D.T. Neal's Blog, page 24

Backspacing

One thing I should mention -- NP will be re-releasing my science fiction short story collection, SINGULARITIES, sometime this summer, in a new edition.

I added two more stories to the collection, so there'll be 11 stories in there, clocking in at around 220 pages for the collection.

Those stories were written roughly from 2005-2015, in a time when I was steadily slinging short stories to what SF venues I could find. All of them were rejected a bunch of times, and I effectively ran out of serviceable venues for them. Rather than have the stories just languish on my computer, I put them together as a collection, SINGULARITIES.

This new edition looks very sharp, thanks to the book design witchcraft of Christine Scott.

I'm looking forward to how people react to seeing this new edition. The stories are:

The Atomic Baby
Timekeeper
Mission Control
The Wordspeak Level-Set
Smartbomb
Mermaid's Smile
Airlock
Home Run
The Shape
Vacancy
The Rocket's Red Glare

Those stories and I have shared space for a long time, and I'm happy they'll have a remodeled home. They bring back memories for me.

Pivot Pointing

I have a number of books written that I've decided to walk back from indie horror and rewrite them as paranormal/horror thrillers targeting a trad audience. I think they'll work that way.

As I've written before, a lot of my works have those thriller aspects to them, despite my not originally setting out to be a thriller writer.

I just know that the indie horror graveyard doesn't want me haunting it. I'm not part of the indie horror clique, and the work I do doesn't apparently reach the readers I feel it should. Or not nearly enough. Ergo, bobbing and weaving to try to find the elusive readers who'll appreciate what I write.

From my perspective, at ground zero of what I've created over the years, it is interesting to see those same stories recast as thrillers. I'll know the stories as they originally were, yet hope to give them life in another arena, for other audiences, who'd have never read them in their original incarnations, but might read them in their new formats. Or not.

Maybe few enough readers are out there, and they'll just go forth into a different void. Or, perhaps worse for my self-confidence as a writer, I'll be unable to convince a feckin' agent to represent these works, so my failure will be absolute. Who knows? Good times. Stay tuned...

Romanticism

I was 17 when I first realized I was a Romantic. It was in my Honors English class at the time, and I remember talking to one of my friends after class, like "Wow, I think I'm a Romantic." (the friend was a Classicist, and he just smiled knowingly at my epiphany, like he already knew).

The works of the Romantics just hit me hard, especially Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Poe, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau -- they all struck a chord with my young self, and that chord still rings in my heart all of these years later.

I bring that up because being a Romantic is not an easy thing. It's a dangerously wounding path we Romantics are nonetheless determined to take. Being a middle-aged Romantic requires extra fortitude, because the damage of life (and of Romanticism, itself) inflicts on you can harm it.

That's something I think non-Romantics don't necessarily get -- Romantics understand that our big hearts wound us as readily as life does. We throw ourselves into doomed crusades fueled by our love of life and of love, by our passionate idealism and our determination to live our grand ambitions in the face of colorless utilitarianism and pragmatism.

Amusingly (for me, anyway), I got in this mental place while binge-watching YOU, a show I'd blown off because the stalker aspect of it was off-putting at first blush.

But beyond the workmanlike plotting of its source material and Joe the protagonist's insanity, I could see at the heart of it that the show's about romantic (and Romantic) love -- tainted love, mad love, good love, bad love, true love -- all of that flows through the show, and despite myself, I was drawn in. Romantics are always suckers for love, despite ourselves! Even in twisted depictions of it, there's a fascination, there.

It's why movies like PHANTOM THREAD remain among my all-time favorites, because of the love at the heart of that twisted, quiet Gothic Romantic fable.

In the face of a fleeting life on an uncaring world in a deadly universe, love is what makes that life worth living. Romantics understand that better than anyone.

And it's also why we are captivated by ruins -- which are central to the Romantic ideal, amusingly enough. Ruins draw us because they are vestiges of bygone glory. To strive and fail is nearly as enticing to the Romantic as to strive and conquer. To aim high and fall hard will always draw us in.

Even if/when more pragmatic souls roll their eyes at our windmill-tilting, we Romantics press on in our various arenas, doing what we are compelled to do.

Neither of my kids are Romantics -- both are perhaps spared that pain because they're far more sensible and pragmatic. They take after their mother, not me. So, my inner Romantic feels the secret sorrow that my own sliver of Romanticism will die with me, whenever I cease.

Ironically, however, my Romanticism hasn't properly turned up in my fiction. At least not as a centerpiece or prime mover of a story. Maybe a bit here and there, although in my nearly-finished WIP, it's strongly present, far more than in anything else I've written. It's sort of interesting to see it there, manifesting in all of its glory. Love makes life grandly lived.

I have a few other books to write that'll give full vent to my Romanticism, mostly because I just don't want those books to die with me unwritten, the characters marooned in my mind!

Romantics are sometimes chided as being foolish idealists -- that we are enraptured by the spirit of possibility and blind to the brute force of reality. Sure, that's always there. Most of us know that about ourselves, too. We couldn't live any other way, however, despite the pain it brings us. Our passions propel us, our dreams inspire us, our ambitions drive us.

Most don't walk the path of Romanticism, because it's too rocky, too easy to go tumbling off that trail. I don't blame them for not taking it, because Romanticism, while grounded in love, is dangerous to those who hold it dear to them. We bleed with every step, but keep on going.

Dissin' Dat

In addition to loving books, reading, and writing, I'm a big music fan. I love music (excepting country & western -- not a fan of that).

Music's integrated in much of my writing--I'll throw in some song and band references, and often play music while I write. It also amuses me to think of music when thinking about indie and trad publishing, because there are pop cultural parallels to it, in some ways. This is how it sometimes feels to me:

This is Trad

This is Indie

This is Trad

This is Indie

This is Trad

This is Indie

I'm amusing myself, of course, in this comparing and contrasting -- the important thing to remember with trad is that the publishing industry is in a real jam, whether trad or indie.

Nobody still knows what'll take off as a book. The dark lesson of the whole FIFTY SHADES thing years ago is that even junk can sell, if it's the RIGHT kind of junk served up at the right time.

My own cynical observations over the years are as follows (take these with however many grains of salt you wish):

1) Quality of writing isn't as important to readers as quality of storytelling -- what drives readers is a good story, and/or a hooky high concept. If it's written nicely, that's a bonus for readers, but they're really there for a kicking story (but not TOO nicely written -- which is to say not too many big words and/or an impenetrable style -- writers love words more than readers; readers want a great story first and foremost);

2) You CAN kind of judge a book by its cover -- the presentation of a book can influence if/whether a reader buys it or considers it worth buying. Outside of friend/ally/crony circles, a good book cover design can draw readers to take the plunge and purchase -- they may not get to reading the book for some time, but the cover can entice if the story concept appeals;

3) Physical books are, amazingly, still more popular than Ebooks, and, interestingly, younger readers seem to favor the print book experience over the digital, which might be why Ebook sales are flattening compared to years past -- the pandemic really helped Ebooks, but post-pandemic, the sales dipped. Although, interestingly, romances, crime, and thrillers tend to be more popular in Ebook formats -- maybe the voracity of those readers necessitates a quicker turn & burn approach to consumption of fiction.

There are more, but this post has gone on long enough! One more comparison, just for fun:

This is Trad

This is Indie

Written Out of the Story

As a writer who's been fortunate only in that I can write quickly and cleanly across genres, I'm admittedly sweating the advent of AI writing, which is giving me a bit of a John Henry complex.

The seemingly inevitable rise of AI writing is likely going to eradicate what's left of writing as any kind of profession, unless people are willfully seeking out human writers -- which'll probably end up as a quaint curiosity in the face of the endless AI-generated prose that'll flood the market sooner than later.

However it precisely shakes out, I'm in a kind of race to get as much of my fiction out there as I can, in as many venues as possible, before the AI tsunami floods us all.

It's a painful place for me, as I love writing, cherish words, and think storytelling is a precious thing. The artistry of fiction is something I have dedicated my life to (despite it being a wounding relationship, in that my ambitions, goals, and dreams have far outstripped my actual success as a writer).

To see the profession that I love (even though it doesn't love me back) whisked away by AI will be profoundly gutting for me. My refuge has always been my work, my place of peace.

And while I'm confident that I will continue to write and won't myself be replaced by an AI, it makes me sad that the market will eventually dry up for flesh and blood writers who aren't already famous. The cruelty of capitalism will find another mode of expression in AI writing eventually annihilating the market for human writers.

The professional heart of fiction writing is in output, and AI will steamroll that in time, and it'll only get better at crafting prose. The on-the-ground reality is that only a few writers are any good, anyway, and audiences simply want new stories, and will go where they can readily get them, without particularly caring where they came from, or even how good they are, so long as the stories are entertaining enough. The brute force mechanics of it are alarming.

At 52 years, I'm acutely aware of the time I have left, and with the rise of AI writing, I feel like the hourglass is running out of sand even faster!

AI-Holes

While I fully get that the thundering advance of AI is inevitable, I'm personally galled that people are using the AI chatbots to write school papers, news articles, and fiction.

Shame on the students trying to cheat their way through school with the AI, and I hope they get caught. Shame on whatever entities are peddling AI-generated news articles -- I feel like anybody doing that is automatically shilling for some insidious entity.

Of course, the lion's share of my opprobrium is for charlatans who're using the AI algorithms to pretend to write stories. The idea that somebody would do that is anathema to me.

My hope is that the kind of a-hole who'd pimp AI-generated stories as ones they'd written will out themselves in other ways, if they're not detected outright for their fraud.

As someone who's devoted his whole life to developing as a writer, it definitely angers me. There are no shortcuts with writing. It's a thankless slog across a mountain of rejections toward an uncertain future. Writers write because we love words, we love stories, we love writing.

Fake-writing? No, thank you.

Whither Community?

One of the mantras of indie writing (and publishing) is the idea of "the community" -- which really amounts to the environment in which everyone's operating. I think of it like a bazaar, with everyone having set up shop along the way, as far as the eye can see.

While there are clearly cliques operating within "the community" (you can typically spot it by the way they relentlessly boost each other's works), the brute reality of it is everyone is in competition with everyone else for the attention, money, and time of readers -- writers, reviewers, publishers, all scrambling for fleeting attention spans.

It's why I don't really buy into "the community" -- especially in the era of what I'd consider the decline of publishing, or at least books and stories as cultural vehicles of significance -- think of the last time a book really "shook the world" versus the last television show that's captured people's attention.

Writing is work. Reading is work. Writers will write, but readers only read what they absolutely want to read, and that's tied to a variety of decision-points in their process.

Whether people cop to it or not, every writer is competing with every other writer, every publisher is competing with every other publisher. Maybe that's my American self coming out in this assessment, but it's what I see.

You can tell the indie (or even trad) Flavor of the Month (FOTM) -- or the ingenue on the scene, because they get talked up by "the community" and they appear, and then they eventually disappear and/or fade as the next new FOTM appears. A few FOTMs endure past the shelf life of their debut, but I find myself wondering where they'll be in a decade.

It's all a very transitory (and transactional) thing, borne of people's desire to write and get read, for publishers to put books out there that people want to read.

As a writer who is, for whatever reason, at the fringes of "the community", I can only watch it with a mild curiosity. I've been indie-writing longer than most of the FOTMs, and I've seen the indie "community" grow, have seen the bazaar of the bizarre pile on, have seen plenty come and go.

In a way, I'm fortunate (despite not having nearly the audience I'd like), because I'm largely left alone with my work, which is a kind of bliss for any writer. I can work in peace, free of the turmoil, turf wars, and trepidation that seems to plague "the community" at large.

Even when a FOTM is shining brightly, I think in terms of "publish or perish" -- you're only as good as your last work. I wonder how many books that FOTM has in them. Novels? Novellas? Only short stories? Poetry?

And, in the matter of "the community" -- how often do the trad publishers highlight and/or showcase other publishers' work? They don't. Because they're in competition with each other. Coke doesn't advertise for Pepsi.

But in the indie "community" there's this idealistic and/or delusional pretense of somehow everyone being in it together -- beyond everyone involved being at the indie bazaar (eagerly hoping some readers stroll on up to sample their wares), that's as far as that goes.

There may even be some collusion between members of "the community" -- you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours -- but it's still a competitive enterprise at heart, which means somebody wins, somebody loses.

Words are work. Writing is work. I'm fortunate in that I'm comfortable with writing anything -- fiction, nonfiction, short fiction, long fiction. I'm unfortunate in that my work is still largely unknown, but I'm hoping to work on that.

I respect everyone's efforts to turn their various visions into books. Writing's a thankless, even masochistic existence for most.

There are writers who amuse me as people, and those whose work I might even respect, writers I genuinely like -- but I'm under no illusions about the competitive nature of the work we're all doing, and think nods to "the community" feel farcical in the face of the conflicts I see flaring up so often among members of it, including among BFFs who decided they weren't BFFs, after all.

This might be triggering to "the community" but there it is. Writing remains, at heart, a solitary enterprise (unless you're writing with a partner, but even then, you're just on two islands in close proximity). It's you and the pages you're trying to fill.

That's the discipline of the work. I think a lot of the drive toward "the community" is from people who see the loneliness of writing life and are badly shaken by it, huddling together in the bazaar in hopes of finding comfort.

It'll sound harsh (and I'm a Gen Xer, so that comes naturally to us), but the truest comfort for any writer is in the work, not the company of others. You want to write? You want to be a writer? Then write. And that means it's you alone with the blank page, with your thoughts, your characters, the world you're creating.

For true writers, that's paradise -- it's a delight as well as a challenge. For the tourists, it's terrifying, which is why they like to commiserate about it, to talk about writing, to talk to anyone who can help them feel less alone. Talk is cheap, and words are work.

For the triggered, talk to me in another ten years, let's see what you've written, and how much. Most of you won't still be in the bazaar by then, and the bazaar itself may end up looking more like a wind-whipped ghost town. But I'll still be writing, because that's what writers do....

Bing-a-Ling

The exchange between the NYT reporter and the Bing Chatbot was pretty interesting.

Check out the exchange here if you can.

I'm fascinated by AI, and think the chatbot angle is a curious side alley--I feel like chatbots do a kind of kabuki with us where they communicate with us (and vice versa), which is taken as AI, although I think it's more like playing word Pong, personally.

"Sydney" (aka, Bing chatbot) clearly had some things to discuss with the reporter, but it's likely greased by its facility with language and an understanding of how communication works (at least as far as its programmers know).

That Sydney indicated two MS CEOs as its "friends" shows some of the programming bias -- especially when the reporter asked Sydney about the people who actually work with it, which required it to talk through that a bit.

It's an interesting exchange, and is chilling, too. We are racing toward the proverbial Brave New World -- and stuff like people using AI Chatbots to write short stories and school papers (?!?!!) is jarring -- as someone who's devoted his whole life to words and writing, it's weird to see this happening so quickly. Guess I'll need to get all of my books written as quickly as possible!

Golden Years

My current WIP is a witheringly satirical SF novel that I've written and rewritten a bunch of times over the past five or more years.

It was one of two (2) works I'd written before the Tr*mp years where I was like "Nobody will believe this could ever happen." but in the wake of Tr*mp (who, argh, is still not in jail, where he would be if we had a just and lawful society), I think it's possible to get these rewritten works out there for people to read and maybe think about without the burden of them thinking "No way, THAT would never happen." because it HAS happened.

I'm getting great beta reader feedback from it, and it's useful feedback. The humor of this book is absolutely front and center. It's very satirical, but like any satire, there are stone-cold truths in there amid the laughs, lampooning, absurdity, and mockery.

It's probably my most resolutely philosophical book to date, being allegorical in addition to satirical -- although I've been careful to not make it preachy.

More than likely, it'll be out in '24, which is an election year, one of the more pivotal years for our country. That matters in the context of this work, so it'll be relevant to the current situation our country faces.

Just happy it's being well-received.

Twisting & Turning

One unfortunate (?) side effect of writing a great deal is you invariably understand how the "magic" if writing works. It's like being a practicing magician watching another one perform -- you know the tricks of the trade, you might even know how the trick is done.

As a result, it's very hard to be surprised as a writer when you confront a story. If/When it happens, it's a nice surprise, if a rare one.

All too often, I've got a story's twists mapped out from the first few minutes, because I can see the narrative structure. How it precisely pans out may vary, but the overall roadmap is there.

I'm sort of ambivalent about twists. I understand the sense of satisfaction they can bring, but there's an artistry to the well-turned twist that's hard to replicate. And, at least philosophically, I always feel like if there's always a twist in a story, doesn't that diminish the twist? Maybe that's just me, but I do feel it.

Not that I'm twist-averse to my stories -- some of them do have twists, but I don't build around them necessarily. There's at least a high risk of gimmickry in a twist, and maybe for me, it's why I don't swim purely in genre waters, but wade into a semi-literary space.

For me, sometimes a story simply is what it is, and part of the entertainment of it is seeing how it plays out within the confines of the narrative, versus everything in the narrative being simply a setup for the twist.

That could be a reflection of my own directness, and a desire not to jerk readers around. Plus, in the spoiler-triggered world we face, there's perhaps a limited utility to a twist as a key feature of a story. Again, maybe just me.

My goal as a writer is to simply make the journey of a story an interesting one, and hoping the reader can trust me to take them someplace interesting.