime ago, specifically from 1987 onward).

Punk impacted me majorly as a kid. I absolutely dug it, and I still do (although not as zealously as I did as a teen). Even though I bitterly reflect on just how dead Punk is, and how Metal ultimately prevailed as the go-to rebellious counterculture (a retrograde issue, because there was a time when Punks and Metal kind of vied for that ultimate outsider place, with Punks as the surburban ragers and the Metalheads as the working class rebels).

When I was a teen, Punk was a magical whirlwind of nihilistic, revolutionary rage that absolutely suited my rebellious adolescent temperament. The old-school bands of that day hit a nerve for me and remain dear to me, even as in my far mellower fogeydom, I have long since made my peace with Metal, which has its own charm and intensity.

I could go on and on about that, but I'm keeping focused on how Punk impacted my writing. The idea of "Punk is an attitude" has always stuck with me -- that drive for authentic and original, uncompromising expression, resentment of authority, loathing of posing, the DIY aesthetic, etc.

The DIY in particular stuck with me -- you want XYZ? DIY it. Make it yourself. Go for it, no compromises. Get after it. The flip side of DIY is most of it is crap. But there was always possibility rooted in DIY that the corporate slickwads were too afraid to touch. The energy and anger and originality of Punk remains.

I'd like to think that spirit infuses my writing, too -- Punk Lit endures with my work, wherever I take it, whatever I write (specifically within Horror and Science Fiction). It's why I worked with The Jestress to form Nosetouch Press, which was a declaration of intent and a DIY stance as there ever was. Indie or bust!

Sure, some might sniff at self-publishing, but they're norms, squares, and cowards.

For a Punk, self-publishing is pure DIY. I mean, bands like Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and Minor Threat formed their own record labels because they knew what they were creating would not get heard through the corporate industrial channels.

They absolutely self-produced their own music (aka, musical self-publishing), and carved out their niche based on their vision of what they wanted to play, how they wanted to play it. Their efforts birthed an entire indie and alternative music movement. From my POV, DIY was a logical, no-compromise way to go. I respect that, and always will.

Punk aesthetics meant doing your own thing, your own way, and striving toward true originality on your own terms (and, yes, in the larger cultural conversation, it was almost totally corrupted by corporate conformity, but I still honor the romantic spirit it represented). It definitely fueled the genesis of NP, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

And, sure, I'm going to try to find trad markets for some thriller work I'm doing -- my punky teen self would kick my ass for doing it, but I'm still going to try, even though I wonder if/whether I'll ever write something that the mainstream normies will appreciate -- I operate way outside the boundaries of normalcy, while masquerading as comprehensible in order to survive.

Maybe that's part of my literary persona -- one time, at an anarcho get-together in the 90s, one of them said to me "Man, Dave, nobody would ever guess you're as radical as you are. You just *look* so all-American," and I just smiled and said "Yeah, that's one of my secret weapons -- I don't wear my rebellion on my shirtsleeves and lapels, but it's always in me").

Maybe my work'll compel with wider audiences, maybe not. My attitude will still always be there, even if it's coated in affability. Part of me tries just to see what'll happen, which is a bit of my old Punk self indulging in a little artful chaos. Those who feel it know that impulse.

The Flood & The Drought

I think we're (writers) in a weird place that's only going to get weirder. I've written about it in other posts, but I'll try to articulate it clearly here:

There are a flood of writers out there (and let's be honest, the majority of them suck, some of them are good, very few are excellent), and there's likely never been a time when readers have had more choice of what to read than they do now.

Which is precisely part of the problem -- supply vastly exceeds actual demand. A flood of writers, a veritable tsunami, leading to a demand drought.

As a result, what venues remain are submission-swamped, which means acceptance rates are dropping (and I'm only counting human writers, here; not AI word pimps).

There was an "indie boom" over the last decade, but it's leading to an indie crash, as I see it. A flood of junk writing has glutted the marketplace.

A tiny fraction of fortunate souls cross over to trad, but that's absolutely no guarantee of anything -- trad's in as bad a predicament as indie is; it just has the benefit of more available capital and favorable distribution networks.

I'm seeing more writers finding it harder to sell their stories, and plenty taking refuge in anthologies and longer works, in hopes of there being less intense competition at that level. But the net result remains the market buckling and cratering for writers. Too many writers are competing for too few readers.

I think we're going to see a literary "Dust Bowl" emerge in the next five years or so, as hapless writers (most of whom likely only had a few stories in them to begin with) wash out in the drought. I'm willfully mixing my metaphors, here, because it really is both a flood and a drought -- a deluge of writerly demand for publication with a drought of reader demand and/or publishing venues.

The capacity to cultivate an audience, always a hefty lift, is the only way for a writer to have a hope of succeeding in the torrent of content out there. However, in a terribly crowded field, it's harder than ever to get noticed, especially without advocates (and even those might not be enough).

I did a tally of remaining books for me to do, and I've got ~45 books to-be-written, with around 30% aimed for a trad market, and 70% for indie. At my current rate of speed, that's about four books a year for me over the next ten years.

We'll see how things are in five years, but I'm thinking there'll be far fewer writers writing then than there are now, at least for anything more than simply a hobby or a form of psychological validation. More and more will see that barren landscape and ask themselves "Why the hell am I doing this?"

Is It Just Me?

Maybe it's just me, but it feels like the pop culture is collapsing in on itself. There are structures and forms of it continuing, but it feels like it's melting down.

Books and publishing in general -- I've written enough about that, but it seems like it's tanking, or at least losing its way, And it's likely to magnify when the Baby Boomer Behemoths of writing all die off -- look at the richest writers and see a sea of Boomers -- and tell me that there'll ever be writers this successful ever again. I don't see it happening.

Music, especially rock music -- do kids still form bands? Can they afford to? Even the big name rock bands are touring smaller venues, are seeing album-oriented rock go by the wayside compared to past years. I see some bands touring and I think "NFW would they have hit a venue that small in the past." Lots of nostalgia tours hustling while bands still can. Again, what happens when the Boomers all die out -- will Rock die out with them?

Newspapers and magazines -- dying out in droves, and/or hollowing out to fractions of their former selves, and/or attempting to live through digital portals, and even then, perching perilously on subscription-based systems and finding audience dwindling.

Movies -- I think the pandemic plus pricing has basically knocked movies off the cultural pedestal. Still there in some fashion, but acres of rehashes, remakes, retreads -- since Wall Street conquered Hollywood, any real risk-taking in movies went out the window, and they're chasing sure things with a desperate ardor. The big stars are getting old to the point where digital de-aging is less viable, and the stories are thinly written, even among the big hits. I don't think movies will ever bounce back from the pandemic.

Television -- seems like one of the few beneficiaries of the pandemic in many respects, but still captive to fickle audiences and the whims of increasingly concentrated media ownership. Similar risk with movies in that junk shows get thrown to eager audiences, although maybe a little more room for some decent shows here and there. However, are audiences still tuning in, or are studios competing more forcefully for fewer watchers? Narrowcasting seems more common than broadcasting -- trying to reach a niche audience as a refuge, like a feckin' foxhole.

Like I said, maybe it's just me, but I pride myself on being a Zeitgeist guy, and what I'm feeling is a general vibe of rampant cultural malaise -- maybe it's the continuing rise of fascism (and the failure to hold fascists to account for, you know, coups'n'stuff) -- maybe it's the general impoverishment of 99% of the populace adversely impacting people's entertainment indulgences (relative to the top 1% thriving beyond their wildest dreams as the rest of us live hand-to-mouth) -- but I'm also thinking, despite how annoying they can be, I don't see the pop culture as we know it surviving the end of the Boomers. Xers like me will remember it, but we're middle-aged, now, and nobody listens to or particularly acknowledges us, anyway.

What comes next? I'm not seeing it. I see a bunch of ephemeral distractions, niche personalities, and the general lack of a broader pop cultural tapestry -- more like a bunch of pop cultural placemats on a capitalist cafeteria table we're all supposed to eat at.

Social media? It's battery acid, not the building blocks of a meaningful pop culture. Woefully inadequate to the task at hand, and only magnifying people's misery and malaise (let's be honest; that's what it is).

It feels like we're on cruise control toward actual dystopia. In may ways, it feels like it's already here, and will only intensify. We're adrift in a leaky ship, bound for rocky shoals, and I don't think we're going to be bailing ourselves out, versus stridently arguing with one another over whether we're even in trouble or not.

But I sure think we are. I think we're roundly f*cked, and not in a good way.

Jumping-Off Pointlessness

(still mulling over my last post, so bear with me)

I think what I'm saying is that, at least with regard to the SF, I'm going to swan-dive into the surreality of SF, and it's going to get weird in all the right sorts of ways.

The thriller work will be meat-and-potatoes storytelling for my action-oriented prose; the fantasy work will be Romantic yearning for justice and loveliness; and my SF writing* will be me spacing out in all sorts of ways.

I can accommodate all three remaining literary lanes in my process.

The legacy indie horror work will simply be a chilly wading pool available for people if they're morbidly curious.

The real action will be in those other arenas, where my heart and mind will be freed up to explore what interests me, so, strap in and enjoy the ride, because it's going to be wild!

*Incidentally, there'll be a re-release of SINGULARITIES coming. It's my SF short story collection of stories I wrote from 2003-2015. The new edition is fab, and even has a couple more stories added to it, so, if you've not read that collection before (extremely likely, I know), you might want to wait until Nosetouch Press releases the new edition. The new cover design kills!

What's Next?

My remaining literary energy (hmm, let's say the next 20 years, assuming I live that long) will be focused in these areas:


Thrillers
Science Fiction
Fantasy


The thrillers will be squarely focused on trad markets -- stories written for mainstream thriller audiences.

The science fiction and fantasy will likelier be indie-oriented, unless something strikes me as being particularly suited for a trad market, or I'm wanting, you know, readers, audience, and fans.

I've already got eight indie SF and fantasy books out there under different pen names, so it's not like I'm starting from scratch with this.

Anyway, I'm feeling liberated by walking away from indie horror, honestly, and I think I know why (I mean, besides the obvious lack of readership, haha).

With SF and fantasy, I can do what I do best, which is world-building -- I'm a big fan of world-building, and I'm good at it, even if not quite as good as I am at writing good books nobody reads -- THAT is my area of unsurpassed literary mastery.

Horror is so rooted in the everyday, the here-and-now, the larger mechanics of world-building are a background consideration, if considered at all.

What is also means is there'll be less noise in SF and fantasy -- which is to say that there won't be as many literary pretenders out there. There's a reason why indie horror gets packed tight with wannabes -- because it's easier to write horror than other genres. Norms love their horror, and I'm squarely in the realm of the freaks & geeks set, the feisty outlier and contrarian outsider. Even as a codger-in-training, I'm still the Art Club Punk Romantic who hangs back from the normies, and I always will be.

The narrative requirements are less in horror. Sure, you should be able to scare readers, but it's also why gore is so central to so many of those works. Tossing a hapless character into a woodchipper is easier than articulating the sociopolitical effects of a surveillance society within a crumbling dystopia.

By walking away from indie horror, I'm graciously leaving that bloody battlefield to the bookish berserkers (most of whom aren't novelists, because, you know, novels are hard work) who relish that kind of fiction. I made my contribution to it, and I'm moving on.

Give me worlds to build and characters to occupy it as I'm exploring ideas, and I'm happy. And I have so many to build in what time I have.

Btw, if any of you are triggered by the above, that's what you get for reading my blog. Haha! I don't apologize for it, or for my perspectives on things as a writer who's almost certainly been at it longer than you. Enjoy your indie horror junk food, by all means; I'm traveling to other worlds, going far, far away...

Marching Forward

Having just launched THE THING IN YELLOW, I'm in the place of focusing on my next works. This is where it gets more complicated, as I walk away from indie horror.

I've got three works that I'm polishing up for trad markets -- all three are thriller-based. One of them I'm already querying to agents, while the other two I'm preparing for that process.

Additionally, I've got two other projects that are completed and I'm looking for homes for them.

The trad market-surfing is always fraught for me, because it's entirely dependent on agents getting around to rejecting the work, and some of them have longer timescales than others, and it's easy to lose track. I recommend keeping tabs in a database.

The other aspect of trad-surfing that bugs me is it leaves the work in question in limbo for a very long time: 1) first, you have to try to catch an agent's interest and acceptance (huge lift); 2) even if you cross that first hurdle, then the agent has to manage to wrangle a sale with a publisher; and 3) that book gets locked into the publisher's production schedule. That stretches the launch date far over the horizon. Two years? Three years? Longer? Who knows?