Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 16

POTD 1/3/20

Kodak DC 290 shot, taken in early 2000 while I was working up in North Hollywood (which isn't really a city and never really will be.) Probably on Lankershim near Magnolia.

POTD 1/2/20

Rice AFB (decommissioned), Rice CA in 1994 or so. Another film shot, taken when a bunch of friends hauled a bunch of old junk out to the disused runway at the old airbase.The past burns well enough.

POTD 1/1/20

Doing something new just to get into the rhythm of things. Photo a day. Only posted here. Not on social media because those dudes make enough money off me for free.This photograph was taken in January, 1992 in Julian, CA. Likely with an Olympus automagic focus job because even then my close-up vision was going and my ability to focus through a rangefinder was degrading. I make no bones about my photographs being collaborations with machines.400 speed b/w film, scanned some twenty years after the shooting.

POTD 1/19/20

Doing something new just to get into the rhythm of things. Photo a day. Only posted here. Not on social media because those dudes make enough money off me for free.This photograph was taken in January, 1992 in Julian, CA. Likely with an Olympus automagic focus job because even then my close-up vision was going and my ability to focus through a rangefinder was degrading. I make no bones about my photographs being collaborations with machines.400 speed b/w film, scanned some twenty years after the shooting.

FULL BLEED: FRIDAY NIGHT

Wrote a bunch of outline pages today but the only honest ones among them were where friends took a character to dinner because they could see she was low down. And this is in something that's supposedly a crime/cosmic horror outing.I'm okay with this.

FULL BLEED: FEAR IS A MAN'S BEST FRIEND (2)

Since I'm at this stage on the second book, here's the intermediate step between the short (2 page) synopsis and the longer "outline" draft. As always, major spoilers for QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS follows. I'm presenting this as it was written, typos and everything laid bare. There's maybe even a few things that I never picked up on and whoops.Hmm. Part 1 isn't here. I wonder where it went.-- SPOILERS FOLLOWArguing about placement of the body discovery scene, keep it as close to beginning as possible.PROSKeeps things movingBrings in cops earlier (depends if I want to emphasize or make it scarier by saying that they can't help.)CONSMakes the meeting with Ariella awkward, if not even impossible.Makes Cait seem foolhardy for even doing this.- Revenge driven?- Curiosity driven- Oh, make it so that her desire for attention makes it impossible to stay away even when Rico is dead. Yay. Fixed.IT IS FIXED. HURRAH.PART 2Cops grill herStay in townFrazzled, sleepFinish book/revisit bookMeet with cultThe Cult wants only the book, but they will pay. So long as none of their activities come up with the police. (Also intimation that the cult has friends/agents in the police force and they'd know, or they could manufacture evidence putting Cait intimately at the crime, but this doesn't have to happen if eveyrone is smart.)Cait won't have a choice after finding Rico's body and being hauled in as a material witness by Joe Darnel from murder squad (and parter Paul Levin). Cait passes Rico off as a friend she's known for a long time (his sister works at the salon she visits). No she doesn't know about anyone who'd want to hurt him. No she doesn't know about any killings that might fit this pattern. Does she know anything about old books? Valuable books? Maybe one that would be worth killing over. Rico did most of his work in his head, didn't keep a bank account, stashed money in his apartment, maybe discovery that he made phone calls to a public booth near Cait's apartment on a regular basis, like clockwork. Maybe admission that she sells books, but doesn't know about this one. She might even be a good liar. Of course, the cult is watching this or maybe they even have contacts in the department. She should stay in town even though that's the last thing she wants to do. TURN: THE BOOK IS THE ONE SHE WRITES- Fallout from Rico's death and ritualistic nature. No Tomorrows or a violent weirdo?- Cops and debriefing/questioning regarding her involvement with Rico and Rico's way of life.- Good cop/Bad cop. She is told to stay in town until this is settled, material witness. ONE OF THE COPS is following her on suspicion that she's holding back. Low-key.- Book collection in Rico's apartment, suggestion that he was making business opportunities where he shouldn't.- Cops suggest open and shut drug involvement to case, but only recreational quantities of usual drugs (weed/coke).- Something about occult books and the circle around them.- Invitation from No Tomorrows and explicit statement that they want the SMOKING CODEX- Cait is freaked out because that's a book she's faking. It's not real. She's writing it.** EDITS- Little short on cult and weirdness content.- Remember the uncanny.PART 3Cait is stuck between two very sharp rocks. She has no illusions about what the cult will do if they get the book. It's clear that Rico was killed by them over it, and that he gave up Cait's location to them. They can find her and there's no getting out from under that. She also doesn't want to give up the business she's built for herself. She likes the business, at least until it comes to life. Ariella, who has met with Cait, is strange and screwed up and believes in a way that Cait simply can't accept. This stuff is very real to her. To Cait it's just fiction, one that was fun to create but now that it seems to be breathing itself to life, it's not fun anymore. She wonders what is actually going on, but not to any great depth. She thinks on it some, maybe makes some additions to the Codex as a kind of backdoor escape route. But she is interrupted in this by a cultist and a THING from nightmare which could have only come from the CODEX - a humanoid servant which sees with eyes in its palms, eyes stolen from Rico (will need something distinctive to make it work, but also make it plausible.) **Need to make it so that it's not directly out of the book, but like a sideways reading, but *feels* like it could've come from it. Easy**TURN: WHAT SHE IS WRITING MAY BE REAL- Meeting with Ariella. Need to have this is a club, etc. Dreamlike and strange.- The order is upset. This should not be taking place. Rico shouldn't be dead.- Possible that one of the cops is tailing her.- Entranced with her own work, maybe it's real?- COSMIC MYSTERY AND MENACE- Maybe Ariella suspects that it's fake and doesn't care.- Cop freaking out at the meeting.- Cait breaks off meeting, disappearing. Wants out of this, but it's taken a life of its own.- End on thing from her book that has become real. Maybe the cuts on the hand.PART 3 ENDS**Diversion to the bookseller or someone else who can mybe get Cait out of this. Possibly even contact one of the cops but have it turned badly. She wants to get out of the situation and might even give up her freedom for it. Besides, she's just selling art, right? Possibly someone at her heels about the fakes**PART 4Cait and the cult face off, at least in short. Distract the assailant with a threat to destroy the CODEX and somehow get his pet to kill him instead. She pockets the obsidian knife that he's carrying. Ancient, unbelievably old and sharp, a strangeness to it. With this, she is able to cut the creature, which bleeds stars. Enrages it and the cult assassin gets between it and her, ending his own life (in a way distinctly different from Rico). **Where does this take place? Her office? Neutral location? Get feeling of kidnap/theft/coercion gone too far**TURN: ACTUAL CREATURE/EXPERIENCE FROM THE CODEX. WORD MADE REAL- Cait escapes the meeting, but is followed.- Cop is suspicious based on her meeting with No Tomorrows. Looks pretty bad.- Sense that the cult is larger than it lets on and is always watching.- Gathering strangeness.- Revisiting the book and realizing it's closer than she thought.- Contacts the cops, finds out that she's been watched and she either comes in as material witness or suspect. Can't. Won't.- End on the Cult Thing and an assassin at her home/workplace.PART 4 ENDSPART 5Maybe she has to find the answer to the book's power by confronting the cult? This would make her a stronger character, facing things down. But she'll be prepared with the knife. It would be unexpected, and perhaps Ariella would respect the guts of that move. "Let's find out the truth of it together." Cops try to move in on things and it becomes more complicated. Cult uses plain old guns and ammo to keep the cops away. Cait tries to warn the two of them off, but Paul won't listen. Something goes badly and the cops can't help and Cait is in the hands of the Cult with the CODEX being held by Ariella. Weird connection between the two of them, because Cait is the hand of Ariella's god, the means by which it can be born into this world from fiction. Cait also compelled by her own work and it's unforeseen power, can't destroy it and instead yields to it.TURN: SHE IS IN THE HANDS OF THE CULT BY HER OWN CHOICE- Struggle with the Cult Thing which she may or may not have invented.- Struggle with her own involvement in this.- INCLUSION OF WHITE OBSIDIAN RITUAL KNIFE- Who makes the world?- Has to distract/enrage the thing enough to make it take care of the cult assassin.- Possibly cops showing up at her door. Maybe good cop. He has to see something to convince him that this is beyond her or anyone's control.- Ends with her realizing there isn't an escape and instead taking the book (and the knife) to the Queen of No Tomorrows.PART 5 ENDSPART 6Above the hills **set a location** of Los Angeles, a remarkably chaste sort of ceremony is taking place. Costume drama. But this is about more than birthing a god, but birthing a goddess in the form of Ariella. Ariella is using this coup to take out her superior in the cult, who is not the fanatic perhaps that she is. To everyone's surprise except maybe Ariella's, the ceremony seems to work. Walls between worlds break down and the Veil of Uncounted Eyes makes an appearance. It is terrible and compelling, and the first thing Ariella orders it to do is to consume Cait. She has no purpose any longer. Imagination has become reality and the loop needs to be closed. But Cait has the knife, which is capable of harming even fictional things like the Veil. A tentacle/feeler closes around Cait's hair and Cait uses the knife to cut through, wounding the manifestation. All hell breaks loose. Ariella's faith is shaken and she dies for it. The Veil does the cosmic indifference thing and eats those who summoned it and their fancy cars, too.Cait is torn between looking under Ariella's veil to see the truth, if she has been altered as the CODEX suggested. Minister's Black Veil moment. She finally refuses to definitively answer the question for herself, leaving Schrodinger's cat alive. Or dead. Is there magic or not? She can't bring herself to answer it because then she would have to reconsider her own place in the universe and whether it was one of power or not. But she'll never create another occult text again. Not even to write fiction.- Everything goes to hell. Or hell comes here.- Who makes the world?- Cait makes the world- Cuts herself free and in doing so sets the thing loose on the gathered cult.- But ultimate revelation is one she cannot face. She doesn't have strength to. She already knows its real.Denoument 1 - the King of No Tomorrows surveys the work done by Ariella and her subsequent downfall. He doesn't understand what happened or how, but knows that the shell-shocked Cait is responsible for Ariella's failure and he always pays back his debts. He tells Cait that all she has to do is ask a favor and it will be hers. But she had best steer clear of No Tomorrows and they will be told to do the same. He melts away, if he was ever there.Denoument 2 - the cops come and find that the place is a mess. Argument over what to do with Cait since she's about the only one left alive, but she's seen better days. Good cop sees the knife and hides it from the bad cop.- Part 6 might be overly long. Bias other parts length to compensate. Long 1 and 6, short 2-5.

FULL BLEED: THIS IS THE MOON WITHOUT THE TIDE

Forgot to sneak this in with the last post.What I most miss about life before the Howling Pit (aka Web 2.0) is non-monetized hobbies, or even being free from the desire to monetize hobbies. Now, there's limits to this, like the semi-pro press magazine world (I'm thinking FAMOUS MONSTERS as the template for this, but into STARLOG and FANGORIA and all those.) Those are snapshots of a time, just as the fanzines (of which I've limited exposure, but some of the HPL orbit, in concept, if not always in execution.)But now you gotta have a podcast. You gotta have a following. You gotta be a personality and you're god damned right your love of a thing has to be the primary product.And folks, those two impulses are at war with one another. But then so's the concept of loving a thing and basing your identity on that love (and yeah, that gets monetized, you better believe it.)Well here's what I ask. If you want to read a book I've written, buy it. If you like it, leave a review. I'm not gonna run a Patreon or lock content behind subscription walls. My thought aren't that valuable.But I'm not gonna give that content to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter. You'll see photos on Tumblr and maybe Twitter, but those are ephemeral and while not without value, are not monetarily valuable. I won't pretend otherwise. If they're valuable to you, then maybe say something along those lines (but see below.)If you want comment, well, post it on your blog. You've got a blog, right? I might even read it, given time. Likely I won't engage on it 'cept should we meet in person. Hell, I'll even talk to you about genre boundaries in person, one to one. I'll be brief and then smile and nod while you describe how I'm wrong. It's okay. Post these thoughts in a place where you run the space. Don't cede it to anyone else. Sure, we're always ceding something to Google. I'm paying Wix to host this space and provide a nice and tidy front end because I'm real tired of hand-coding websites.But don't do it to make someone else money, or at least limit that as much as you can.

FULL BLEED: NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN

One. I haven’t deleted Twitter, but I’m back to being off it, only to monitor DMs for folks with whom that’s my primary source of contact. I’ll post to it when I have a new update here or something valuable to say or a new product to sell because the Howling Pit hungers, dig?Two. I’m off Facebook. Don’t ask me to come back. I’d still use Instagram, but the app that let me post stuff from my desktop to Insta just puked up its guts and died and I’m in no hurry to replace it. It was nice to get likes from folks there, don’t get me wrong. But it was all hollow and it didn’t do anything to drive traffic. And sure, I like the likes, but it’s still just a Facebook company and fuck them. Their masks have come off and we know who they are.Three. My friend Tom Spurgeon died last week. You may or may not know who he is. I’m not going to speak long on him and his work. Like, all I have to say is that Tom was the rock upon which we in comics blogging stood and we never even goddamn knew it. He died too young, but not unremembered. I’ll miss him.Four. It’s almost the end of 2019, close enough that we can see the precipice now. The tire-fire of the decade will be left behind, only to keep smoldering for years to come. But it’s all about the arbitrary time-stop, right? Back in 2009, I was still irregularly blogging about comics, but was pretty much done. However, I did come out to offer my thoughts on the the decade that came before. It was a weird one, as in 2000, I was hardly reading comics but got back into them. I fell hard for Grant Morrison writing a team I thought I was done with and for Jack Kirby’s comics which I’d never properly appreciated before. In 2008, I published my first comics work. But from 2002-2008, I wrote pretty regularly on comics and popcult. At the end of 2009, I’d opined that the most important comics story of the decade wasn’t any of the movies or new media interest or changes to the direct market or merch or even comics blogging. None of those stories were anywhere near the importance of one thing.And I got some grief for bringing this up, so I relish the memory.The most important story in the 2000s was Disney acquiring Marvel (and STAR WARS after that, but that slipped into the 2010s). That and Warner Brothers, in a fit of me-too-ism, took firmer control over DC as an intellectual property stable.I wasn’t wrong then. I’m not wrong now.That said, the story in the 2010s is similar but different. It’s not comics that I’ve got my eye on, but the pop(cultural) landscape. And where we talk about it, how we learn about it, where we engage with it, where we wage war over it. Not just social media, but what social media has become. By 2009, we were soaking in it, sure. But we weren’t carrying around the Howling Pit in our pockets, ready to unleash ironic likes and retweet dunks and smart swarms (or dumb ones, for that matter). I suppose saying that this is all weaponized now is a little flip and easy. But I do love that low-hanging fruit. So does Twitter.Now this isn’t a conscious thing on Twitter’s part. Or Facebook’s. If we take them at their word, they’re neutral platforms. Of course, any sociologist or linguist will tell you that there is no such thing as platform neutrality. We can hope that these products haven’t been *designed* to enhance and drive behaviors that make Online such a hellhole at times. But you know, the people behind the algorithms look at lots and lots of data. That’s why these platforms even exist at all, right? Remember that if the platform is free, then you (and that’s the Digital You, as in your informational footprint) are the product. And they’re on 24/7, always waiting.I’ve joked that Twitter was my favorite MMO, and I doubt I was the first to do so, since I got to Twitter pretty late in the game (though I do remember stars as opposed to hearts so I’m not that much of a new adopter). But like an MMO, it’s always there, always running, players always populating the world. Jump in anytime. Oh, and of course Twitter is a game. Rack up followers, rack up likes, go viral, dunk and declare your allegiance. Go to war. Have an opinion on everything. Go start fights. It’s good for your rep, get boosted, dunk the motherfuckin’ president on his home turf. Feels good, man. Toss out a bad-faith opinion about how [beloved franchise] sucks and watch people take it seriously.Now, I use Twitter as the example here, but you could do the same thing on Facebook pretty easily. Hell, you could on USEnet too. I watched folks argue over just about anything, and watch some who had no stake in it do it for the sheer blue hell of things. A good donnybrook gets the blood pumping. Just keep it brief, digestible. Feed the ego because that’s all these things are good for. What’s that? A mere college student has decided that your masterpiece isn’t good enough for an award consideration? Well damn, better call in the squad on this. That’ll show them.Yeah, that’s pure ego. The purest hit. Validation crack (apologies to William Gibson) on a permanent drip. You know why they call it dopamine, right? Yeah, because you do dopey shit in pursuit of it.I won’t even get into the whole #amwriting thing, where you get rewarded for not actually doing what you’re supposed to be doing and instead just talking about it. Oh you know I’m guilty of that one, more than my share. But I’m wandering off-topic a bit.Social media is a thing where we’re out there making that Good Content for no monetary consideration (unless you’re a beautiful influencer, in which case, that becomes its own reward, yeah) and all so companies can read what we write so that they can sell to us better and in turn sell our data to whoever wants to pass along that bag of money. In the 2010s we might’ve been writing on platforms that we didn’t own (Blogspot, I’m looking at you, but Livejournal and Myspace too — yeah, I remember that bit in IRON MAN). We wrote on those platforms, but at least our own work wasn’t being turned against us. This is not to say that there wasn’t plenty of ego poisoning in those days. There was. There was performative shitposting, some of it entertaining, some of it just shit.But we weren’t being tracked. We hadn’t quite been convinced to go from turn-based to full first-person-shooter, if you can follow that metaphor. We hadn’t yet been convinced that we had to be Extremely Online to sell our work, or to engage with the people who are selling us the work we read. We hadn’t yet been turned into full-time performers on shifting stages that we would soon internalize and carry with us at all times. Or maybe that’s just me? At any rate, the conversion of social media to a full time ad-generator and data-trap as well as product in and of itself is a thing that’s come to full flower in the 2010s. I won’t swing directly into politics in this, but we’re in a different era than we were in say, 2015. And if you say that things haven’t changed, then I’ll know that you’re either a fool or you have something to sell that depends on me being a fool. We communicate on platforms we don’t control, and hardly understand. We purchase things with systems that we don’t control. Hell, Square made huge inroads into the independent artist/writer circles that I run in, and now that they’re the de facto standard, they’re changing up the rules, to squeeze folks who live and die by small transactions. It’ll take a little while for this to filter through, but I bet I won’t be seeing as many readers on show floors, or it’ll be from a competitor’s brand and not Square. Turning money into digits is a hell of a thing, particularly when one company can capture all that traffic. Sure, they’re still fighting over this territory right now. That’ll be a war fought and won or lost in the 2020s. Might even see the beginning of the end for cash in some circles by then. Maybe giving the control of commerce and trade to a bunch of venture capitalists will turn out to be not such a hot idea after all, y’know?Fortunes have been diverted not by creating new businesses, but putting digital interlocutors in place over the old ones. And we’ve gotten to that point with communication.Oh, I know. You’re still free to say whatever you want on Twitter or Facebook. Or in Gmail. Sure we can. We’re free to sell stuff there too, just as long as we pay to promote posts. Remember the days when you could put up something and have some assurance that everyone who followed you would see it? Yeah, I do, too. But that’s bad for business. Leaves money on the table. If you really want that message to get out there, you gotta hand over.I won’t even get into the Discourse as it is. But maybe talking about a thing isn’t as good as actually enjoying the thing. Fighting over someone else’s opinion of movies you love, that’s the best, right? Especially if they’re an important somebody. Now, keep in mind that there’s thousands of these conversations on at all times.“Oh, just don’t participate in them,” you’ll say. Sure. Except that everyone else does, so you see it whether you like it or not. There’s not enough mute filters in the world to hide from these kinds of discussions. I realize I’ve been swapping between the personal and not-personal here, a lot. But some of this is cosmic horror territory, our communication modes hijacked and monetized and ultimately turned to someone else’s interests. Content the likes of which that Terrence McKenna never envisioned in the most burning of his Time Wave Zero fever dreams, generated by the hour, used to sell ad space and the best part? All for free. Just pay for that broadband connection and then you get more content than you could assimilate in a lifetime. Every day. And wow, you could talk about it, forever. Join the ebb and flow, rule the discourse.Whew. Let’s take a bit of a break here.More later. (So let's take a twelve-hour break, or not.)So, participation in the system or don’t exist. That’s the dichotomy offered, and like most binary dichotomies, it’s a false one. My friend, who I know only as Revolt of the Apes over on Twitter would offer a meaty Buddhist aphorism in return, one that would disarm the falseness offered. As a writer, we’re told that we need to buy into this system, to be available on social media, to interact, to race down the court when you get a chance to grab the rock and get that dunk in. Writer as hero. Writer as product.The internalization of these platforms and *their* needs is the big media story for the decade. Bending our viewing habits or discourse strategies or even down to the *enjoyment* of all forms of art (and is that not the very purpose of art?) is the primary product of the social media discourse now. Binge before everyone else has moved on. Join the conversation. Put up those likes. Join the swarm. It hungers.Facebook is only interested in things that get more engagement on Facebook. That means more money. Same with Twitter. This is the purpose of these platforms. Netflix, at least, doesn’t pretend a social component, but Letterboxd does. Netflix just wants you to binge and move on to the the next one. They’ve got their black box and they can read the numbers and decide whether their strategies are working or not. Same with Amazon. HBO Go. Hulu. And now Disney. Remember them? They bought Marvel. Then they bought STAR WARS. They bought the childhoods of a generation, one whom they previously haven’t captured.These platforms have become interlocutors for social reality. For our modes of consumption. Yes, I buy most of my new music off Bandcamp, for instance. I listen to music while playing it off of iTunes to organize my tunes. I don’t listen to CDs any longer (and vinyl decays at my touch.) I enjoy movies and then think about how I want to write them up in 240 characters or less. Same with art that I take pictures of and post, for instance. Don’t get me started on the insanity of our political reality, for which social media is like a napalm mist sprayed over a tire fire. It’s a battlefront, and I was gleefully sniping from my safest place thinking that it meant a goddamn thing other than that dopamine rush. Remember that “dope” is a phoenetic component of “dopamine.”I’d let my play in social media become internalized. I’m positive I’m not alone. It’s what Facebook wants. It’s what social media wants. And dammit, it’s what I wanted.It’s the big story. Not just in media but wider even than that. And I think I know when it really started. A few years back, I was being run through a years-running and exhausting life process/event. It was a slow-rolling catastrophe with no good end. Until there was a shot at not a good end, but a substantial improvement of things. Again, that sub-process in itself was going to be a slow-rolling big change and series of minor catastrophes and triumphs. As I was going through the low points in this, I turned to the ephemeral comforts of social media, in this case Twitter. I also used writing as a balance to that. Only I stopped pretending to balance awhile ago.As I said in my last entry LINK, where I was talking about difficulty in writing my second (really tenth or so) novel, talking about how it was easier to worry about how it was impossible or even just difficult than it was to do the thing. To open up and reach around in whatever place that is that makes the work possible for me. It’s, shamefully, easier to do that than to do the work that hasn’t done more than pay for a couple months of mortgage when you look at the balance sheets. That kinda means the work isn’t real, right? Look at the dollars. Look at the engagements.It was easier to run away and believe that it didn’t matter, dig? Yeah, it’s sad. Oh shoot. I kept it on the personal, not the universal, or at least the platform-wide.We live, increasingly, in a world and on planes that are not of our own design. That are there for the financial benefit of others. Sure, some folks spin that podcast into a second line of income. That’s the promise, right? Just keep plugging away. You’ll make it.I stopped reviewing books and comics because I decided that it was better to create the work talked about than to submit to the discourse (aside from say, in-person conversation where you’re buying the first round, but I promise I’ll reciprocate) where the stakes are weirdly unreal (but don’t tell that to the college student who dared reject that author’s work for award consideration, or for a woman online, or a sex worker, or anyone who gets the fact that they’re not in the current hegemony). That’s the battlefield. I’ve luckily been insulated. I’m well aware of that.Anyways, I guess you can throw me in the pile with Neil Postman and Gerry Mander and those other cranks who dare study the water that we’re all swimming around in. The platform isn’t neutral. The platforms aren’t neutral. And where I’ve allowed them to steer me hasn’t been a healthy one. I understand I’ll have little choice but to interact with it at some time. Maybe I’ll join the sideshow as the last dude who refuses to put an Alexa in his house or to refuse of that little cell phone and intra-retinal display like Gibson put into THE PERIPHERAL. Or I’ll be a sell-out because I can’t walk away 100%. Or I’ll just rejoin it when I can keep it to my terms. But I’m not there right now.And I’m not interested in having the platform dictate terms to me.I thank you for indulging me should you have read this far. I can only hope to continue to earn such confidence on your part in the future.

FULL BLEED: FEAR IS A MAN'S BEST FRIEND

I really was better off in this business when I didn't think about things and instead just figured I could write. It's weird to bodily, wholly understand that, on a level best described as physical, if not anxiety-inducing.So, yeah, I'm Having a Time working on this second book. Even though it's not my second book, closer to what the tenth that I've started (have several ones I gave a college try on before giving up on them, years ago.) Shocked that it doesn't get any easier. But I suppose I'm just a weirdo. I've known that for a long, long time.But fear? Yeah, that's new. Suppose it comes from what, six years of being in a near-perpetual state of alert. I'm not just talking about living through the Current Situation, but life even before 2016 was draining and fearful and largely dread-driven, and while those events resolved themselves as good as can be expected, I barrelled into writing QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS while I was on my last nerve.And I never really realized it at the time. Took awhile. Never addressed it after, either. That whole period is sitting like a benign tumor, fine so long as I don't poke at it.Still the fact is that I was able to get past it and pull out something from nothing more than nerve and ego and frustrated output. So I told my editor I could do it without thinking about it. Sure. Why not?The problem now is that I've been allowed to think about it. Enough to completely change the branding/name and scope of my next set of projects. I've generated a huge bible that nobody but me will ever read. I've managed to overthink the place of magic in the world and what genre I'm even writing (ah, but that's a trap of its own making, right?) I've spent too much time thinking about things and outlining, and that's a good way to kill a book dead.But I did get to explore a couple different looks for what was once SMOKETOWN and is now NEON ABYSSAL. Let's take a quick look.Neither of these have been approved. Hell, the name hasn't been approved. Oh well. I can come up with others. It only took... uh... a little while...So the other thing I'm doing now is going back through my process on writing QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS. And I suppose as close as I can get to the inception of that project is this, the short outline/pitch. This is what I sent to my editor after he asked if I wanted to write a longer piece, maybe or maybe not set in the same universe as the story "Chunked" that I'd written for the anthology TOMORROW'S CTHULHU and submitted blind. I'm still shocked that I managed to slip in with that one, honestly.I don't have the one sentence pitch around, or the original original idea. QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS was a synthesis of a bunch of different ideas I'd had, some straight cosmic horror/fantasy and some in critique of the whole affair (protip: "Chunked" is a savage assault on the Chulhu fiction thing, sort of an OG cyberpunk - in ethos, not aesthetic - take on the subgenre.) I suppose THE DROWNING CHORUS is no different. Part celebratory and part yeah I'm gonna do something different and you're not my dad.But I had to remember how I started with nothing and turned it into 40k words (originally slated at 30k, and I believe, a serial, which is why it was broken up into chunks -- I'm glad it wasn't, because the below structure would not work out in reality.) So here's the notes that started me on that path.MAJOR SPOILERS FOR QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS FOLLOW. So do typos and other garbage. I'm not going to fix them.Note that some of this stuff did not come to pass and some of it never will. The story changes in the writing.--QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWSSETTINGLate 1980s, in a Los Angeles that is feeling the slow seep of unimagined powers and alien gods making themselves manifest.OVERVIEWCait MacReady is an artist, writer and (secretly a) forger, primarily of occult texts and other lost books. She's previously sold to professors, collectors and criminals, but her latest sale is different. This work, THE SMOKING CODEX, has attracted the attention of No Tomorrows, criminal adherents of a god that doesn't yet exist (but wants to.) It has somehow spoken to their cult Queen, Ariella Gutierrez, and needs the Codex so that it can be willed into existence. 1When one of Cait's long-time fences (and one-time romance) Rico goes missing, Cait realizes that No Tomorrows used him to find her in an effort to push her into selling the Codex to them. Cait is tracked down by the cult, and invited later to meet with their Queen, Ariella. No Tomorrows is both an occult and ordinary crime organization, though the cult trappings make it easier to intimidate any competition. Cait refuses and is given a clue that she can't, but maybe she should ask Rico what she should do.TURN - Rico turns up murdered in his home, eyes removed and ritual suggested in his death and murder scene.2The police who are investigating the messy death of Rico check into Cait's connection with him, leaving her a suspect. The cult makes plans to take the Codex, but only after it has been finished (Cait's cover being that it is making it way through sources to her.) They don't care whether or not Cait is alive in this, but the cult leader, Ariella, recognizes that Cait has a special connection with the book, though she is unclear what it is. TURN - Reveal that the Smoking Codex is a forged text, one that Cait herself is writing. It can't be real, or shouldn't.3Cait is stuck between the cult and the police. She has no choice but to meet with Ariella and see what, if anything can be salvaged of her life and freedom. Ariella shows Cait the power of her belief and after this, Cait is left questioning not only the book, but the nature of reality itself. The gang after her worships a god that only exists in a book that she herself is writing. How can this be? Is this something that can be controlled and turned to her own escape?TURN - What she is writing may be coming true and what does this mean about reality?4Before she can answer, Cait is attacked by the cult (including a thing out of nightmare and the pages of the Codex). Only by threatening to destroy the Codex does she escape, along with a sacrificial knife made of white obsidian. Suggestion that this is another branch of the cult, but at the moment, nothing is important other than keeping herself alive.TURN - She is confronted with actual evidence of a monster out of the pages of the Codex itself. If this is real then what else is?5With the police and the cult after her, she tries to slip out Los Angeles. She knows she should destroy the Codex (but she finds it offers its own attraction to her, especially since she doesn't fully understand her power over it.) Cait realizes that she can't escape the power that her own imagination has unleashed and has to see this through, has to see if this is all real or not. She takes the Codex to No Tomorrows themselves to see this through one way or another.TURN - Cait is in the hands of the cult and maybe she's beginning to believe herself.6With the Codex, they plan on conjuring their god, the Veil of Countless Eyes into being. Ariella is using this opportunity to just to raise a god, but to use its power against the true head of the organization so she can ascend in both her imagined celestial throne and that of the No Tomorrows organization. Cait struggles through the shock of this experience and her own attempted sacrifice to turn the tables and instead feed Ariella to the Veil.Denouement 1Cait can't bring herself to peer under Ariella's veils to see the truth of her transformation. The manifestation of the Veil could be explained away, perhaps, but not this.Denouement 2The King of No Tomorrows (until now unseen, but responsible for the attempt on Cait's life in order to stop Ariella's plan) surveys the wreckage and Ariella's fall, noting that he owes Cait a debt that he perhaps doesn't fully understand, but will honor. He disappears beforeDenouement 3The cops, including the murder investigators, come to mop up. Cait is badly, perhaps fundamentally shaken, but still whole. What can't be fully explained is swept away, but if nothing else, Cait is responsible for this arm of No Tomorrows being cut off, which gets her at least some leeway.But we're in a world that is left in uncertain shadow now.--All in all less than 900 words, but still, there was enough there there to keep rolling. I can't lay claim as to it being perfectly paced. I tend to write stuff as it makes sense to me, and while I like narrative ficiton (I know, so basic) I'm not a master of the tight plot.I'm sure that I have a lot more than that in the outline for THE DROWNING CHORUS as it stands right now. That may not be a good thing. But it's probably enough to start running with, even if I don't have all the answers or even most of them other than a sense of direction and vibe that I'm reaching for in the book. It's just time to sit down and start the train rolling downhill and then to jump the tracks, powering through the industrial suburbs as it gains speed like the Chicxulub meteor hitting the atmosphere before pulling into the station.It's just a matter of hitting that unconscious voice, and the only way to do that is to sit down and start working.Fine if you can keep the fear out of your mind.And yeah, I didn't even mention what, exactly, I was afraid of, did I? If you've written a thing, you probably know. That you're gonna reach for it and there won't be anything there. That what you said you could do, you simply can't. That the world was right to have kicked your career to the curb for the better part of a lifetime. You know. The usual stuff. And none of which, I'll add, is necessarily without basis in reality. Especially that last part. Which is why I can't allow the dubious pleasures of thinking about it. Pleasure? You bet. You get to shirk responsibility. The world won't care so why should you? Just give it up. There's a freedom in that powerlessness, isn't there? I mean, from a certain perspective there is.Yeah.

FULL BLEED: THE QUALITY THAT GOES IN BEFORE THE NAME GOES ON

So, remember last week when I pointed out that my current book needed a new title because THE DROWNING CITY was taken (albeit indirectly). And then that got me thinking about the working title for the entire series that I was working on, a series that started with QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS.Right now, that name is ABYSSAL. The code name for all six plus novels. Really it's a name that's supposed to encompass the setting more than just the characters, though I do have a stable central cast set up. In short, I'm conceiving of it as I'd conceive of a comic book series: a central setting and cast with an umbrella title to cover the whole works. Now, I'm oldschool. I'm conceiving of a series without a definite end. That's a no-no now. Nowaways, you come up with a short arc and cross your fingers that it gets to continue. But that's another talk for another time.Now, coming up with a name, particularly a short, punchy name, to encompass a whole series is a daunting task. Even worse, is my deliberate aim to mix two disparate genres/modes while doing this. It's hard enough to just pick one genre and stick with it, having the name reflect that. Effectively doubling that? Yeah, that's dumb. Don't be dumb like me.Granted, I have a lot of practice in this. My first comics series was a horror/western book called STRANGEWAYS. And when I did that, I learned that you piss off not only one but two sets of genre purists and never the twain shall meet sorts of folks. "Hey, you got a werewolf in this western!" "Hey, you got a western in this werewolf story!" Whereas I want to explore the space common between the two, most readers want to keep them disparate. I learned my lesson with that.Only I didn't. Because I'm either stubborn, cantankerous or stupid.With QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS, I clearly staked out territory in both crime/noir (though I'm hesitant to use 'noir' as a prose descriptor, since it's more appropriately used to cover a set of aesthetics/mood in film) and horror/fantasy. And I'm *really* hesitant to use horror as a descriptor. I'll write about that some day and I'm sure that my doing so will result in me being asked to leave the horror clubhouse forever. Additionally, twenty-year-old me is as appalled as anyone that I'm writing a thing and willingly calling it fantasy. Contemporary/urban fantasy was not much of a thing (aside from obvious exceptions like say LAST CALL by Tim Powers and a whole range of work by Jim Blaylock, at least in my orbit.)So here I am breaking all kinds of my own rules. But yet, in doing so, I'm doing my best to stay true to the nature of the work. And if I can't be brave enough to do that, then what the hell am I doing even writing? Oh, I know. I could tick things off the checklist and write suqarely to a set of genre expectations. I could do that, only I'm apparently not capable of doing so.Yeah. Stubborn. Crime and fantasy. Street-level crime and urban fantasy if you want to drill deeper, but let's not. I'd rather let the work be itself. And if you're wondering who I got to be broken like this, consider that my mom wrote SF that read more like fantasy and ultimately pioneered (among others) the whole school of writing known as romantic suspense, which is, you guessed it, a combination of romance/mystery/suspense which definitely breaks the old rules and makes something else out of them. She wrote something satisfying to her and made it work. I can do no less than follow her example.Now, you'd think that people would be happy about this, about widening the palette and putting more pieces in the toolbox. Lemme tell ya, that's not the case. There's plenty of quite vocal people who are only insterested in maintaining the existing boundaries and making sure that nobody climbs over the walls and brings invasive ideas along with them. Life's too short and I'm honestly bored to tears about discussion of what is or is not fantasy or horror or science fiction or a goddamned western. Bring me on a panel to talk about this stuff and I'll do everything I can to tear down the walls between them. Then someone will bring up the "promise to the reader" and hell no. Honestly, it's okay to shake things up some. Trying to give the people what the writers think they want has led to shelves after shelves of very samey stuff. Go down to Barnes and Noble and check it out for yourself.So I can only do what I'm going to do. But I still need a name to call it all. Short, punchy, evocative of both mystery and fantasy and unreality. Easy, right?I've been circling around this for more than a week. Here's the original name, which is being abandoned mostly because there's a TBN series of the same name that barely showed up in a Google search. But, let's be frank, the last association I want in this world is to be with those grifting preachers and their money-extractive network. Nope.It's a nice name. Fitting, even. I wish I could hold onto it. But that's not in the cards. And yes, there's a historical connotation to it that's not appropriate for me to use. It's not my story to tell. Though I hope that others actually do it.Which leaves me with a problem to solve. I've worked harder on this than any other name for any other project that I've ever worked on. Usually titles are easy (or they're very difficult.) We know which this one is. And I have a few candidates, but none of them really do the trick just yet. I suppose I'll be forced into one that emphasizes the weird/fantasy side of things than the crime, but I'll fight for that.Oh, and I do have a name for the follow on to QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS. It's pretty close to the original, loses a little but maybe gains a lot. The publisher hasn't officially announced it, but I can here, to you, my tens of fans and readers.It's called THE DROWNING CHORUS. More later.