Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 21

FULL BLEED: THIS BRIGHT MANIFEST

Summer is withering in place as we speak, barely able to push out an eighty-two degree day here, out in the foothills where I'm used to ninety for this time of year and the kids telling me that I really should be picking them up closer to school. Instead, it's shade that's a little too cool and sun that's perfect to walk in. I'm expecting a last thrashing heatwave, like a fish that's been hauled in but isn't off the hook just yet, flopping around the bottom of the boat until it just gives up from exhaustion.Being consumed by preparation for Rose City Comic Con coming up in a couple of weeks. Worldcon was just a couple before that. I really don't have much to report on that, other than listening to the folks who came up from all over Mexico to talk about the SF experience from their part of the world. You know in Mexico they don't really differentiate between SF and fantasy? It must be nice. Just call it all 'fantastic' and let readers figure it out for themselves. Because maintaining the borders between all other genres gets exhausting enough as it is. I've long given up on it, particularly since my instincts have me writing between them as it is.But then time to market books comes around and I have to tiptoe around things. All the stuff I'm writing now might have cosmic horror as background elements, but I wouldn't pretend to call it that. So I just try to make it individual and see where that gets me. (About a thirty percent response rate when writing to blogs/podcasts, if I'm being generous.)Here's the front and back of the postcard I'm printing up in advance of Rose City, something to attract the eye and get people to come over to the Broken Eye Books table and maybe pick up a copy of QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS for their trouble. Hey, a guy can dream, right? If anything, it'll be another piece of convention swag that gets recycled when you clean up your room. Maybe it'll get pinned into a wall and inspire someone. Maybe it's just a beautiful thing, you know? There's something to be said for that (and it takes a hell of a lot less time to make a virtual neon sculpture than it does to write a novella or novel.)But read that copy. You'd buy that, right?Of course you would. Even if it doesn't fall into anyone's categories, no matter how broad or narrow.As mentioned, I'll split my time at Rose City between the Broken Eye Books table (not sure where it's going to be) and walking around. Maybe I'll be able to sit in at an artist's alley table with one of my friends, but don't depend on that. My hope is that you'll be able to pick up your own copy of QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS in paper ahead of the December release date (ebooks not available until then, either.) As for shows after that this year? Looks unlikely, but if anything moves, I'll let you all know here.Plotting out the next thing I plan on writing, which has the tentative title CINDY SAYS FOLLOW. That may or may not change. It also takes place in the same setting as QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS, and yes, you'll see some familiar faces, but only in the peripheries. Of course, none of you have even read QUEEN so you'd just be confused if I talked about it so I won't. I'm still trying to figure out what kind of book it even is. I know. That's a dumb question to ask so early on in the process. Hell, I didn't know what QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS was until I got about two-thirds of the way through it. I mean, I knew what it was supposed to be, what I'd pitched it as. But that's not always what a thing is, you dig?All that said, I need to spend some more time and focus on it simply because I've done enough marketing and artwork/layout in the right now to make my head hurt. And more marketing awaits. I know. It's supposed to be fun and no. It's really not. I suspect I feel this way because I'm significantly older than the rest of my "just landing writing gigs" cohort. I'm just not embracing my brand identity hard enough. Not riding the wave onto the very far end of the long tail.Anyways, let's play out a last song for summer and turn it up loud.Open up to the welcome cool and dry that is fall, all leaves and dirt and harvest.

FULL BLEED: MADE OF LIGHT LIKE THE REST OF US

Yeah, I know. I've been off for a little while. Late summer gets crazy. I know. it's not really late summer yet, but my kids just started back to school which means I can think about getting back into a sort of regular work schedule.Let's see. First big news is that THE QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS is due for a December release (but you can pre-order now.) Here's a flyer you can get from me at Worldcon if you can find me there, commemorating the event.In theory, copies should be available for purhcase at the Rose City Comic Con in September. I'll be there, either way, wandering or at the Broken Eye Books table signing copies of QUEEN or TOMORROW'S CTHULHU. Hopefully can firm up plans on planned but not yet announced things there as well.I should be giving this stuff its own post and will be talking it up more as the date approaches. I might even talk about the promotion process and what I've come across in it. Someone will probably talk me out of that, though. It has, however, put me on uneasy footing with the genre that I'm supposed to be writing in, so maybe I can talk about this for a bit.See, most of my published work has been labeled "horror." I mean, squishy monsters and werewolves and vampires and bad things happening. What else is it supposed to be? Looking at what I'm coming across on horror-labeled blogs and the like, I'm not seeing much crossover at all. Ultimately, at least for me, horror is fantasy with a specific set of outcomes or vibes or what have you. Now sure, it's not nearly the same thing as something like your high fantasy epics, or even your grimdark fantasias (though I'd argue that grimdark wants to be horror, if not in outcome then in atmosphere.)But looking at my work, whether it's STRANGEWAYS or QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS or SMOKETOWN, and while there's elements of horror fiction in all of them, they're just that. Elements. I'm not particularly into extremity for its own or any other sake (so I'm not going to end up writing splatter, sorry). And, more fundamentally, I'm not really interested in reaching for the mega-downer ending, which ends up coloring the whole work no matter what comes before. So yeah, I don't have much of anything to prove in that regard. I don't want to write a book that you put down and say "Oh god, CRUSHING, bro."Look, life, plain ordinary everyday life is crushing. It's crushing in ways that you can't predict. Sometimes you can't even safely contemplate those ways without going insane. Only abstraction keeps you from running into traffic because it's crazy and just doesn't matter. That nothing is planned, it's all ad hoc. Yeah, thanks, I got the memo the first time. Even the "it's all a cosmic joke" thing doesn't really work for me. But then neither does calculated edgelord-ism."So what do you write, dude?"Excellent question that doesn't really matter. Genres matter for Amazon categories and bookstore shelves and marketing. Granted, I'm supposed to be marketing (and doing a damn fine job of it, huyck!) so this is something I should be concerned with. Maybe even tooling my output towards, right? You put me in a corner, point a knife at my gut and demand an answer and you'll probably get "Fantasy," said with a cold smile on my face. Hey, you asked, not me. So now I have to qualify it as "dark fantasy" because it's not all sunshine and rainbows, but I'm not likely to serve up an ending where DARKNESS REIGNS, WALLOW IN THE KNOWING OF THIS THING, MORTAL, THAT ALL YOU LOVE AND CARE FOR IS MEANINGLESSNESS CLINGING TO DUST MOTES IN THE VOID HAHAHAHA.Sure, I'll type that in caps to be funny. And yet, it's not a joke. There's a whole audience for that, a whole market for it. Just not my audience, not my market.I'd rather offer readers an experience, you know? An experience with ups and downs, loss and recovery, not everybody getting what they want but maybe what they need (just geez, never come out and say that in the text because come on, who needs that?). Put it in an intriguing setting, even if it's a place you've lived in all your life. Every place can be weird if you put it together right. But that doesn't necessarily mean lurking horror. Carcosa but wonderful, right?And this isn't to swing that pendulum all the way over to the Delerlethian "Oh, the Outer Gods are kind of our buddies and the Great Old Ones are eeeeeevil" and that whole limb grafted onto the mythos. Or hell, even bothering to have a codified mythos to adopt – geez, for forbidden and unknowable things, they're sure catalogued exhaustively. (He said, cradling his copy of PETERSEN'S FIELD GUIDE TO CTHULHU MONSTERS.) I mean, the heavy hitters in the mythos sure seem like anything but indifferent, right? Always getting in humanity's business, messing with things. I knew even giving them names was gonna be trouble. Then you get to defining and codifying and pretty soon you're down to plush Cthulhu sitting on your shelf.But hey, the Outer Gods are made of light like the rest of us. Doesn't make them your best pals. I mean, a hungry alligator will still eat you alive. A scorpion will still sting you if you piss it off. Plenty threating in nature already. Have you heard about gravity? It's a mother.Come on, though, even the concept of galactic squish monsters don't compare to, oh let's say cancer. Hell, in comparison, they're entertaining and thrilling. But that's what fiction's supposed to do. Yeah. Fiction.So circling back to where we started. I once said the difference between horror and SF (and fantasy that matter) was that horror was an actual destination in fiction. That's probably as close as I can nail it down. Horror is that down note, whether it be brought about by dread or violence, consumption by cosmic entities or a festered personality, by the resurrected dead or a five-year-old with a knife. So sure, read my work as horror if you like. If that's how you found it, great. I'm all for people enjoying things. Read it as urban fantasy (though you're going to have a hard time finding any of the Usual Suspects in it). Read it as magical realism. Read it as literary fiction (I double dog dare you.)But please, just read it as an experience.

GASLANDIA - "A Fifth World"

Archiving this from the front page news, as I gotta make room for bigger and better news there.---Happy new year, albeit belatedly. Biggest new news is as follows. The GASLANDIA anthology, featuring my short story "A Fifth World," is now available (as an ebook.) Follow the link to obtain to learn more. I'd say it's for sale immediately, but that doesn't appear to be the case.UPDATE - It's available at Amazon: Click right here to order for your Kindle device.As for the story itself, it's about the inability to find a place for one's self. This one just happens to be set in an alternate past, where FDR was deposed after a coup and the USA is at war with itself, thinking things were just in the mopping-up phase. That breeds overconfidence.I'm including a sample of the first few pages to let you figure out if you want it or not. Hint: you want it.---God’s always hungry. Didn’t take very long for me to figure that one out. He made up the Heaven and the Earth and it didn’t take him more than that seven days to start eating it up. Nothing would satisfy him.Of course, I’m talking about the god of my father, the god of the white man. My mother’s people don’t have anyone like that. I can’t tell you which is wiser because I’m on a path in-between those two. This is something I have a lot of time to think about, given over to the fact that my legs don’t work very well, so getting around takes me longer than most.But I can remember a time when they used to. That was back in Arizona under skies that were wide and I could play in lands that were bounded at first by the four sacred peaks of my people, and later by the four walls of my room when polio made a friend of me and like some friends, took me down the wrong path. Then it was to Los Angeles and the factories and neighborhoods there. People making machines to fight a war and the shifts went around the clock, so I never saw my father much and my mother had all the time in the world to teach me the language of her people, the Diné, which some people call the Navajo and most just call Indians.But see, I’m between these worlds. I get time to think about this as I approach the outer walls of the landing field. And there, visible past the hurricane fencing and guard shacks and repair sheds, sits the servant of the hungriest god of all. They call it Current of Eagles, owing to the electricity that powers it and the freedom that it brings by way of the Great Persuader mounted on its bow.Imagine a five-pointed star, only make it as big as several city blocks. Like that whole cluster of downtown LA. Now seat a sort of steel dome chased with chrome and antennas at each of the points. These are the engines, the repulsives. They turn gravity off and let this whole thing lift impossibly up, across the entirety of the Legion States of America if need be. Then it positions the Great Persuader and . . .And I often wonder about this path that I’ve been forced to walk.***The first thing that hits me as I approach is the hum of the repulsive engines. I am old enough to remember hearing thunder at night as it came across the valley and hills and hit hard like stone even though it could only barely be heard. The repulsives are just the same, not sound but sensation, a bad weight across the middle and in your hollows. It gets worse as I come to the crew intake. My legs and the metal around them feel as strange as always and I’m forced to concentrate to keep them from working wrong. I can kick a hole in a brick wall with these electro-braces, but I have to move like a turtle so I don’t injure myself.The engines and their electromagnetic magic suspend gravity and weight so long as they run. I could move the Current of Eagles with a single hand if I wanted to. A ship wider across than a football field and made with a graceful swoop and span of steel that weighed countless tons. And I could move it with my hand now.Want to read the rest? You know what to do. Plus you get a bunch of other great stories for the low price of three bucks.

FULL BLEED: CARCOSA (IS HERE), DREAMLAND (IS NOT)

I'm doing this week's entry a little early. Going on vacation and I need to get some stuff out of the way first. Attempting a reset. We'll see if it takes.I did want to get back to a thing I've teased a couple times last week before I forget all about it, though. Wanted to talk about Carcosa and horror and fantasy and the spaces between. Mostly because they're all territory I stuck my toe into with the last piece of short fiction I wrote (and probably under-wrote, but hopefully will have a chance to develop it a bit more fully. If not, fuck it, I'll just write it as I think it should be written and throw it into the Howling Pit.)But yeah, Carcosa. A name/place invoked originally by Bierce, hijacked by Chambers (and many others, given the way the Lovecraftian horror genre works – remind me to talk about this phenomena in relation to superhero comic universe franchises and early fandom all kind of dovetail together.) I honestly can't recall if HPL himself used it as a place/name and am too lazy on a Sunday morning to go look it up. (Quick research indicates he did, but only as a referred place – remember, HPL borrowed as well as the rest of that whole circle.)It doesn't matter if he did. There were many Carcosas, cursed and horrible cities that were the final destinations of the unwary, repositories of damnation, alien and Other. As was Bierce's Carcosa, not necessarily a city but a geography, more appropriately a purgatory. Carcosa was a place like ours, but wrong and therefore horrible. R'Leyh and Iram of the Pillars and the cities of both the Old Ones and the Great Race of Yith, all of these places are recognized as cities by HPL, but cities of the damned due to otherness. And sure, let's throw Red Hook in there, Innsmouth as well (though both started as human places overrun by the terrible Other and we'll leave it at that, as these are well documented.)But Bierce's Carcosa was like our world, land and sky and stone. Its simple existence, was terrible. Because it *was* and you could find yourself in it. It was just Wrong, capital W. Like the Other capital O.But what if Carcosa wasn't terrible on its face? What if it was beautiful? What if it was just like home only a little skewed? A thousand little differences adding up to a different place but essentially the same (though you'd lose every Trivial Pursuit game you played.) Is that a place that is welcoming because it's almost home or just another way to pick out the differences, and define a thing by that which it is not? Both, maybe.Anyways, I wanted this to be a guiding force in what I was writing. Which makes my work fantasy and not horror (a difference that is in the eye of the beholder and emotional destination as much as anything, though simple nihilism is often substituted for horror and they are certainly not the same thing. Horror is hard, nihilism is lazy.)Funny that HPL is not recalled more for the Dreamland books, though, which are straight fantasy and not the science-fiction/horror hybrid that he's known for. Or maybe it's not weird at all. Dreamland was strange by its very existence, but not repulsive, not horrific. It was simply Another, not the Other. Does this make sense? Maybe it doesn't.Wonder or terror? Awe or fear? Revelation or Apocalypse? (Hint: they're not the same, well actually those last two are basically the same thing only we've taken Apocalypse to mean the end of everything and not simply revealing a hidden truth. Or is it that the truth revealed is so devastating?)Yeah, chew on that one for awhile.

FULL BLEED: THE GREAT AND DURABLE LIE

Marketing sucks. There. I said it. Daydreaming is great. Research is great. Writing is great. Editing is something that I do but I'm no good at. Posting updates to my blog and to social media is not so great but whatever.But marketing sucks. It's the worst, the most awful job in writing.You wanna know why? Because it has nothing to do with writing. It is wholly removed from the experience, both on the creation and consumption end. See, writing a story (and we'll just stick with that example for convenience's sake) is only half of things. The story itself is nothing more than render instructions for an experience in the mind of the reader, and maybe even in the heart, if we're to invoke that dichotomy.The reader makes the experience. The writer is the guide, but since it's co-creation, the outcomes can be unpredictable. This, however, is something that we all better be ready to deal with. You can't dictate the experience that the reader has. And if you can, maybe you overwrote it? But some people like that sort of thing. Me, I prefer impressionistic writing that's evocative and not overworked, got a looseness to it, space for the reader to sketch the rest of the background in.Marketing, however, is about a false experience. One that hasn't yet happened, and in actuality may never. Like when you see the preview for the movie and you realize that it was sold one way and it presents utterly differently (thanks, expectation of the marketplace.) Not-so-coincidentally, this comes to the heart of my problem with genre, in that it is a manufacture of experience expectation ahead of the actual experience. IE, you're being sold on a thing being X when it may in fact be Y. Pretty soon, you only want that X thing. Pretty soon, people are producing X-like things because that's what people want.But imitation of success is no new thing, right? Even when the thing that's a success is itself an imitation of a number of other things (okay, a synthesis, if we're being kinder.)Okay, back to marketing, and veering away from the sorts of unsavory unintended consequences that marketing has on the creation process. Let's just stick with you've made a thing and now you have to get people to pay attention to it. But how's that work? I mean, what you're really trying to do is to promote consumption of the item in question. Now it used to be that people consumed entertainment for fun. However, in the world of the Howling Pit, in many cases, consumption has been tied to identity. And wow, is that ever a recipe for an atmosphere so toxic that chlorine seems like fresh mountain air by comparison.So writers aren't tasked with building audiences now, but with building clubhouses. Boom. Author as product. Right there. Star in your own podcast. Write for your own blog (ahem). Build up that wacky and lovable persona in social media. Always be closing. Writing isn't the end goal anymore, but just another way to build that hashtag brand. Mash the subscribe button. Set your RSS readers for…whoops, can't do that anymore. Don't forget that Facebook presence, since that's how lots of people interface with the entirety of the internet now. Oh well.And all of this? 100% not writing. Oh sure, writing ad copy and creating a fictional persona to execute online, that's writing. But it's not the writing you're here for, right? All of this stuff to convince people of the kind of experience they can expect, when we all know that's a dubious proposition anyways. But still we keep doing this stuff. We keep paying for Google ads and appearing on blogs like its 2003. We're all hoping for just one more set of eyeballs to linger on things and willing to promise all manner of experiences to get there. By hook or by crook.So yeah, these are durable lies. If you prefer, they're magic incantations we're undertaking as pleas for success. Recast it as chaos magick if you like. But you gotta know that the marketing is just that. Marketing. Hey, I'm all for letting people know that the book exists and the can pre-order it. Just don't expect me to construct a persona around how many times I can tweet "buy my book" in a day. It's exhausting.THE QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS will not be a ticket to conversation or to the cool kids club. (I was about the uncoolest kid in school from elementary to high school, even among my group of outcast friends.) It's no proof of bona fides. It doesn't desecrate the corpse of Lovecraft. It won't rewrite the rules of genre. It's not the latest chapter in the world-wide smash franchise hit.It's a book. It might even be a weird little book, filled with all kinds of the things that I wanted to read about and have a good excuse to look up. Sure. It's that. But I can't tell you, other than that, what kind of book it is. I can't tell you what the experience is going to be, though I can guess at it at least. I can tell you it's coming out and where it's available from. I can tell you that in most cases I'll be happy to appear on your podcast to talk about the book, but if you're into selling the whole writer's journey jive, you might be disappointed. But that's okay. Some lies are more durable than others.I wonder if it's yet safe to talk about the biggest lie. Which is that, anyways? Overnight success? Transcending genre? The guilty pleasure? That of consumption based identity and how the fan really creates the work that generates success (which is not the same as the work being co-created by the reader/viewer.) Or is it the simple fact that all the money that gets spent on marketing things like books and comics doesn't actually move the needle all that much?I mean, let's be honest. I can write some copy that makes outrageous promises for QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS and decide that I'm going to spend ten thousand bucks on advertising. And all that is me literally paying people to say things. Or paying to have my words get a bigger reach. Assuming that it actually reaches any number of people and isn't just rolled into the background noise of the Howling Pit. Of course the even bigger lie is that marketing tells you what a thing is. Nonsense. Marketing tells you how a thing wants to be perceived. (Freshman media studies spoiler.)Coke isn't friendship. But it wants you to believe that it is, that the feeling will hit you when you crack open that can. The advertising isn't the thing. The marketing isn't the thing. It's not even a perception of a thing. It's just trying to shape that.But don't you dare skip on marketing your wares. Not today. Not in this moment.

FULL BLEED: IT MUST HAVE JUST BEEN A CARDBOARD CUTOUT OF A MAN

Yeah, I didn't do a new content post last week. The Howling Pit went hungry. I'd tell you how many people missed out on something wonderful, but I don't look at my metrics. That's a short path to insanity. I mean, talk about prostrating yourself before the bitch queen Success, right? DH Lawrence was right.But yeah, I'll try to do better. Summers are weird.I dunno, am I supposed to talk up things that I worked on that may never see publication? That digs into the whole Success Advice branding I'm supposed to build up here. Hell, nobody wants to hitch their wagon to anything other than a rising star. That's the joke. And I like nothing more than undermining a dominant paradigm, particularly when it's a toxic one. So let's go for it.Spent the last couple weeks writing a thing called "Cindy Says" for an upcoming anthology of the urban weird. I wasn't asked, so I'm thinking it's maybe 50-50 that it gets in (even though my track record for this particular publisher has been pretty good, all things considered.) Originally, they were asking for a 7500-word short story. Which is fine, but it's about 30% shy of where I usually run short stories out to.And let's be honest, they're a quirky form. You'd think it's easy to do. Not particularly for me. See, the thing I've learned is that my natural form ends up being a novella, in more ways than one. A short story has to have a conceptual hook, almost feel like a joke in final delivery, everything winding up to a punchline. That's really the essence of it for me. Not necessarily the O. Henry twist that upends everything (although that's certainly a good approach to be remembered and make an impact with.) Even if it's not quite the everything-is-wrong twist, it has to deliver a kind of thing that novels aren't necessarily expected to deliver, except perhaps as an act turn maybe. Maybe.Short stories aren't novels, or even novellas (novellae?). So they're something I have to actually work at. I know. Oh boo hoo. I still write them because there's outlets for them, but I'm the first to admit that I'm not very good at it. Still, I forge ahead.As for "Cindy Says," I wanted to break down the process and aims a little bit. Nobody's reading this anyways so I can say whatever I want and let folks look behind the curtain. Seeing the pulsing guts like looking down after the zombies have you pinned down and started doing what they do (nevermind that human teeth and hands aren't made to rip skin and flesh like that.)First thing? Germ of the story. I imagine this is where most folks would come up with the conceptual twist that they're going to build things on, have every single thing move towards, become an unstoppable juggernaut, an army of warriors all focused on the same point, able to penetrate any armor and triumph.Yeah, I didn't do that. Whoops.Instead, I just had the idea (can't tell you what it is because then why would you read the story, duh), so I knew the basic setting and where to start turning over rocks to find stuff. I did this for awhile. Probably too long and we'll get to that later. Suffice it to say that "Cindy Says" takes place in just about the same time and geography as QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS, but about five years before, give or take. Hell, I'm already hip deep in the world, should keep working with it, right? But I did need to nail down a lot of stuff, make sure the geography worked (thanks Google Maps!) and let stuff simmer in the back of my head.For a couple weeks, while I sifted through my own photos and research photos and websites and the history books within reach. And like any good magpie, pretty soon, I have a very pretty pile of shiny things. But that's just a pile. It's not a house or bridge or any kind of structure you want to name in the service of this particular metaphor. It's just a pile of shiny things. Just like setting isn't a story, you dig?So after a couple weeks of doing this in an on/off fashion (it is summer after all and the house still needs to be maintained and kids need to be kept from burning it all down) and it's about time to actually write out a synopsis, AKA pulling something from nothing. Sometimes I give myself little graphic design exercises here too, just coming up with logos for things or places, try to help orient myself visually and in time. It's also good for stalling.(fun fact - the entire sequence that this was designed for was cut: whoops.) All that done, I sit down and actually write the synopsis. Not think about writing it or pretend I'm writing it or talk to myself about writing it, but putting it down on paper. Yeah, scary, right? Thing is just because it's on paper doesn't mean that it's set in stone. Don't panic. Something might occur to you and you can change it around, just be consistent.Let's keep in mind that the target length for this story is 7500 words. That may sound daunting, but it's not. It's not a drop in the bucket, there's a little room to work with, but you gotta stay focused.My synopsis came out at, uh, 1700 words. And that was telegraphing the last two thirds in an ever-sketchier manner.Yeah, this isn't going to work. And I've run into the dreaded word limit several times before. Like every time I do this.But I start writing anyways. What am I gonna do? There's no way there's room for this to all unfold. I think about begging for just 1500 more words. Maybe I could make it work.This is also a dumb idea. Don't do this.So let's review real quick. Say 7-9 days of research and background plotting, off and on. I couldn't tell you how many hours. But a few. Another maybe three hours if I'm being generous, of writing and unwriting and rewriting various parts of the synopsis. I'd say there's more or less three acts to the thing at this point. Three actual acts.Sitting down to write, on Friday, I get rolling. A good day on a novel for me is maybe ten pages over 3-4 hours, but if I go past, I'll often start with a low tank the next day unless there's no other goddamn choice. Rolling. Rolling pretty well, actually. Fourteen pages over about six hours with some breaks. Dinner. Go back and do a little more, brings it close to sixteen.I'm also maybe 45% of the way through the synopsis. I have somewhere around 5000 words, give or take. So yeah, about 30% over length. And let's talk cuts for a moment. I'm lucky if I can cut 5-8% of length, and that's if I was really sloppy. I don't lean on very long descriptive passages (and probably fall short in that regard, honestly). I try not to put in stuff that doesn't need to be there, at least to me. But I'm a weirdo.I get up the next morning and look at where things are. Not anywhere good, really. I mean, what I've written is pretty solid, at least I think so (that's what they all say, I know.) But there's no way there's going to be space to do what the story needs at this point. And I really should say, what the novella needs. Because that's what it is.So I do the unthinkable. I adapt. Weird, right?I look at what I have and say "where do I end this to hit the kind of elegiac note of realization that might make this work as a short story?" And I stop it there. Then I decide that I can do the stuff on Saturday that I was going to have to blow off because I was previously going to be trying to whittle stuff out as I wrote to make the impossible fit into the limit.Then I come back to things on Sunday and rewrite with the new aim in mind. And I spend probably five hours to add maybe another two or three pages total and rework bits of everything else. Write the cover letter and submit. Fingers crossed.Does it work? I don't get to decide that. The reader/editor does. Hopefully I'll know soon.Oh look, out of room for this week. And I didn't even get to the subject I was really going to talk about. I'll leave it here for next time:"Carcosa but not horrible."And what does that even mean?

FULL BLEED: LIVING LIKE SKELETONS

This was originally published on my blog (RIP) and got reposted in THE HOWLING PIT. Reposting today in answer to writer Ernest Hogan's observations regarding SF/comics shows over at his blog, which is always worth checking out.http://www.mondoernesto.com/2018/06/timewarping-at-phoenix-comic-fest.htmlOriginally written in, uh, 2014? Not clear on the dates. But not much has changed.---I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to figure out why things are the way they are. Not everything, mind you. I don’t have the time to compose a supertheory of super-everything. But when I spend time in a place or situation, my brain gets to considering how it got there, the way it is and what brought it to where it is. Nothing happens in a vacuum, right? It’s all accretion and decay and rebuilding, particularly in matters of culture and the like. That stuff isn’t planned, no matter how many would-be-franchises get put out there. Particularly in fandoms.And I’ve spent more than my fair share in a number of fandoms: science fiction, music, blogging, comics, academia (oh yeah, that’s a fandom, too). I end up never really belonging in any of them. It’s that outsider’s outsider thing working in my favor.Slap a big question mark at the end of that last statement. Seriously. There’s nothing stranger than thinking “hey, these should be my kin,” looking around and figuring out that they’re not, that this place you’re ‘supposed’ to belong in simply doesn’t fit. There’s plenty of people I enjoy hanging out with, but once it moves past that circle, buckle your seatbelts for fandom.So much of fandoms now is the whole basis of personal identity through consumption, which is something that often baffles me. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy comics, as an example. I’ve written ‘em, written about them on and off for more than ten years (two volumes worth of material if one was so inclined to look them up on Amazon), have been to more comic shows than I can count, starting in 1989 and read them since 1981. You’d think, true-blue comic fan dyed in the wool, cut me and I bleed four colors forever, right?You’d also be wrong. I read these things and love ‘em (have even been accused of fetishizing them on Intrapanel, which is perhaps half right) but I don’t identify as a comics fan. What’s more, you’d be hard-pressed to get people to identify me as one on sight. As an aside, I own exactly two comics-related shirts, and only one based on a character, that being Dr. Blasphemy from Rick Veitch’s BRAT PACK. I don’t scan as a comics fan, not even as an artcomix fan. But I do enjoy them. Even counting that, I don’t derive a significant deal of my personal identity from them.Though they do take their fair share of time and attention on my part.Another example. I like metal, particularly the doom/drone side of things. But wow, am I ever not a metalhead. I like a lot of punk (and have a fairly expansive definition of it, going from garage up to the Brits who adopted it to the West Coast/East Coast strains in the eighties and beyond.) You’d never mistake me for a punk rocker by dress or demeanor (other than perhaps not giving much though to how you choose to define me). In general, I like a lot of strange, outsider music, but again, you wouldn’t guess it at first glance.There’s plenty of aesthetics I enjoy, whether it be in film or design or music or video games, but none of them are badges that I wear. Sure, oftentimes I fall in with crowds who derive identity from these things and can get along with ‘em pretty comfortably, but I’ve yet to find a uniform that fits other than say, normcore (go ahead, look it up, I’ll wait.)The idea of taking these fandoms and deriving community from them, that makes some sense. And I suppose it makes some sense to dress yourself accordingly, marking your allegiance so that you can be recognized and accepted. But that’s never quite worked out for me. It’s okay. I’ve had a lot of practice not fitting in. Like, forever.Advantages and disadvantages to it. I don’t feel like spending a whole ton of money on uniforms or things that make me belong, which leaves more for weird effects pedals and used books.But all this outsider-ness does mean that I see things differently sometimes. I can see the commonalities in fandoms and that leaves me wondering how they manifest themselves in completely different ways.Take science fiction, for instance. I could care about your gatekeeping. I’ve been reading and watching science fiction since I could read and watch anything, and I’m older than a bunch of you (at least in comics). I won’t pretend to be the most widely-read person in the genre, particularly because there’s a lot of it that simply doesn’t appeal (like when the science rides high and in front of the fiction part) and never will. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think the genre holds promise. It certainly does, or I wouldn’t be writing it (and BLUE HIGHWAY, for better or for worse, is science fiction – heavy on my mind since I’m in the middle of line edits on it).I’m also spending more time in the social world of science fiction, at shows for the most part. I’m rather burned out on specialized discussion groups online, but don’t mind talking this stuff out in person. Lots of interesting folks to talk to out there as well, which is why I enjoy going to these shows. And I do enjoy it, no matter that it’s going to sound otherwise as I continue here. That’s okay, if I’ve got stuff that I point out about SF fandom, I could point out just as much in comics and videogames and music and academia, but they’re not the examples I’m working with right now. Comparisons will be inevitable.This entry has been awhile in coming, really since I started going to science fiction fandom shows a few years back (though my first big one was Worldcon in 1993 I think, maybe 1992—it was a long time ago so I can’t nail down the year right off the top of my head.) And I noticed the difference in the shows and fandoms that far back, since I’d been a veteran of the San Diego Comic Con since 1989.I know what you’re going to say next. “Nothing compares to SDCC! It’s the biggest thing ever! That’s unfair!” But SDCC in 1989 barely even compares to Wonder-Con now. SDCC in 1989 really comes closer to a show like Big Wow Comics Fest today. Sure, over the years, SDCC has become the née plus ultra of pop culture shows, but it wasn’t always like that.Let’s break some things down. Ostensibly, science fiction fandom and comics fandom are the same thing: groups of people who enjoy works of popular culture. That’s what it boils down to. You can argue semantics/forms if you want. Go ahead. Science fiction fandom revolves primarily around books (and movies and television shows and cosplay and filk). Comics fandom revolves around comic books (and movies and art and cosplay and toys and television).So, mostly the same thing, right?But if you’ve been to both kinds of shows, you know they aren’t. At all.For the last couple years I’ve gone, all the science fiction shows I’ve attended are set up in hotel meeting facilities, with a selection of meeting rooms, gallery, breakout rooms and a dealer’s room, along with a few tables usually promoting other shows in the hallways. Generally there’s no central location around which everything else is focused. If anything, that’s the hotel bar after hours, otherwise it’s ebb and flow.Comics shows have all the same things (and are usually at convention facilities, not hotels): meeting rooms, galleries, etc, but the center of the show is the main floor, of which the closest equivalent in science fiction fandom is the dealer’s room (which is all but an annex, for the most part). This has been the case for every comics show I’ve attended, and I’ve attended a lot, particularly since 2008 when I started promoting STRANGEWAYS (that being a series of weird western graphic novels that you haven’t read).Of course, one of the primary functions of the comics show is to offer independent publishers a place to sell into the comics marketplace. Science fiction shows don’t seem to serve that function, particularly in terms of the direct publisher-to-reader pipeline. I mean, it happens, particularly at the biggest of the big shows, but not nearly to the extent that it does at comics shows. Which strikes me as odd. Seems to me that these conventions are exactly the kind of place that publishers would be working. And yes, there are usually a couple of self-publishers/small publishers working science fiction dealer’s rooms, but no big ones.Seems odd to skip over the audience like that.Another major difference in the kinds of shows, and I can’t underestimate how major this is, is in size. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if a show like Big Wow got twenty times the attendance that the last few science fiction shows I went to did. This may be an apples to oranges comparison, but Big Wow is hardly a gigantic show, even on the west coast alone. It’s grown steadily since I started attending them back in 2007 or so, but it’s nowhere near the size of even Emerald City Comic-Con, much less SDCC.Science fiction shows (again, in my experience) show significantly smaller attendance numbers. This has advantages in terms of atmosphere and accessibility of guests and the like. And honestly, some comics shows get pretty overwhelming pretty fast, but fewer attendees means you’re reaching fewer people, right?There’s other factors that come into play here, namely cost. I’m just going to look at door fees, not hotel, bar tab, etc. I go to Sac-Con, a local comic show, and I spend maybe ten bucks to get in, usually less. Something like Big Wow costs all of twenty or twenty five (for a day membership) and takes a good couple hours to survey. Wonder-Con, well, I don’t know, since I haven’t had to pay to get into one for years. SDCC costs something like two hundred bucks, right? But you’re getting your money’s worth in terms of programming (anyone who complains about the price for SDCC is looney, by the by.)Most of the small sci-fi shows I’ve gone to are mid-to-high double digits for membership. The membership price for Bay-Con (not to pick on them, but they’re fresh in my mind) was eighty dollars for the weekend. Keep in mind, I’ve seen criticism of indie comic shows for charging all of ten bucks to get through the door and that means that folks don’t have money to spend once they get in. Now, most if not all SF shows are run by non-profits, but so are the bigger comics shows (which is a smart move for a lot of reasons, primarily how all kinds of shows live or die on the utilization of volunteer labor.)Granted, it’s pretty clear that commerce isn’t a major factor in SF shows, but it certainly is in comics shows. This is neither good nor bad, but a difference in the mindsets.Here’s where we really start seeing divergence in the two kinds of shows. My observation of comics shows is that there’s not a lot of concern placed on the preservation of traditions. They’re seen as places to go and get books signed and buy stuff and see artists. Science fiction shows seem much more interested in history and tradition of the conventions themselves. Again, neither good nor bad, but it does make for a different experience. (Though I’ll go to any Jack Kirby appreciation panel that crosses paths with me.)And to extend the metaphor, science fiction shows feel a lot like a holding action. Whereas comics shows are on the move, trying to bring in more attendees, offering different content. Perhaps the holding action is by design. But if it is, then what’s the goal? What’s the endgame? I know, this is positing that there is not only an active plan, but an endgame to reach. Which is probably asking too much of everyone involved.So, as far as I can guess, science shows exist to perpetuate the model of science fiction shows. Yes, of course, anything exists to perpetuate itself, but comics shows at least have shown willingness to change and to take on new content and audiences. Sure, there’s a lot of people complaining that comic shows are about a lot of non-comics content (sometimes I even agree, particularly in SDCC’s case, since it’s now Show West, Mk 2—giving the networks and studios a shot at a pre-consumer audience). But comic shows, by comparison are growing and science fiction shows feel moribund.Which is baffling to me. But then I’m a guy who grew up in the seventies reading books out of my mom’s sci-fi book collection (and she wrote the stuff, too, under the name Ann Maxwell, all long out of print but she holds the copyrights) and got exposed to all kinds of things from Hal Clement’s NEEDLE books to DHALGREN by Samuel Delany and DOCTOR ADDER by KW Jeter and Roger Zelazny’s fantasy books. Back then, science fiction was pretty outsider entertainment. You have to remember life before STAR WARS, or at least imagine it, before there was a mainstream success like that. Before franchises.I know. I’ll stop the nostalgia trip now.Science fiction should be a chrysalis, not a cocoon. And my experience of science fiction shows of late is that it’s about the preservation of an esoteric order, not expansion. I’m not talking about gatekeeping necessarily (and I’ll note that borders of inclusion are being broken down in SF shows and comics as well).But the shows themselves feel like they’re meant to conserve a way of fandom, not to create or to include more fans, more readers. If people wish to filk or cosplay or discuss their favorite authors, that’s great. But I want to see more readers of the genre (or really anything). Just like I wanted to see more people reading comics instead the preservation of an imaginary construct called “comics culture”.I love science fiction. I really do. Have for a long time. But the subculture doesn’t need to be saved or preserved. Don’t worry, comics feels like it needs saving sometimes too, and it doesn’t. Misers need to save things and only dead things can be enshrined in gold leaf. Know what I’m saying?Science fiction needs more readers, not fewer, harder-core readers. Don’t feel bad. Every kind of book needs more readers. But then they all need fewer readers who are out to preserve the purity of the genre as well. And I can’t help but feel like science fiction conventions serve that purpose and that purpose only, enshrinement and not celebration or, >gulp< mere commerce.I suppose that one man’s enshrinement is another man’s community. But I’d offer the heresy that if you have active readers, you will end up with a community. Granted, you have to watch the kind of community it becomes, whether it’s inclusive or exclusive, walled and guarded by gatekeepers. Because exclusivity only favors those who are letting folks in behind the velvet rope.Where’s this going? Seems clear enough to me. The phenomena of science fiction show as we’re currently seeing it, isn’t an expansive process, but in contraction. It’s a domed garden inside a jungle. The environment outside the dome isn’t necessarily hostile either, it’s still being kept out. The seeds for science fiction’s success have already been planted a thousand times over. It’s gone from pulps to novels to television, film, video games, etc. It’s no longer an outsider genre (or even collection of genres.) But why do SF shows feel esoteric and hidden by design? Fantasy is underground? What’s the most popular show on HBO again, folks? The most lauded fantasy in history is a six-movie series for crying out loud.Is it a matter of simple economics? I know, it costs money to rent the hotel facilities and pay for guests’ travel and the like. Comics gets around that by living off the money brought in by merchants at the dealer’s room (as well as volunteer labor, one of the unspoken truths behind all pop-culture shows, and one that’s likely to change in the very near future, particularly for shows run for profit). Is book-driven SF popular enough to support anything more? (I hesitate to use the term “literary”, not because SF isn’t worthy of such a lofty crown, rather literary being a hodgepodge descriptor of critical opprobrium and not any intrinsic value.) And if that’s the case, then why? Where’s the excuse? GAME OF THRONES is how popular? The Harry Potter books? STAR WARS? STAR TREK? DR. WHO?Those are all mainstream properties, but perhaps they’re being read by people who aren’t accustomed or comfortable with deriving some sense of their identity from what they read. In theory, there should be something for just about everyone at these shows, but often it’s just set up for folks who are already into these shows. But if that’s the case, then where does the expansion and renewal come into play?Or is the design to keep the hothouse closed?Comics, at least in terms of the physical comics show, has grown far beyond that, but then it’s supported by other media as well (again, not always to everyone’s approval/taste – there’s plenty of people who complain that SDCC was better when it wasn’t a media event). I see plenty of self-identified comics fans at these shows, but I see just as many (if not more) who aren’t, who just read comics or enjoy the movies and probably even read books.I guess what I’m looking for is the sort of rejuvenation and expansion that comics shows have enjoyed to hit science fiction fandom, and honestly, I wonder if that’s even possible. Granted, I’m wanting this for purely selfish reasons (mostly so I can expose my work to more people at one time, but that’s all any author wants to do unless they’re King or Patterson or in that class). Still, with science fiction shows constructed in the way they are (ie, needing to be plugged directly into the fandom to even know about them, willingness to pay higher entry fees, etc) it’s tough to make them grow. If people even want them to grow.Maybe it’s time to open up the dome, learn to coexist and grow. I know what there is to lose, but the other option is watching it be lost completely.

An Aesthetic Divergence

Just got back from HOTEL ARTEMIS, which I quite enjoyed, though there were some places where I wanted the writers to trust the audience just a little bit more in terms of Repeated Important Dialogue. Aside from that, a smart and funny series of interlocking crime stories set against the backdrop of an LA tearing itself apart when the faucets get turned off.It's also a very successful evocation of the atmosphere/sense that I got from reading William Gibson's pre-Sprawl trilogy short stories. There's a sense of dilapidation, of old luxury going to seed, going long in the tooth, going all GREAT EXPECTATIONS wedding cake. But that's mixed with very high technology that's just a heartbeat away, of consumer interfaces slapped on military-grade medical technology where your ticket out of a sudden urban war is an Uber-style 'copter ride. I don't want to give too much of it away, but it feels a lot more successful in that sense than say the trailer for CYBERPUNK 2077, which dropped today as well. HOTEL ARTEMIS is the new being injected into the old, with that uneven distribution we've come to know and love.CYBERPUNK 2077 is a crazy set of skins put on GTA. Pretty skins, but just skins. (Though the moment where the model is adjusting her makeup and we pull back to see she's all Ms. Cyberdyne of June 2077 was pretty cool. Other than that, didn't rock my world.Don't get me wrong. Lots and lots of eye candy. Lots of it. But it's super-refined, leaning on an aesthetic that's been old for twenty years now.I'm probably just old, but I'm liking the sense of the past being incompletely buried, letting it yellow and crack but still stand for awhile before the neonized future completely gentrifies it.Most resonant moment in HOTEL ARTEMIS, other than seeing the Eastern Columbia building's clock still lit up, was a zebra skin rug in one of the rooms, reminding me of the one that was on the floor of my room in the Hotel Figureoa last time I was there. The hotel still stands, but its Moroccan fantasia decor is all but gone, according to last reports.Anyways, recommended.

FULL BLEED: DOMINATION'S THE NAME OF THE GAME

So let's talk real quick about another of the fun little symptoms induced by the Howling Pit. It's a thing I've seen for as long as I've been on the internet (which far predates the Long September of 1994 or was it 1996?). Movies, and frankly, games and comics and stories and even music? They're just things to be conquered. They're things to catalog and dominate. To pick apart and find fault in. To rack up points with. To prove that you are indeed superior to whatever is made by other humans that you might happen to consume. Or build an identity around.I mean, how can you prove you're strongest in an identity-by-consumption society? You got it. By proving you're mightier than the stuff you consume to fuel your identity. You're a STAR WARS fan? Well, you're not unless you can dissect it in exactly the right way. Or if you only like the right STAR WARS movies in the right way.This plays right into gatekeeping and neatly dovetails into the clicks/metrics for cash that something like 95% of the entertainment internet is based upon. Look at CinemaSins over on YouTube, or any dude just barfing up an Explainer video on what's really being said in Romero's zombie movies.An aside: I love most of Romero's zombie movies. They are not difficult texts to engage with. Pretending they are for clicks says more about you than me. And while I've done a long exigesis on DAWN OF THE DEAD, my intention was not domination, but submission with reporting on the experience. That whole master and servant thing.But this stuff? It's easily quantifiable, right? A dude can rattle off a list of inconsistencies and frozen frames with VFX flubs or where you can see the camera in the doorknob and BOOM. He's above the movie. He's never been in it. He's picking at minutae, not actually, y'know, having a goddamn experience while being carried away by the film. He's in charge of all of this. He's dominated the film. He's the aesthetic dominator. No mystery box can escape his sight. He'll claw it open and gleefully shriek that there's really nothing inside. That it's just empty so MASH that subscribe button and get another cinematic annihilation next week.I lay a lot of the blame for this at the feet of MST3K. You can (rightfully) argue that the dudes really love these movies and are just poking good-natured fun at them. Sure. But that doesn't mean that an army of cretins seeking a way to dominate not only work but fans of a work won't pick up on things and turn them into something awful. Does what it says right on the tin, y'know? Sure, another part of this is the carefully cultivated Gen X irony, which was supposed to be the major countercultural mode during the ascent of the internet into mainstream society (but the roots had been laid down in USEnet.) And I'll cop to being just as guilty as anyone on this count. It's easy to tear stuff down. Harder to build.I could make the parasite analogy. It might even be the right one to make.Of course, it's hilarious to see folks who cut their teeth taking down regular serial TV, even something as lofty as LOST, try to take down TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN. That was endless entertainment. I've even seen very well meaning people explain every action in the last two hours, linking them together in a great chain of inevitability and meaning that was surely inescapable as the Black Lodge itself, right? And yet none of those touched on the harrowing emotional quicksand that Lynch and Frost and company charged into to present the viewer with. Can you imagine trying to turn this into a linear plot that makes sense when the emotional reality of it was far more unsettling than any horror movie you could imagine in your head? That's a real apocalypse being visited unto the viewer, a real hidden truth.Of course, this impulse cannot be broken. Not when it's so easy to monetize, so cut-and-dried and factually correct. Who else will replace the hole left in the economy by BREAKING DOWN THE TRAILER SHOT BY SHOT articles and videos and tweets and Facebook posts? Who's gonna buy the collection of breathless prose on Amazon later?It's like these dudes are terrified to actually experience a movie, y'know? Just like musicologists (as friends and I dubbed them) were terrified to have an experience where an album physically rearranged their molecules. These dudes have to be in charge at all moments. They gotta have control. I understand the impulse. The world is a terrifying place. You gotta be in control of something, I guess. Me? I'd rather have something control me once in a while. Exterminate all rational thought. Submit. Have a near-life experience. I beg for that when I sit down in the theatre. Take me right there and then. Take me out of here for just a little while and maybe kick something genuine loose and free. It doesn't happen often. I wish it did.In the meantime, I keep turning over rocks to find something that bites deep enough to actually make me feel something. A genuine something.

Going to the mall, part 2

Quick follow up to my DAWN OF THE DEAD post. In the original script, James Gunn called out a bunch of brand names for the mall stores that our luckless heroes find themselves trapped in.I'm not sure how it would read if they had done this. My suspicion is that they didn't have the money to get the kind of clearances needed. See, we're in an age where brand damage is seen as a real thing. And if a brand shows up in a movie, well, you can be sure that it's not the bad dudes who will be utilizing that brand's products. We're a long ways away from BLACK SUNDAY, which showed the Super Bowl and both the Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas Cowboys as the center point of a depicted terrorist attack carried out from the Goodyear Blimp of all places. I guess people were hungry for any kind of filmic advertising at that point. Because now? That seems totally inconceivable. Brands are precious. They need to be protected and managed properly, allowed to grow and thrive, not merely wasted for a few seconds of frisson on the screen.