Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 5

FULL BLEED: I’LL COME RUNNING TO TIE YOUR SHOES

Hi there. My name is Matt Maxwell, actual living breathing human being and not a branded entity, not a registered trademark, not a talking head or wind-up monkey on a video channel. Picked up a bunch of followers on Bluesky recently and this is way too long to post there, so I’m making up an introduction post here. Maybe it’ll even get read.

I’ve been on the internet since about the time I started writing. Mostly since that was about the time that relatively normal humans (ie, not operators of mainframes) could be expected to be online. And online I was. I bet if you really tried, you could find posts by me on alt.cyberpunk and alt.music.alternative and rec.arts.comics. This was January, 1991. Okay, I lied. I started writing about six months before that, not long after I graduated from college (UCI, double major in English Literature and Social Sciences.) I wrote my first novel back then. Even submitted it. Got a nice letter back from a big SFF editor saying it was good but the market wanted more fantasy. I wrote a fantasy novel awhile after and they weren’t interested. Nobody way, really. This was back in the days of mailing a big pile of paper and it cost fifteen bucks back when that spent like closer to fifty and it took months, several of them, to hear back if you were gonna hear back at all.

Today you send an email query and you can get ignored immediately. It’s much improved, really.

I wrote half of about three different novels before quitting and then going to school for design and animation. After which, I actually got a job in animation and VFX at a shop in Hollywood (okay, North Hollywood at the corner of Lankershim and Magnolia) and worked there at the end of the nineties and the early months of 2000 back when the world was gonna end because of floating point math or some such foolishness. Instead, the business collapsed. No, seriously. Take a look at all the VFX companies who worked on the Oscar-winning film Titanic and check out what happened to them the day that job wrapped. I moved back to San Diego and awaited the birth of my first child. Then the second a couple years later. I played Mr. Mom for several years, taking a day a weekend and some mornings to write a comics script or several.

Most of those went nowhere. But I got two graphic novels out of it, under the umbrella title Strangeways. Weird westerns, both of them. Cowboys and werewolves, cowboys and vampires. Put them out myself, offered through Diamond distribution (it’s a much longer story than just that), sold in stores, a few copies. Sold at comics shows, a few more copies. It didn’t make back its production costs. Everyone besides me got paid up front. I learned a lot about writing comics and that comics people are really the best. Selling and marketing? Yeah, not that much. Some, but it’s tough to move those needles. Besides, things have changed so much in the last decade-plus that any advice I could offer you would be outdated. Other than this. Start small. Don’t expect to pull off a multi-graphic-novel-volume series off the bat. Write an eight page story with a beginning, middle and and end. Then shoot for a full twenty page story. Do those for awhile. Then worry about big stuff.

Hell, even a single comics page where you explain a simple narrative. If you really want to do this, you’ll start small. I realize nobody wants to hear this. Just like my kids never wanted to learn under-drawing when they decided they were kinda serious about drawing stuff. And that’s fine. It’s good to have a thing that you’re good at that you don’t have to worry about succeeding with.

No, you can’t buy copies of Strangeways anywhere anymore even though I still have boxes of them. Hint: Amazon shipping sucks. I was losing money on every copy I sent to their warehouse for them to then send to customers. No, you don’t have this problem with POD books, which is why I can offer copies of my books there still. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

About the time I was offering the second Strangeways book (and had started on a third, which has a handful of pages drawn that’ll likely never get shown) I began to write short fiction again. I should say that for the five-six years before this point, I’d been writing a lot about comics and my reading of them, published at a handful of websites including the first iteration of this one (domain lost and I don’t feel like paying the ridiculous thousand dollars that the current owner wants for it). I wrote enough to fill two books on it. They’re there over on my Amazon page, The Collected Full Bleed and Highway 62 Revisited. I wrote a lot of words for zero pay other than knowing that folks would read them because it was early days on the internet. Ish.

So, back to writing short fiction. I wrote several short stories and mostly novellas because that’s my natural length. Which sucks in a world of small outlets who pass on anything over 5000 words or want to do flash. I can’t do flash or microfiction. If that’s your thing, great. I don’t care to read or write it. Pitched to some anthologies. Got rejected a bit. I posted one of the stories online and asked William Gibson to give it a read, as it was based on a tweet of mine in reply to a thread he’d started. He RTd it and that became the first line of a short story called “Tug On the Ribbon” which I think is still one of the best things I’ve written. He liked it, but it’s not the kind of thing I could use as a blurb (even if I tried.) I ended up putting out a couple collections of short fiction. None of it went anywhere. Closest anything came to was me being invited to write a story for Blizzard Entertainment in the StarCraft universe. I went and pitched a bunch of ideas, they picked one and it was back and forth until I had an idea of what they wanted. I wrote a draft that was twice as long as it needed to be and spent two weeks whittling pieces off until it fit. It paid real well. Even got to write another one for ‘em, but it never got printed. Got paid real well, better than any SFF magazine would’ve. It’s probably still online if you look for it, called “The Teacher.” I know it was included in the Project Blackstone anthology volume which is still for sale.

Most of the pitches that I sent to open anthologies never went anywhere, but for one, around ten years ago now. It was for a set of Cthulhu/HPL-inspired stories in a futuristic setting. I wrote a real mean story called “Chunked” which I didn’t expect to go anywhere. Crazily, the publisher liked it. It went out in an anthology called Tomorrow’s Cthulhu which is still in print I think. As for why “Chunked” is so mean, well, nobody but me twigged to it. Is that because I wrote a great piece or because I suck as a writer? Exercise left to the reader. Did another story for this outfit and finally was asked to pitch some ideas for a serial they wanted to run. So I came up with a story about a book forger who instead creates a working occult tome complete with otherworldly god. Some of you might recognize this as The Queen of No Tomorrows. You’d be right. I wrote it in 2016 and it came out in 2018, even got paid real well for it, all things considered. There were plans to do more, notably a second novel to come out in 2020 under the name My Drowning Chorus.

That… didn’t happen. Two years of back and forth and long periods of being ghosted and I ended the relationship with the publisher. I paid for cover art that was not going to get used and paid the editor for the time they’d put into the book. Whoops. There went the advance I got from the first book a couple years ago (that and taxes). I sat on the new book for a long time. Mostly because I knew that going full self-published as opposed to indie-published is a great way for you to get your book ignored. There’s lots of reasons for this. We all know what they are, but much of it comes down to marketing budgets and prestige. Seriously, look at all the outlets out there who have “I will not read self-published books” as part of there “About us and if you want to get reviewed” pages. There are people out there who do. They are not the influencers who monetize their channels or show off stacks of books sent to them by publishers, indie or otherwise.

So earlier this year, I ran a Kickstarter for the book, under the new title of All Waters Are Graves (a title I like much more anyways.) I put up a modest ask and was surprised when it went three times over (don’t get excited, that’s $1700, and I barely broke even on postage and printing.) This kickstarter is the only reason why I kept going, honestly.

It sucks to follow anthology queries and get blown off. It sucks to have your publisher crumble in front of you. It sucks to get only a couple of reviewers to pay attention to your book. It sucks to work on a thing for more an a year and have it not really go anywhere. At least with the kickstarter, I know there’s a level of interest in the book.

I’ll do another one. Hopefully more after that.

I’ve been at this a long time. I haven’t made more than a mortgage payment out of the work I’ve been able to put my name on. Yeah, I’d done some well-paying ghost writing that I can’t discuss other than to say it happened but that’s all long in the past now. I don’t have much patience for folks who say that if I’m not willing to do it for free, than am I even really a writer? I don’t have any patience for folks who say what my art should and should not be. That’s a good way to catch a block from me.

I’ve also talked about and folks have asked “Hey, you’ve mentioned some personal challenges as a drain on your work and I wanna know.”

If I know you in real life, you probably know what they are. I don’t really feel like speaking to them beyond that other than their reality and accepting how they shape my time and energy. You can accept that or not. It’s not for me to worry about.

As for the now, I work on a series of books under the shared title Hazeland.Go ahead and click that if you want background info and anti-manifestoes. There’s two of them printed so far: The Queen of No Tomorrows and All Waters Are Graves. There’s a thing called Fake Believe which will go out for a Kickstarter early next year. I’m working on a fourth book called The Missing Pieces. After that will be a book called Asphalt Tongues. They all take place in the Los Angeles of the eighties, a place and time I’m familiar with as I lived in both. I market them as horror but genre labels are tiring otherwise. They are novels of the fantastic, sure, but not urban fantasy as it’s sold. Place them somewhere between Chandler and Calvino, only they ain’t ever going to be taught in lit seminars. The books themselves are about language and magic and time and what it’s like to live in a world you only sorta understand. There are no vampires, no secret world of faerie, no government conspiracies. There is no multi-season Netflix adaptation coming. There is no army you’re joining by reading these nor is there an identity to reinforce.

I've written in nearly every genre that is. I am tired of caring about genre purity. I don't care. There's fantasy and then there's non-fiction. None of these books ever happened. They're not describing things that are actual. They're telling you the truth as it applies to them. This is not literature.

But then lit seminars seem like a quaint afterthought in the today of STEM-driven curricula. Oh yes, I know, there’s still English Lit classes that are out there. Still departments surviving even though the chancellors of the universities are being pressured to put out more business-friendly degrees. And what company or political organization wants writers to do anything more than be a friendly marketing arm? That’s not hard. You can teach a gibbon to do that.

Maybe this answers questions you might have. Maybe this just makes you want to ask more.

Here’s some other stuff that I’ve done and some of which continues on:

Highway 62 at Tumblr

The Roswell Incident and Identify 9 at Bandcamp

Intrapanel

Flickr page

Amazon Author Page. And honestly, I don’t want to hear about how you’ll have to hold your nose or anything else. Nobody is making you click on it.

I have an Insta account that I barely use. Don’t send me stuff there.

My Twitter has been deactivated for some time.

Facebook? Ha.

I don’t have a newsletter or a Patreon or anything else. I’m out here running probably realistically annual Kickstarter campaigns for single books. I will never run a campaign unless the book is substantially done (which in common parlance means at least a second or third draft.) It’s just me. I’m not a movement. Reading my books is not praxis. If you saw me in real life, you’d think I was just another normie not worth bothering with. I’ve been an outsider for basically as long as I’ve walked the planet. Too much attention will likely make me shut off and hide.

Other stuff? It’s in the books.

Until next time.

FULL BLEED: SHOOT SPEED KILL LIGHT

Today's election day 2024. Don't worry. That's my first and last discussion of the issue. Just marking the time for the record. Assuming there is a record, or that I revisit these to check out what was boiling in the 'ol brain pan on any given time. I've been known to do that. Like with photographs I've taken on the phone where I see something that just sticks out and I feel like it should be recorded. Sometimes I can even remember what I was thinking about or feeling when I took the picture. Sometimes.

I don't often do this. Though there was a period last year where I spend a lot of time reading books I'd loved (everything from Blood Meridian to The Invisibles to The Sandman and the Swamp Thing refiguring by Alan Moore and company, but also Gibson and Chandler.) I also went through a bunch of my old college papers, trying to connect to that wide-eyed dude who'd just been shown the wonders of critical theory circa the middle-late eighties and sociological theory and practice, zen, all sorts of stuff. Stuff that I ate up then and has become somewhat rote and expected now. Though once in a while, I get a fresh kick in the head from work like Mark Fisher's. It still happens. But yeah, revisiting that work so I could see where the spark came from. 'Cause that spark is tough to come by now. Happens when you have 35 years intervening. Thats's a lot of occlusion in the systems building up (in my case literal, thanks thrombosis that happened about four years back.)

Which is funny, because after recovering from that thrombosis, I was pretty much fired up to get back to work. I even got a lot done. Which got thrown in the woodchipper after my publisher melted down. End digression.

So, did I find that spark while going through those papers and assigned readings and the like? Nah. You can't go home again. Though it was nice to see that I was capapble of being motivated (for awhile I didn't really give a fuck about school, even in college -- then I finally started taking classes that I was excited by after getting all those pre-reqs done.) I was capable of going way above and beyond (a hundred page work, much of it reference images, of death in the comics, co-written by one of my best friends, then and now, for instance.) Why is it hard now? Aside from thirty-five years and I'm still my primary audience? Yeah, tough one. Real puzzler.

There was a time I felt like it was all possible. That's harder to come by while staring down, well, time. Things feel finite. Limited. Particularly in a world like ours where individual creators are so commonplace that being among them is like submerging yourself in the seethe of a crowd. And everyone, everyone is hungry, least of all me, or yourself if you are one of those creators who've found your way into reading this.

Sure, it's great that all these people are taking spins at the wheel. Sure, it makes things hard in the aggregate. And of course, you, as a reader of stuff that's on the outside, want to help all these authors out and that's exhausting. Sure, I'm supposed to have a limitless supply of love and support in that well. Isn't that what we're taught?

Man, that level of energy gets harder to sustain every day. I'm sorry. I know I'm supposed to be positive. That's what you're supposed to be out here. Positive as fuck. Love those book birthdays and unboxings and cover reveals and and and.

I still see that stuff as just playing around, really. It's not the work.

Not that I've been good about the work. Not that I'm one to talk. Not that I even ever was. I can point to that small body of work and feel some pride, but lemme tell ya, my numbers aren't going to convince anyone that I know the first god damned thing about what I'm doing. But what I'm doing is writing. Not selling. Not being a social media personality (though I spend too much time there.) Not racking up reviews. Not all those things that we've been told we need to do. Not making contacts and shaking hands and electing myself as the one-man representative of a genre or worse a group of writers out there. I've never seen that end well. Hell, we're watching another case (that was far worse than I ever suspected) turn out badly not only for the dude at the center of that, but everyone he fucked over to get another rung up that ladder. If that's what it takes to succeed, then I'll take failure.

I know. There's multiple dudes I could be subtweeting here, some far more famous than others. I'll leave it mysterious.

Anyways, treating writing like that kind of social climbing game is a recipe for heartbreak. Or just using others as stepping stones, as tools. And who wants to go through life like that? Nevermind, I know there's literally thousands who would, given the chance. Count me out.

I suppose this means I wasn't ever meant for the social media age of writing. You're goddamn right about that. I started in this more than thirty years ago, with time off for good behavior. It's about the only thing I'm good at. Okay, I'm pretty good at making covers, but nobody else wants my work for their books. It's weird, right? I know I'm good at this, but that's kinda the last opinion that matters. Unless you're using that as your rock to cling to, the ferry to ride downwriver as the cable has snapped and you're helpless and at the mercy of the roaring water and the rocks thudding against the hull. You got nothing else to hold onto.

You got nothing else to hold onto.

Maybe that's all the spark you get.

Anyways, back to the matters of life and work. The next book is called The Missing Pieces, and it's a haunted house story. It'll get backed up with a shorter work called The Pearl, which is about trying to carve out a place you can stay in long enough for it to be haunted. The first one is mostly about a girl named Grace who we met briefly in my last novel. Yes, Cait will be there, too.

Until next time.

FULL BLEED: THE FUTURE HAS BEEN PICKED CLEAN

The title is *ahem* borrowed from the film All You Need Is Death, from this year, largely by Paul Duane. It fits. Hit kinda hard, really. It is a sharp little piece of dialogue that talks about the exhaustion and cowardice of the media industries and the emptiness that they leave.

Oh, it isn't talking about that? Coulda fooled me. I mean, I was told there was only one interpretation of any particular piece of art and ahahahaha even I can't continue on with this particular joke. There's a piece of art and everyone interacting with that piece of art is going to come up with a different, co-created, work. That's okay. It gets easier when you simply accept that.

I know. There's lots of people who can't simply accept anything. They spend their lives trying to impose meaning on things, and ultimately, on people. It's tiresome. But it's also easy political juice and fundraising potential, given that politics is so much the emotional and not the rational. Yeah, this isn't the usual line of conversation for this place. I'll try to tie it up, much as I would a bloody stump.

There. It's done.

Ticked off another year on the tally last year. No I didn't make a big deal (or really any kind of deal about it.) I've had an ambivalent relationship with the phenomena for a long time, usually along the axis of tolerate to loathe to dread. It's a big area, yeah. Lots of territory to cover there. So, yeah, not having it perceived until its passed is probably for the best. There's often an unreal expectation on these events, that they're your day and to be special and only good stuff happens and I'm not twenty-one anymore. I've passed the marker where I get the aged and infirm specials or early meals, though I don't look it so much. Chalk it up to my years of youthful optimism.

Yeah, last week wasn't great. Maybe that's on me. I'm still here, right?

Sure I am.

Sure I'm supposed to be working on a book right now. It originally started as three novellas, which then became two novellas and is now rapidly working on being one novel with a novella attached. Dummy that I am, it'll probably become two books. I'm in the stage of things where I've got a whole bunch of stuff that I think should be in it and am rapidly finding some of the stuff I was sure was going to be important for it isn't. That part's never particularly easy for me and I'm out of practice with it.

"You should just wing it, then."

I should not. I've tried that before and it never ends well. I need that roadmap in front of me. Doesn't matter whether I really do or not, does it. I only think that I need it, so it may as well be the same thing. So I need it. But wrestling those chunks of a storyline or how to express what I want to get at without coming out and saying what I'm getting at is hard. Even harder when I'm wrestling the notion of where I am in this world of weird genre fiction. Since that's the world I'm in, not actual literature or academic fiction or whatever you wish to call it. Specially since I'm not interested in following the boundaries of any particular genre. So yeah, my own worst enemy here. Yet I was always told that people are looking for something new. And idiot that I am, I believed it.

The future is picked clean because people are afraid to bank on it. Starved before it gets much of a chance. Born hungry.

And yet, what's the alternative? Follow your bliss? Take the advice that YOU JUST GOTTA MAKE THE THING? That's the same line. And, sure, ultimately, it does come down to the creator to go ahead and do it. But in the face of what?

I ask myself that all the time.

I do wish this was the only, the most important problem in my way at the moment. But that's never been true. It's a distant second with the prime spot eating enough of my psychic battery to make sitting down in front of the computer and moving intangible pieces of language around in a way that interests me and has a shot of making sense to someone reading it who doesn't happen to be me a real problem. I know. I really shouldn't think about what's going to happen to the work once it's done. But I'm stuck doing that.

If a work comes and goes without being read, was it ever? Sure, for me, I suppose. But that's a pretty tiny chunk of the world. So is this just a matter of mortality and once that fire's gone out, it's out forever? Something lovely to consider. Of course the truth of it is that it is neither lovely nor un-lovely. It simply is.

I do wish I knew if it would all work out, not unlike Veidt at the end of Watchmen. But I suppose I do in that it doesn't ever end to get to a work/not work status, should you catch my drift. That these stories would at least mean something to someone outside me, even though they're very much the kinds of stories that I like reading with their weird permutations of, well, everything.

But that's above my pay grade, really.

In the meantime, I suppose I should get me back to work. I'd tell you what this next story is about, but the truth of it is it'll only make sense to about ten people on the planet.

Which might be part of the problem.

Until next time.

Birthdays, right?

FULL BLEED: GRAVITY WELLS AND CHICXULUBS

It's fall now, though the thermometer outside would probably have most of you thinking differently, a hundred yesterday and just a touch cooler today, cough stuck in the back of the throat dry and not much relent in that condition for the last nearly three weeks now. Yeah, the vacation was great but coming back sick and wondering if this is just Long Covid now was not so great. But this could be one of those "depressed or just hungry" things. Either way, it's a drag on things.

So I'll pretend that's why the ball hasn't started rolling on the new work just yet. Sure, I have some things to tie off with Fake Believe (that being the third and upcoming Hazeland book, going through funding in the Spring -- and when I say funding, I mean using Kickstarter as a way to do pre-orders and to directly talk to folks about the work.) I sent off a handful of ARCs of the book to friends and readers, all of whom I'm grateful for.

Like I said, writing is a lonely kind of affair. I've said that a lot and it's 100% true for me. Maybe it's not for you. Maybe you can write socially and get together with all manner of other folks who write and you can vent over coffee or drinks or whatever. That's not my case, 'cept maybe at shows and even those are fewer and farther between now. Lots of reasons for that, nothing I really need to go into.

Particularly a lonlier sort of proposition if you're out there self-publishing. Real John in the wilderness hours if you get what I'm saying. Rolling those stones and it's that the stones get any bigger but the passing years just make 'em a little harder to get moving and make that knowledge that if you slip, you're going to have to work that much harder to make up lost ground or step aside as that sucker just leans into gravity's pull and back to its angle of repose a quarter mile back. At least you didn't lose a limb, right?

No editors, little feedback, occasional attaboys from readers. That's your bread. And hey, it's tasty bread when you get it. But turning your back on the wider process, that's its own set of obligations. I won't say rewards 'cause it's far more double-edged than that. You get to do the work that you want to do. That's the reward. I hope that's enough. I wrestle with it being enough for me, I honestly do. Even though at this point in my life I understand that it's what I'm in for. This is the world that I've made for myself. And I best be happy in it, because only a fool makes a world for themselves that wasn't what they wanted, right?

And I wish, I sure wish that this was a matter of me standing by my principles and turning down contracts to write books that I don't know how to write or can't. That would at least indicate two different things. The first being nobility and the sort of stalwart regard for aesthetic purity and struggle that refuses the easy reward. Wow. That sure sounds goddamn noble, pure, unalloyed. Downright idealistic and iconic. Worthy of attention. And, the second, more important part in this world we find ourselves in, that I create work that someone thinks is worth rewarding or even paying attention to. Yeah, it'd be nice to have that problem. I thought I did at one point, but that ended so poorly (both reputationally and financially) that I'm reluctant to engage in that proposition ever again. Yeah, I know. That sentence honors myself to even suggest that someone would want to validate my work with their capital and reputation.

That's the rub, right? That's the money melon. That's the pursuit. Lotta folks out there seeking that as the end or thinking that once they're there, everything else will fall into place. This will fix them and their work.

I'm here to say that there's nothing wrong with your work. Or you. You're addressing a void that ain't ever gonna be satisfied. Sure, it's nice to have your work rewarded with a check that you can throw at rent and food and maybe go see a movie or pay for a new video game or some more books to read that you can toss on the pile of to be read books or even all those things. We're just in a world where that's a thing that happens less and less and less. Where all manner of artistic labor is devalued if not scorned (or worse, cleansed of any individual voice and processed into franchise content -- but at least the folks who worked on that got paid for it, I hope.) That's always been a cyclical thing, just that we lived through a hundred years plus of developing what we might call a mainstream audience and then having that snicked away with a thousand cuts and that was even before the Algorithm came along to serve itself. Before a time when agents posted wish lists of books they wanted to see (but were not in a position to publish) on social media. Before the multiple Chicxulub impacts that have come along.

Now, sure, Chicxulub was bad news for the dinosaurs (whether or not they were warm or cold blooded) and made things gloomy for a long time (but not as bad as any of the bid Cambrian extinctions which were in a word, whooof, bad for life on the planet.) However, it opened things up for the mammals. At least that's the conventional wisdom of this sort of thing. I'm not going to say that it's a good thing that it's actively harder to make a living with creative work (and it is, judging by what I see out on Bluesky nearly every day). Maybe, however, it will dissuade some creators from seeing that pursuit as the pinnacle to reach. Or maybe I'm saying this to make myself feel better. That could be it, too.

Truth is, we could always write whatever we wanted or paint whatever we wanted or make whatever free jazz skronk blackened powerviolence noise music we wanted to. Just that maybe we need to decouple the idea of the paycheck being the reward or the goal. Hey, I like getting paid for my work, I really do. I've had to stop worrying about it so much for my own sanity. And then I think about some of these things which became huge cultural touchstones, whether they were movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Night of the Living Dead which inspired literal schools of filmmaking but due to legal wrinkles or just plain theft, the creators never got paid for them. No. That's not noble. It sucks.

Or all the concert venues for nearly any music scene you could think of, barely scraping by on drink sales or operating gray-market at best in order to stay open to keep paying bands so the kids who couldn't afford anything more than two bucks cover could see something new to rip their heads open and maybe offer a path to doing things differently. Does it suck that these places couldn't succeed long or well enough to maintain their continued survival? Yup. That's not noble. It sucks. Same goes for record labels run out of garages or industrial spaces, for publishing houses that make an initial funding round but can't make it for more than a couple years. It sucks. It's hard for everyone out there. No matter what media.

And now I'm seeing that movie studios are trying to get fans to help the make movies by way of focus groups. Yeah, that's not gonna work, because as smarter folks than me have already pointed out, the fans don't even know what they want. And yeah, this gets me dangerously close to touching on AI, but let's just pretend I did in the whole "world that is rapidly devaluing art and creators of art" thing so we can spare ourselves a withering screed. Thing is, movies are in real trouble because they're so goddamn expensive to make. They're capital traps, which I wrote about, oh geez, maybe ten years ago. Why are properties so worried about being made into movies? Because that's the top in this world. They're spending money on a thing you like. They're thinking it's a thing that will get them some money so they try to get attention for it, etc etc. If your work becomes a big franchise, then you've effectively won, right?

Yeah, exercise left to the reader on that one.

And there's gonna come a time when the audience to support a couple hundred million bucks being burned up in two hours of projected frames on a screen or streamed to a television set just won't be there. That's gonna be grim times, for movies. Yeah, there's gonna be determined weirdos who go ahead and do it with a video camera and hopefully they can get distributed to more than their friends and family. Maybe it'll even mean a renaissance of strange and weird and people trying to make a mainstream movie but having no idea how to and making something wonderfully outside instead.

That's a lot eaier in books. Maybe in comics, too. I dunno, been a long time since I tried that. Music, too. Just so long as people can keep the bills paid apart from having to pay for studio time or editors or cover designers or whatever other ancillary costs there are. Maybe once the smoke clears, people will realize that it's easier to do this sort of thing than they thought and we'll have a panoply of different and new voices. I know for sure we'll have plenty of traditionalists trying their damnedest to maintain things as they were, plenty of genre purists doing what makes sense to them. I'm not worried about SF, whatever it might actually be, dying.

Anyways, went the long way around the mountain on that one. Sorry.

This is all to say that I'm trying to wrestle less with notions of success when it comes to my own work. Yes, I'd like to do good work and think that I do, given the constraints I operate under (Aside: I'd love to afford to pay an editor but my Kickstarters would have to be at least triple in size for that to happen, so I'm not holding my breath.) But I've turned my back on acceptance and the accompanying prestige that comes along with it vis a vis external publication. It's where I've put myself, even if I didn't really understand it, once I started writing prose again in 2011 or so (apart from a brief bout writing WFH). So I better stop fighting about it, because the struggle against the self is just another way to say self-destruction (and I don't mean in the transformational way, either.)

Maybe understanding that Publishing Doesn't Love You will pick up steam. Or folks will make their own co-ops and fight that uphill battle of acceptance even in genre circles. Again, if you're a self-publisher without a giant reputation to start with, it's a relatively foolish struggle to undertake, no matter how many independent media outlets say they want to hear new voices. That hasn't been my actual experience. That's part of Publishing Doesn't Love You, too. That's part of the multiple Chicxulubs.

This year has been a terrible year for my work, personally. Getting All Waters Are Graves released and finding that there's a (small) audience for this sort of thing was a big deal but that was just a little wind at my back rolling that rock uphill. I'm trying to turn it around and start on the fourth Hazeland book, that being The Missing Pieces (the third is mostly complete, as described at the start of this long ramble). And then the fifth, hopefully enough so that I can offer books three and four in the same calendar year. Maybe. That might be nuts.

It might. But maybe it's true that only the insane have the strength to prosper, or however that saying goes.

FULL BLEED: I'M MISSING ALL THE THINGS I KNEW

Or should I call this one Summer Affective Seasonal Disorder? Yeah, summers are tough. I know. What's not to love. Sunshine. Free time. Vacations.

It's all something else to me. But that's usually the case. Wish it was okay to feel that being out of step is just fine, but we all know it isn't. You're supposed to find a cohort to feel comfortable with, right? If nothing else a lone Statler to your Waldorf, hurling brickbats from the safety of the balcony.

Then there's the time to be alone. Which when you're writing is a lot of the time. At least for me it is. I can't speak to anyone else. Process, genre, mode, commercial aim. That's all personal stuff. Sure, lots of folks are shooting for maximalized success with them. Or what they think will maximalize success. But as I've said too many times in the past, I can't pursue the regular standards of success. I tried that and fell short so many times that even thinking about them was enough to make me lock up.

It's funny. I was in San Francisco briefly last weekend (on the way to a signing in Petaluma but more on that later). Anyways, stopped to talk to a friend who runs a comics store there and it was great to see him. We got to talking about the time I was making comics, and it's true. In my half-assed not knowing any other way to do things, I did. Not just once but twice. Pulled out of publishing deals and ran the pages daily on the internet when that was a novelty enough to get noticed (not really) and ended up doing the whole thing myself, burning up a pile of money and pride in the process. Yes, I was pleased with the final books. I still am. And I've been lightened by every positive reception the books got.

But still, he came out and said "Comics gave you PTSD, huh?"

And he wasn't wrong. I'd never put it into words before, but yeah. They pretty much did. I never knew what to do or how to do anything other than the path I took. And folks, that's not a fun path. Don't do what I did. Let my career serve as an example to others. Sure. A negative example is still an example. And my experience stung to an extent that even when I was asked to write up a short story for a friend's anthology book, all I could do was turn it down without screaming that no, I wasn't going to do another comics thing ever.

Now, that's had consequences. Everything does. There's been some stuff that I've fucked up because of this. That's on me. Throw it on the pile of mistakes to sharpen knives on or something. Maybe it'll be of use some day. Maybe it'll even be of use to me. No experience is ever wasted, right? At least that's what I hear.

I should probably talk about the SF show I was at recently, not as a guest or anything, just another of the many writers looking for a little shining bit of wisdom to hang onto. Funny, right? Only been doing this on and off since the 90s and still out there with my blanket and bowl of kibble out by the water heater 'cause I can't bear to come in the house. Something something feral.

And I still don't feel like I belong. What the market there seems to want is in something like eighty-five percent opposition to what I'm doing in my work. I mean, I get it. All you have to do is write something that an editor will want to go to bat for and that's it. Only I gotta get that past me first and, well, it's not a thing I can do. Or want to do. For the levels of prestige/pay/whatever involved, anyways. Something about reigning in limbo than serving in the suburbs of acceptedness. Be the king of my own little patch of nothing.

Then again, publishing itself is still being rearranged by the withering of audiences, the decimation of reading as chunk of free time versus games or movies or streaming or doomscrolling. I get it. It's easier to get your affirmations in small chunks on Bluesky. I know that it works for me sometimes. Besides, I landed my indie publishing contract and guess what? Aside from the one time I got an advance, it didn't change the world. I did just as much work as I'm doing for promotion now. Heh. Promotion. That's another issue.

The best promotion ever was running the kickstarter for All Waters Are Graves. I can only hope that the one for Fake Believe that I'll be running in early 2025 will work nearly as well after I have to tweak prices (I might've cleared maybe a hundred bucks when all was said and done, and that was on the backs of ebook orders) to make it viable. I'm not talking even rent payment. I'm talking just surviving and feeling enough that... Well. Trying to find a way to express this without calls for intervention.

I'm way past the whole "do it to prove it to yourself" or "do it because you're compelled." I've got a few things in my life going on that already make superhuman demands on time and energy and frankly, will. No, I won't be discussing them. Long-time listeners might have some idea but I won't be talking about them here or on social media. They're things that only change in one direction and the only way out is through. In short, life.

So I suppose ego is still in the game, no matter how much I try to shut it down. It's fuel and destruction both should you get it out of balance, like high-test and badly-tuned engines where the seals could blow any second and maybe some oil sneaks out of a blown gasket and catches fire on the block. None of that's good.

But even with the kickstarter and the flurry of activity around that, and the perception if not the recognition (of course I haven't seen if the books are actually landing with readers, but that's another issue altogether) of that, it's sometimes tough to get moving. I've practiced a great deal of avoidance behaviors (and tried to start up some new ones in this last go-round, though I think I've staved them off for now.) It's hard to deal with indifference, hard to be the only one saying "okay, time to get back at it", hard to sit down with myself and shut the goddamn brain off for a little while and work.

Oh, you think it's all conscious? Yeah, about that.

It's time to go back to work and I'm afraid, out of experience and conditioning and ongoing PTSD I suppose, that in the short middle and long term it'll simply not matter. And that very well may be an expectation that was ingrained in me by a world that no longer exists (if it ever did.) It's still hard to put that down and let go of it. Even something as, for lack of a better word, ugly as that.

Well-meaning folks talk about writing your fears, and if you're afraid that you're really onto something. I don't think I believe that. Anyways, that won't get you any closer to acceptance than simply writing something that an editor likes and will go to bat for.

Like I said. I only know how to do this my own addled way. And this is part of it.

I know. There's better ways to get this done, but I don't know any way of them.

That said, I start revising the collection known as Fake Believe this week. It's... Oh geez. I don't remember how many short stories it is. Ah. Just checked. It's seven. There was some confusion as both Dreams Are Made Of Us and a story not yet published called Asphalt Tongues were part of it at one point. But that's changed. The final lineup looks like this.

A Crate of Bottle-Fed Ghosts

Cut/Paste

Third Saturdays

Suicide Jewelry

In What Furnace

Club Closed: Private Party

The Cinderhaus

The last one is a follow-on to All Waters Are Graves, so there's some continuity. A couple that folks may know show up in Suicide Jewelry. There's a cameo in Third Saturdays from a familar character. In What Furnace centers around a TV show crew that we've heard mentioned but not seen directly. Club Closed is about two guys robbing an infamous nightclub (I'm sure you can guess which one). Otherwise, you're going in cold. So hopefully it's seen as a good jumping-on point.

Yeah, jumping on with a single-author anthology. That totally makes sense. I mean, could this be any more commercial suicide?

Well, I don't know any other way. And honestly, I don't need it to be a commercial success. At least not in a way that any normal human would recognize.

Revisions on this in the summer, then actually drafting something brand new in the fall.

Unless I can keep avoiding it.

Until next time.

FULL BLEED: FULLY BLED

I know. I've probably used this title before. It may not even be the last time.

Yeah, long time since I posted. I do wonder why I even do. This isn't a call for sympathy, just an observation of facts. Long posts only get read if people can pass them around and shout how they agree with them or how the opinions inside are reason enough to put the author to the flame. And lemme tell ya, the agreement posts don't really move the needle in terms of orders or getting reviews. Which is the game. Which has always been the game. To stick out in the very wide and oceanic field that's approximately two inches deep if that much at all. Things don't even make splashes anymore, simply slipping beneath the choppy and turbulent and wind-blown surface that seethes like so much fractal noise, an equation which simulates life and activity and a sense of being but only simulates.

So, about All Waters Are Graves. I've ordered the print books for the kickstarter backers. If they arrive sometime next week, that's when they'll go out. My guess is the hardcovers will take longer. They usually do. Trying to do it all at once. I'll send out the ebooks when the print copies go out.

My guess is that will be the extent of sales because trying to attract attention to the books is nearly impossible unless I want to shell out dollars for online advertising of dubious utility at best. Mostly because everyone is doing the same thing, trying to reach the same increasingly small pool of readers. That's the thing nobody likes to talk about, and why would they? It's a grim subject. Who was it, Tarkovsky? Yeah. According to the internet.

*beat*

We can totally trust the internet now, right?

“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”

Only now art isn't just to prepare for one's own death, but the death of the form itself. I exaggerate, perhaps. But only a little. This is the problem with having lived long enough to have borne witness to a much healthier set of publishing and entertainment industries. I'd love for someone to compare the numbers sold that got a book on the top 10 of the NYT bestseller list in 1975 and in 2024. Oh, that's so unfair. That's fifty years. Unfair or not, it's the world we've got now. One that's been looted and income streams firmly pointed in the direction of those making the rules. Much like a state party deciding, say, that the governor of a state can remove any elected official for any reason whatsoever and there's no recourse. Because that's a thing that just happened. Just like a bunch of dudes taking over all the businesses that print books and make TV shows and record labels and movies have directed the meager flow of income in direction other than the creators.

It's grim going out there. If you're making your living solely off this, you have my admiration and my sympathy. It was always hard. It's harder now. And the folks who want to sell you access know that.

So maybe the only sane response is to refuse to play the game.

Maybe the only thing that makes sense is write the books, offer them via Kickstarter and folks who are interested can get them early and have some sense of participation in the process. Because the alternative of submission or scratching up outreach or promotion only to throw things into the seethe (see first paragraph) just doesn't make sense. It's an endless succession of auditions or writing checks to buy banner ads to get coverage (don't be so shocked). I'm not in a position to do that. Hell, I'm not in the position to pay an editor a thousand dollars to go over the copy in my books, much less get developmental editing, because, get this, that's more than any of these books has made or will ever.

I'm tired of seeing the independent creator not regarded as that, but as a source of income (from big companies mostly, looking at you, Adobe, but MS is as bad only with a reasonable price tag), or a source of prestige, or as a discourse target. I only ever wanted to write books but had the misfortune of entering an industry in steep decline, only to be sold a bunch of hot air once things went digital about the long tail and evergreen backlist items and how it was finally your time. The only thing that ever made sense to me was writing, but the process has done its level best to destroy that enthusiasm. This, I know, is where I'm told to Git Gud and activate Hustle Grindset Mode and split myself off from the requirements of marketing. Which sounds like sociopathy to me. I have enough trouble as it is.

I know, again, nobody likes to think about this. We like to think about successes, enough so that we redefine them. "You finished the book, that's a success." Well, I've finished, ah, many of them. It's never felt like that. It's just created a sense of impending anxiety and What Am I Gonna Do To Make This One Work. Maybe they're not there to work. Maybe they're not there to do anything other than to spark an experience in the reader. Protip: writing these isn't about exorcising something from the writer's soul, else they'd just write the one book and stop. Just like the myth of character catharsis, dig? Only if that character catches on, well guess what, it's franchise purgatory where nothing ever grows or changes except the side characters.

But I'd kill for a successful franchise. Don't kid yourself. I still hunger for that recognition. Every day. I know. The Buddha is displeased, but perhaps not disappointed.

Anyways, as I write this sort of withdrawal from the game itself, I am looking at what Adobe is doing and considering tossing half of my lifetime learning and using Photoshop because I'm just tired of being treated to having my work picked over for their profit and I'm paying for the privilege. Not to mention the wholesale embrace of pushbutton content via AI scripting which, read the room, Adobe. I guess if it means that someone is buying a subscription for the software, that's enough, right?

Getting treated as disposable is something nobody should have to deal with. Nor should you foist it on yourself. So work in a level where you simply can't be. This isn't me giving up on writing, but it is me rejecting the business.

Until next time.

FULL BLEED: THE FINGERPRINTS OF TIME OVER ALL OF US, UNEVEN

Went down to Wonder-Con this last weekend. For those of you who don't know, Wonder-Con used to be the second biggest comic show on the west coast (pretty sure Seattle superceded it some ten plus years ago -- whenever they moved from the ball field over to the convention center there). It also used to be in San Francisco, not Orange County (which is not Los Angeles, where the con organizers have been trying to make a second show a year work for some time -- this in addition to the big mammajamma of a show in San Diego every year.)

For the record, I'm not the biggest fan of Wonder-Con. Don't get me wrong. It's a decent small/big show. But more on that later. I'm not a fan of the venue they're attached to, or the fact that they like to post it over Easter weekend. The Anaheim Convention Center is very old, maybe sixties for the original building, seventies? That's nobody's fault. It just is. The fact that there's nothing really do do around it, unless you like expensive franchise food or Downtown Disney, is not a point in its favor. Nor is the general traffic level, etc etc. I'm also old and grouchy, so take this with a grain of salt.

And as I said above, the show itself is fine, though there's not that much of interest for me. There's plenty of vendors. Not a lot who serve up the stuff that I'm digging around for. That being a mix of silver and bronze age comics and books, usually on the cheap side, so long as it's all holding together. I like looking at all the toys that I'll never buy, the collections of original art that I can't afford (and to be snickered at by the dudes in the booth if I dare make a slip -- word to the wise, don't fucking antagonize your potential clients, you'll sell more.)

What I didn't see a lot of there was new comics. IDW was the biggest regular comics publisher there. Prism was there as always, but I don't recall even seeing Fantagraphics. I'm sure I'm missing one or two, but they were not big ones. Plenty of very small indie presses with their own books, that I don't know if they even made the back of Previews or not (real estate I have some level of familiarity with, even if my plastique is old, as the metaphor goes.) And, oddly, a number of indie books with a $20 price range. For a single issue. Which is not a price any regular person is going to pay and maybe not even a regular indie comics person. Yes, I know comics are very expensive to produce. Please. I've been there and have done the calculations relatively recently. So, that's a thing. That's a very steep entry point.

There were a handful of artists I recognized in Artist's Alley, all of them doing what seemed to be a pretty good business, at least I hope they were. Not a lot I knew personally who were around when I was, but then my contact list gets older every day just like me.

There was a lot of indie craft sale work for sale there. Some of which was inspired. Some of which was two things put together only with kawaii for flavoring. I get it. You need name recognition to drag folks in. Yowza yowza yowza! Getcher red hots here! One thin dime gets you an eyeful of the wonders of the world. Someday I'll write about how we need barkers working these booths, salt some shills in the passers-by, return to tradition. There was some beautiful work to be seen, but nothing that really stuck for me. I don't need dice caddies or lanyard charms or little 3D printed geegaws. I don't need geek lifestyle accessories. I'm not that type of geek. I've got my books and that's what I'm after. I don't need anything to say yes, I like books so you can pick me out if I'm walking around and maybe you like books too. But I come from a different geologic age of this sort of thing. Talk about the last neanderthal being eaten by the first cro-magnon or however the metaphor goes. I'm positively saurian in a mammalian world. That's okay. My blood's cool. I run at my own pace.

I did make some nice scores at the show, saved from bargain boxes or pulled out of bins in one of the far corners with nary a slabbed comic to be seen. But, let's be honest, they're junk to anyone who isn't paying attention. That Star Raiders graphic novel by Maggin and Garcia-Lopez? That's gold. So is the Thomas/Russell/Gilbert Elric collection that I paid all of five bucks for. I did pay for some top-dollar items, namely a collection of Alex Nino's artwork published by his family with a nice sketch inside (for cheaper than a copy I'd seen at a secondhand store last month, by a substantial margin.) Grabbed some cheap comics that got the eyebrow raise from the guy running the booth like "What are these doing in the three buck bin?" but a deal's a deal, my friend. Due dilligence and all. Gotta turn over rocks to find stuff, and there's a lot of rocks there.

I didn't do much in terms of programming, other than appearing on a panel about The Beat's twentieth anniversary. I'm not sure I had much to offer (other than the fact that nobody but nobody is getting rich out of this except the capital groups that buy then bleed then bust out once-good if not great pop culture websites -- but there's so many of those it's easy to lose count and courage.) It is very very weird to consider what my time in comics fandom looks like. Even just 2004 looks like an utterly different landscape than 2024. I won't go into detail here (though I did leave a record of those years in The Collected Full Bleed and Highway 62 Revisited, which are available as ebooks -- I have yet to reformat them from the Createspace editions that I offered some almost fifteen years ago.) It's odd to feel like an elder statesman instead of a dork who just hung around the hobby for too long. Anyways, thanks to Heidi for offering me a slot on the panel. We've known each other for a pretty long time now (an eon in internet terms).

What else at the show? How about the publishers who aren't actually publishers but want to appear like ones so that someone can acquire their IP if not the operation lock, stock and barrel so that they don't have to play musical chairs any more. The books look slick (sometimes) but you get close and you see they're anti-life. There's no there there. It's like The Thing (Carpenter's version) deciding to disguise itself as a comic book so it can lure someone closer so as to eat them wetly and noisily. This is a theme we'll come back to if you stick around the rest of this undoubtedly-too-long essay. Anyways, I don't like those guys. There's no reason to read it if it only exists to be bought by the Financial Class, not by customers. (Pretty sure the customers could tell the difference too.)

There was a pretty large island of indie authors and I can tell you that people don't come to a comics show to check out indie books. At least on Friday it was relatively un-trafficked and most of the folks behind the tables had a look I recognized because I wore that look an awful lot the years I was out there flogging Strangeways. It's rough out there if you're someone nobody knows. And even if people do know you. Even if you were writing a run of acclaimed comics and you offer some of your creator-owned titles and nobody even blinks at them. Yeah, rough.

Anyways, the show itself was fine. About what I expected. People were spending money. Funko wasn't the biggest single booth like they were last year. But as an alternate marketplace for comics? Kinda hard times. I'm sure I'll go back next year (though I won't need a 3-day badge like I bought this year.)

Retired up to a friend's place in Gardena, had some really next-level tonkatsu ramen with enough garlic to make even me sit up and take notice. Drove up to my hotel in Burbank in the on/off rain, which of course makes LA traffic just that much weirder. Either people become super extra cautious or they just throw caution to the wind and drive extra angry. Finally got to the place, which was not actually in Burnbank, but the weird Burbank/Glendale interzone of non-places, places that simply cease to exist after 5pm, office parks and extended stay motels. I didn't care. I was very tired, having been up since 2:30am (earlier than I needed to make the plane -- stupid brain.)

In bed at ten or so.

Then the fire alarm went off at 12:22.

I was so out of it, I needed a minute to figure out where I even was and how best to respond. It took a moment to tease out, between the brain fog and the earsplitting klaxon. Got dressed, hobbled around on my gimpy knee (did something to it at the show) and got outside in the insistently drizzling rain, barely under the awning. Took about half an hour to figure out that it was indeed a false alarm and it was okay to go back in. Blacked out for several hours, not long enough.

Breakfast back in Gardena, at Gardena Bowl (which also offers billiards and videogames), at the Hawaiian restaurant there. Lots of amazing options, both downhome American and pan-Asian Hawaiian. Opted for the kimchi and bacon fried rice with a couple eggs on top. (Oh right, this was after a doughnut I snuck in before the drive down, over at Donut Prince in Burbank, which is a regular stop for me.) Back to a longtime friend's home (probably the longest I've known anyone who I'm still seeing even irregularly) and just hanging out for several hours before returning to Burbank.

Picked up another pair of friends to carpool over to the night's entertainment. That being Nightmare Alley (the original) on a silver nitrate print over at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. I'd originally hoped to turn it into a photo expedition too, but the weather was making that a less appealing idea by the second. The rain wasn't so bad, just grinding. The cold, however, was unseasonable for LA at all, much less this time of year. Yes, LA gets cold, even bitter. I know my friends from the Midwest and Great Lakes region are gonna laugh at me. I'll die on this hill. I'll die cold.

So, going to see a film during an American Cinematheque festival is pretty much like going to church. Maybe not as quietly solemn, but certainly on the serious side. After introductions and testimonials, there was the warning of the dangers of hellfire. Or at least the very real possibility that the inherent instability of the nitrate stock would yield surprising and fiery results, so there were admonitions to recognize the authority of the fire alarm should it sound like Gabriel's very trumpet. Amen.

Thing about actual physical film cannisters is that over time, they all develop their own scratches and scars. Frames get dropped out because they're simply too degraded to risk. Time itself becomes manifest on the stock, fingerprints flickering by making those luminous scenes not diminished but increased. You're having an experience. You're in a moment. And this thing has been passed down for nearly eighty years, improbably surviving its own instability, both cultural and chemical. And you're there with a couple hundred people, some of whom are friends, but all of whom are there for the same thing. For an actual god damned experience, marked in time made real, or at least the illusion of it.

I'm not going to offer much in terms of a review, other than it was really good, dovetailing along several avenues of my interest, crime and faith and culture and humans simply being imperfect and not problems to solve. If you have the opportunity to see it, you should avail yourself of it. For nothing else if not to see this representation of a world that's been gone for a long, long time. Of course we're all past that, being conned by faith and visions from beyond the veil. We've all grown past that, right?

Sure we have.

Afterwards, took said pair of friends over to Tommy's (they'd never been) on Hollywood Bl. I'd have preferred the one at Beverly and Rampart, but expedience and cold weather made this the wiser choice. It was good, not great. Like any place, it all depends on the crew and a variety of other factors. Still, great to sit down out of the rain and partake in the not at all dubious pleasures of a chili cheeseburger and chili fries, even if the root beer wasn't mixed right and would have made a good base for napalm, gasoline to taste.

Drove back on those slick as oracular-offered entrails with colored gemstones on the windshield coruscating and changing as we passed by streetlights and billboards lit so bright you could read by them. On the moon.

Another long day. Another promised early appointment tomorrow. Back to the eerie interzone and this time no middle of the night fire alarms.

Sunday took me back to my old stomping grounds of Orange County. Yes, I spent the formative years (and then some) of my life there. Yes, it's weird to be from one of the most hated (whether casual or serious) places in the state if not the country. But there's a part of me for which that will always be home. It's your problem if you don't get it.

Dumping rain overnight and into the morning made for some memento mori moments on the drive down. There's so much concrete in the Southland and sometimes there's just no place for that water to go. So it ponds on the fast and slow lanes, but with overcast skies, it's very hard to see, so maybe you drive only as fast as you feel comfortable hitting two inches of water that is doing its damnedest to break contact between the tires and the road. Bad enough that CHP had northbound traffic shut down around Carson (where the giant gas works is -- you've seen it in movies, trust me). I made it down okay. Hung with still more friends and caught up over black coffee and frittata. At least that's what I think it was. Hard to go wrong with eggs and cheese other ingredients. We talked while the rain ebbed and flowed, coming down hard enough at one point that it was tough to talk over it. Decided I wasn't going back to the show again even though I thought I might. Guess I just don't love comics that much.

Drove up around sunset as the storm was finally breaking up. 605 to the 5 to the 101 and watching the city sparkle in the clarity of after the rain, City Hall lit up like a big blue tombstone and the city jail (as depicted on the front of City of Quartz) looking so tough that not even entropy itself could ever break in or out. My destination that night (foolishly, according to some) was Universal Citywalk.

What's Universal Citywalk, you ask? Well, it's like Downtown Disney but for Universal Studios. It's a place designed for the frictionless dispersal of brands. It's a place that is not really a place, entirely ersatz and made because someone had something to sell you. I know, you say that's everywhere, but this is really that. It's like that shapeshifting eponymous Thing, only this time it digested a mall and said "Here's a way to really pack them in. I'm gonna eat like a king forever." It's all brands.

That said, it has some lovely old neon pieces that I really wish were in a museum. I'd rather have seen them there. As it was, I paid to park so I didn't have to park on Cahuenga and walk the mile or so just to get there. Though I kinda wish I had, because I wanted to get some good shots of that new Godzilla billboard down there. But it was not to be. And I was lazy.

At least I did get the pictures that I was after. And then some. But I didn't eat there. I didn't even eat at Pink's (though I never have -- but that'd have been true if I had bought a hot dog there. It's not real. It's not an actual place.) I drifted and detourned, snapping pictures that jumped out at me. I finally got to see the Earl Carroll Theater girl neon sign. I took a lot of pictures of tree branches with out-of-focus neon behind them. I took a lot of pictures with long shutter speeds because those are like easy art.

After I'd had my fill of that, I drove over to the restored Vista Theater on Sunset. The outside looks just great, though some of the neon is already fritzing out, but that's the nature of that particular beast. It was great to see the place back in ship-shape, as it had fallen on some hard times and was even on the beaten-up side of things in the 90s when I'd last been. Wandered down to try and shoot the El Rey theater marquee on Miracle Mile, but they don't run the lights except when shows are actively going on. My luck was run out. Done for the night and with a nearly-drained camera battery, I went back to exile at the extended stay motel.

Up early to meet another friend at the NoHo Diner, which is just a couple blocks from where I used to work, right there on Lankershim and Magnolia. The diner was there then, maybe it always was. Saw the Thai place we used to get lunch at maybe once a week and the pizza place that we hit just as often. The building I used to work in got demolished and turned into WeWork suites or something. I wonder how long that bubble is gonna stay un-popped or maybe it's already gone. Had too many biscuits and gravy servings, but the worst was yet to come.

Saw another friend over in town, talked about a lot of things. One subject that came up with nearly everyone I talked to was how everything's just waiting right now. The money is not being spent. That strike you heard about last summer, sure it got resolved, but there's another two in the wings and the big boys don't want to put anything on the table in the meantime. Yet everyone who's out there doing the actual work is still operating like the strike is in place, only they're not picketing. The dudes at the top think they can survive while the trunk and roots of the system wither. I wonder how long they think they can do that. How long they can just sequester the cash that they've made from their deals and just wreck the business that they looted in the first place. I'm afraid nobody likes the answers to that one. Maybe they'll get smart and realize the money only has value if it moves around. Or we're gonna lose a decade of that business entirely. I don't want to ponder that possibility, even though it doesn't touch me directly.

I already opted out of the business. Yeah, I sell books. On a vastly smaller scale because it's not my main income. Is that a selfish place to stand? I dunno. In my case, it's recognition that nobody in the entertainment world is gonna want what I have until they want it. Which might not be ever. But if I go around chasing trends, well, ain't nobody gonna want that. So it's persevere in the acid fog of the meteor hitting and live off of stolen dinosaur eggs until conditions change. I know I can do that, but not everybody can.

I know I should talk more about the kickstarter and how that all worked out. Not here. Maybe somewhere else.

Anyways, I hope the money realizes that it has to work or its going to shut everything down. Taking all those yields and just parking them in corporate silos may sound like a great idea, but it's going to make all those studios they bought into dead assets. I know that entertainment will survive, but it doesn't have to be this way, doesn't have to be this grim and lean. But what do I know. I'm not a genius with an MBA.

Grabbed a friend for lunch at Chili John's, which opened in 1900 and nearly got wiped out by the pandemic. Great food, unique atmosphere, almost a time machine, an actual place run by actual people. Chili that could cut through battleship steel. Got a chili dog (bacon-wrapped) with onions, fritos, sweet pickle and mustard. Sounds terrifying on paper and you'd be right. But it tasted divine.

Wandered a bit of the Valley, marveled at how even San Fernando Bl. has changed in the five years since I've been there. Time making marks everywhere.

Returned home, marveled at the radiance of the setting sun on the people movers near the airport, hitting everything just right so that you might understand what the vikings were getting at with the idea of a rainbow bridge taking you to a better place.

Hope my next visit isn't so long a time away.

FULL BLEED: DIESEL POWER

Sure, let's blog again. It's been awhile.

So, what's gone on since I last posted here? Well, a lot of the end part of last year was burned up by taking care of my wife who'd had an illness flare up. That took a lot of physical and mental energy. Add to that the holidays and all they require. Yeah, kinda rough. Don't want to repeat it and I know full well that I'm not in charge of that decision.

Around the first of the year, maybe a touch before, I decided to do something different in terms of putting out books. Or rather I figured out that I couldn't keep doing what I've been doing. That being put books onto Amazon and hope the algorithm would turn readers onto them. That doesn't even work in the movies. I know. But when your books aren't going to make money, spending money on ads and book tours and buying reviews (which is about what it takes to get more than handful of reviews when you're at my level of non-fame) just doesn't make a lot of sense. Oh maybe if I intended in being a prolific indie author or wanted to get into the Kindle Unlimited ecosystem (hint: I do not.)

Besides, this was stuff that my publisher was supposed to be doing. Yeah. The publisher that I was no longer affiliated with after I figured out they were more interested in doing RPG materials than putting my book out and after a couple years of missed opportunities and kicked cans (all of which ended up costing me money as I paid the editor for their time and work and the cover artist for their time and work -- yes, they'd been paid by the publisher but I didn't want the book that they weren't going to put out to be the reason they took a hit; so I paid them out of my pocket.)

I figured I'd try something new. I'd do a kickstarter. We all know what those are, though I had to explain what it was to my mother in law. I figured since I'm nobody and don't have a record, I'd start small. Five hundred dollars. I was hoping for twenty readers to buy in. Twenty folks to look over what I was offering and then say "yeah, this sounds like something I'd be into". Needless to say, given my history in publishing, I expected this to not fund and for me to just return to what I'd done before and maybe put out the couple books I'd had written and walk away from it. I have other things I should be spending my energy on anyways.

So last Wednesday, not even a week ago, I post the kickstarter campaign, after putting together the text and graphics and all that. I didn't really study other kickstarters or project pitches. I didn't record a project video and probably won't ever do that. You want to see me on video, you can check me out at this segment I did for the Lovecraft E-Zine podcast last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73yInUp7Nso&ab_channel=LovecrafteZinePodcast-HangOutWithUs%21

I simply wrote up the background of the project and a bit about myself, repurposed some of the cover art from the Hazeland books that I'd reworked around the end of last year (yes, I had energy enough to do those because doing graphic design doesn't require actual focus on my part -- weird to say, but 100% true -- I just go into another mode and don't... think so much.) Put all that together and just mashed the launch button.

That $500 figure? I got it before the end of the first business day. Mostly via posting on Bluesky. I didn't even hit Instagram until the day after. I haven't used Twitter in actual months, maybe since early summer? Gosh, I don't even remember now. Maybe I should post there. But that'd be craven and transactional and yeah...

Right now? I'm up to $1300, or just shy of it, and 39 backers. That's the first week. Granted, the action was fast and furious in the first 48 and tailed off. I'm aware that means my audience isn't all that big.

But it is bigger than I'd thought so before that. My books don't get much in terms of reviews at Amazon or Goodreads. I've sold books to people at shows (though the last time that didn't go so well - one over the entire weekend). It's easy to be disconnected from the audience. Which isn't a surprise as the platforms that you might build an audience on, well they want that relationship monetized and they make it hard for you to actually get a hold of everyone. Luckily that's not really happening on Bluesky. Yet. It will. Facebook has set the standard for that, for the whole "make a service and then get people used to that reach then break off chunks of that and get creators to pay to get it back" and no. I'm not doing that. But nearly every other platform is. Which sucks.

This, however, has been an amazing surprise. I know. I'm getting worked up about 40 readers. Which means I'm accepting the New Normal. For a long time, I played at it but never really did. And that just made me feel like I was writing books and chucking them into the void. Much less never getting paid for them (which is another set of conversations entirely.) I thought that getting a contract would help make things feel real. And it's more complicated than that, much more. But getting a contract with a publisher that can't... do anything other than put the book out and hope for the same sort of magic to happen, that's not healthy. I should have understood that in 2019 back when I thought that being published actually mattered in the ecosystem of readers and bloggers and reviewers and all that.

And yes, at a certain point, it certainly does matter. I was not at that point. Nor will I be at that point. I'm becoming more okay with this. It's still not okay, but I'm adjusting to it.

This is all something new and I'm trying to learn that what I think is well and good but maybe having some other people out there behind you helps a lot more than I was ever going to admit. Does that make sense? I always knew that the books were real. It was just draining to see the world not act the same way, or to have that level of connection stripped from you (but Amazon got their cut, Ingram got their cut, etc.)

No, it's not a living. Yes, on an absolute scale it's something like a buck an hour or less for the work I've put in on it. Okay, that might be an exaggeration. But not much of one. It is not paying the bills. But then writing doesn't for most of the people who actually write. Yeah, sorry, but it's true. If you can make it work, my hat is off to you. I could not. I couldn't write anything people wanted badly enough to publish, that would be Bookstagrammable or a viral moment on TikTok. I didn't build the following in the nineties to bedcome an elder statesman. I'm just a dude who writes books that don't neatly fit into any particular genre (I've also come to the conclusion that genre itself is a categorizing term that's kinda cancerous and narrow-minding, but that's a rant for another time.)

All that said, I've found a small audience. It's hopefully something I'll be able to build up from. And maybe I'll even get more folks to take a look at this one and contribute more to the financial and mental nest egg. That's the job until the end of the month or so. Then it's finish the layout (including thank-yous to the contributors) and maybe a brief foreword. Then to Wonder-Con, I think. Let's go back to a comic show.

Yes, I went last year. I'll try not to be so dramatic.

Then it's plan the next campaign, this one for Fake Believe. Then I gotta write that fourth book, The Missing Pieces.

And adjust to the way things are now. But that's an ongoing process.

Thanks again.

Oh, right. That Kickstarter link. Right here.

PAST THE TREELINE

Okay, so in honor of passing a thousand bucks on the kickstarter for All Waters Are Graves, I'm posting this, a whole-ass short horror story that I wrote a while back and shopped around and got precisely zero interest in. It's over 5k words, so that means 99% of outlets aren't interested in it since I'm not a big draw. I doubt it's graphic enough for most any horror outlet. It's not SF. It's probably not even fantasy. But it is a crime story. Hope you enjoy it.

All rights reserved, yadda yadda.

--

The flashlight beam crawled only a few paces ahead of Lyn before it was consumed by the forest. Either the bright white circle danced and melted across a tree with scarred bark and shaggy dripping needles or it pushed out into a darkness deep as a child’s eyes widened by panic. He flicked the light off, deciding that he didn’t want to see whatever had made that sound a moment ago. The shotgun was cradled in his right but it didn’t offer much in terms of comfort against the cold damp. Or the fear. And it sure as hell didn’t make him feel better about taking this job that his cousin Gilly had tricked him into.

No, that wasn’t right, he thought. I tricked myself. ‘Cause I was afraid I was gonna end up like Angelo with his big wet face and fear so taut it made his skin hard as bone. Play or pay.

He could only sling pizzas or try to pay attention through a whole shift bagging groceries for so long before the boredom and drudgery and people getting in his face about how his mask was off his nose or he wasn’t putting the bread on top got to him. I didn’t want mushrooms on that, they sneered, when all he wanted to do was to get home to his converted shed out on his father’s land and get high as fuck because that was the only way to sleep at night. But get high as fuck enough and that costs money. Money that he didn’t always have because he flushed every job he could down the shitter without a second thought. Not that there were many to start with up this far up in NorCal where Oregon is just a baseball throw away, so long as you clear the tall trees and avoid the growers you don’t know.

And then he owed money to the dudes who let him get high. Gilly being one of them. He always had that easy yellow smile and bright eyes under that mop of red hair. Even after everything they’d seen together growing up, even after the stuff that had happened when they were just dumbass kids. Even after Angelo never coming home. Kids don’t think about consequence. Nothing sticks because they’re immortal or just too stupid to think the rules apply to them, whether they’re laws that people come up with or laws that run deeper than that, deep like rivers carving out canyons over millions of years.

But Lyn was learning consequence, soaking it up now.

Three nights ago, back in the liquor store parking lot, it was all “Don’t worry, fam. I got you. You work guard a season or two and you make all that money back, plus some more. And hey, you show you dependable,” Gilly leaned back against the side of his green and brown cammo Toyota Tundra and took a suck off his vape, a real lung-buster. Then he smiled and breathed out white clouds that turned to veils in the cold light. “If you dependable, the world can be you oyster.” His finger pressed hard on Lyn like a drunk bullet.

Lyn didn’t think about what would’ve happened if he’d said no. He didn’t have to. Dudes either worked for the grow and kept their mouths shut or they got to return to nature. Usually in hamburger-sized pieces.

He made the deal a week ago.

Tonight was his third night running perimeter watch.

Two nights ago, Gilly had shoved the shotgun into Lyn’s hands and told him never to come to work baked, stoned, or fucked-up in any way. There was no smile or wink or nod, game seven and you got cancer serious. Then the two of them walked the perimeter of the grow where the haphazardly-cleared land and discarded jugs of fertilizer and piles of PVC pipe to run half-assed irrigation ended. To where the forest began and went without limit.

“We haven’t had trouble in a long time,” Gilly said. “So you got it easy. Yeah, had to run those Mex out of here, dipshits. And the Altarboys after that. Double dipshits.”

“I heard the Altarboys got killed by a bear,” Lyn said without thinking about it.

Gilly’s backhand hit him on the chest hard enough that he fumbled the shotgun, safety off, safety always off because you didn’t know when you’d have to go. His heart gripped like crystal chased with Monsters.

“Who told you that shit?”

“Jesus, Gilly. That was just talk from the deputies over beer and wings and slices. That’s all. No disrespect.”

His green eyes burned under the copper fringes. “No, no. It’s cool. We, me and Poly and Gameboy and Cheeto. We took those fuckers out, took ‘em old school.” Gilly mimed Poly pushing his thick glasses up his nose, just so I’d know who he was talking about. Then he whisked out his Desert Eagle and held it sideways guaranteeing he couldn’t make the shot. But he always did that. “Took them dancing and left ‘em in the woods. That was a message.”

The words ‘left in the woods’ snagged Lyn hard as a nail sticking out of a fence post. There was only one kid that phrase meant for Lyn. And it was that thing with Angelo. It was just a prank. But Gilly had never looked back at those eyes, moonlight-bright as they outran the forest to the clearing north of town. Back then the trees came a lot closer. Now they were clear up until the slope of the mountainside kept even the most determined rogue cutters at bay. Even if the odd one still went out and didn’t come home and maybe the body was found later, like the Altarboys had been, beaten and chewed.

“So why the bear talk, G?”

He holstered the gun and grinned. “You think Deputy Dawg and his partners want it known that they can’t keep a lid on things? They gotta look like they’re in charge and I’m fine letting them look like that. Earn they pay.” He took a vape hit, exhaling fingers of vapor sweet as a spilled orange soda. “Why do you think the bear talk, fam?”

Because bear talk made more sense than talk about skunk apes and men that were eight feet tall and made of muscle stronger than cordwood. Lyn bit his tongue.

“They said the bodies were all ripped-up. But you didn’t do…”

Gilly had been into shit and other trouble for as long as Lyn had known him. Get into a gunfight and you’re not going to feel bad about sending the competition home a little heavier from lead. But to mangle bodies?

“Oh, that shit was bears. For real. What else would it be?”

Lyn ate his tongue behind his teeth before talking. Gilly was gonna make him say it.

“We aren’t all that far from Willow Creek, so I thought, y’know.”

“I don’t ‘y’know.’” His grin pulled tight with strained mischief and scorned consequence. “What?”

“You’re gonna make me say it?”

“Guess so.”

“Fine. Bigfoot. Sasquatch. All that shit.”

Gilly stared at him for a long time, dopey and angry in equal weight.

It was stupid to ask if anyone believed in that stuff. Believing didn’t make no nevermind when it came down to broken branches with maybe hair on them or ululating shrieking howls that could’ve been the wind but made your heart clutch and skip as bad as dad’s truck on a cold morning, or any morning. You didn’t have to believe in gravity, just understand that stepping off the mountain would kill you dead. Belief didn’t enter into it. That was for Sundays if you bothered, maybe Christmas and Easter.

Lyn wondered if Angelo believed or what gripped him that night had just been fear. Didn’t enter into it.

“Nah, man. All that stuff is to get tourists out here, and it’s a pain in my ass. Gotta plan for hikers stumbling across the grow or worse, those stupid drones taking video.

“That’s what you gotta really watch out for here,” he said, sticking a knife into things. “But the bears do sometimes keep the question-asking to a minimum.”

But this didn’t answer Lyn’s own question as to why he was walking what amounted to perimeter patrol all night long.

The second night had started the same with Gilly shoving the gun into his hand hard and awkward. His eyes were bloody and whatever he’d been smoking hadn’t been strong enough. So much for not coming to the job wrecked.

“What gives?”

Gilly looked Lyn up and down in a frenzy. He righted the weapon and checked the safety. The sharp smell of powder hit him harder than any vape scent that might’ve clung to Gilly.

“Weird shit just a little while ago. And I think Poly might be selling us out. But that’s at an end.” Gilly raised the vape box and took a hit that did nothing to calm him, shuddering the entire time.

“Chill, man. It can’t be that bad. So he bailed.”

“Poly wouldn’t bail. Not unless he got a better offer.”

“Who’s been firing the gun, Gilly?” Lyn thought about holding a weapon that for all he knew had been fired at someone ten minutes ago and he was just taking the fall for it.

“Oh, me,” he said as if that could have been the only possible answer. “Saw a bear wandering around, near the treeline. Big fucker.”

“And that drives them off?”

“They sure don’t like it any, no.”

The sun was setting swollen and red as a knife wound, sky above it a clotting mess of color and clouds all fingernail-scratched behind the trees.

“But they’re not coming back.”

“I dunno, man. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do.” He sucked and held it a moment then exhaled. The mist pulled away from him and revealed only more agitation.

“Who they?”

“Bears, man.” He shook his head to mock the openness of Lyn’s question. There was only one possible answer. “Just bears, like a little family of them.”

Gilly wasn’t saying half of what had happened. Lyn’s stomach tied itself in knots as he checked the gun. It had been fired to the last.

“Hey, G. We need more shells in this thing.”

“We’re gonna need more than that,” he said, without presence or thought.

“What?”

“Bullets. We’re gonna need more bullets. Right. Let’s get loaded up and then get you walking. Gotta walk that line.”

His hands shook as he pulled out the box of Federals and passed them to Lyn.

“Damn. This is heavy as hell. What’s in here?”

“Slugs. Slugs are the only thing that’ll stop a bear. And you gotta hit it right.”

“You said this was a scattergun, just drive looky-loos away.”

“Slug’ll do the same thing,” he said with a hollow gravity. “Now get walking. I gotta go burn some trash. Don’t come poking around it, neither.”

Lyn slid out, watching Gilly standing by the kitchenette table of the dingy trailer and just vibrating in place, so wound up that he was fit to explode. Last thing he saw was Gilly pulling a can of gas out from under the sink and just staring out the dirty window.

Resting on the steps Lyn stopped and put all eight shots in, then pocketed the rest of the shells because he didn’t want to feel like an asshole just leaving them there for kids to find. Kids could get hurt just fucking around. They wouldn’t even consider the possibility of something permanent or real happening.

Then he began to think that making pizzas might not be so bad.

But being undependable would be worse, so he went and walked the dead space between the field and the trees. They loomed there shouldered together in places so tight that not even a raccoon could get through. But other spots were wide and open, grown at a diagonal to one another, almost pushed aside by hands too powerful to contemplate. The spaces there were scooped out dark, like teeth pulled out.

The night was quiet, critters chittering low with even the frogs peeping softly as if in deference to something much bigger than themselves. Somewhere near the scratched-out garbage pit on the other side of the grow, an orange light danced weakly as a snake that had been stepped on. Gilly was burning his trash and Lyn didn’t want to know the first god damned thing about what was in there.

Wind breathed through the forest, warped by running through branches and needles and over wrangles of tree bark. Sadness was wrung out of it, sadness without words or language, a soft wailing expressed through sound drawn out of a soul somewhere out there. The chill it brought made its way down Lyn’s neck and back, through his guts and both ass and bladder clutching closed. He stood there stuck. The only thing he’d ever heard in his life like that was the sound that Angelo’s mother made when she was told that her boy was never coming home, some two weeks after fucking around in the woods with his friends. They came out but he never had or would. He heard that crying a lot after that. It took him a long time to find a way to dull it.

Enough weed, enough whiskey and everything got obliterated, sure as stepping off a cliff. It wasn’t so bad now. Just once or twice a week that Lyn needed fat hits and burning slugs to put consequence aside, make it small enough to forget in those quiet moments.

The forest sound had been gone for who knew how long. Lyn found it within himself to take another step and instead of the soft crunch of needles or litter there was a click and snap as something held then gave under his weight. He crouched down and reached where his step had fallen, finding something cold and unyielding, with a sharp edge.

Poly’s glasses. But no Poly attached to them. A sticky dark smudge clung to one of the lenses and the frame. And the arm. He didn’t need to look hard to know what it was. He’d smelled blood before.

The light was for shit. So Lyn swallowed hard and pushed the bile back as he reached for his flashlight then cast it around. It played over the ground, lingering at a spot nearby where the needles had been disrupted and scattered, unlike the rest of the clearing at the forest’s edge. Dark liquid spilled then smeared against a jutting of rock just tall enough to trip someone. It might’ve been Poly’s. But the scene didn’t make sense. Lyn caught a vibe of a struggle and a fight, but not much of one, more dragging and tossing, pretty one-sided. And Poly was a big enough guy that was easier said than done.

The smell of blood grew stronger now, like he was swimming in it. Lyn dragged his boot through a bunch of pine needles clumped up by the knucklebone rocks that were dark with the stuff. The mat stuck as a whole, moving slowly. When it finally gave, the dirt there was black and sticky in a meaty spatter. Uncovering the whole of it, he found the mark more than a couple feet across, made bigger by dragging. Whoever it had been, they hadn’t gotten far. Lyn followed the marks to a place near the treeline where they smeared and scratched out flat and then all but disappeared.

A cold thought crawled down him, twitching through muscle and bone until it rested at the base of his spine. This wasn’t one awful thing, but two. Somebody got hurt bad, probably shot a few steps behind him, dragged himself this far and then was lifted and taken away. And there was something telling Lyn that it was dragged into the forest, not away. Didn’t explain the glasses though. Or did it?

Wind seethed through the grass of the forest floor and it made a sound like breath through teeth closed tight. Lyn was making the same sound without even knowing it, echoing that primal inhalation. The cold thing at the base of his spine told him he was right. Poly wasn’t coming back. But then what was Gilly all wound up about? Unless it was just him covering tracks.

Lyn peered at the marks by his feet, now-dried blood in the brown dirt, tough as concrete. They were hieroglyphic to him, obviuos but without meaning. He looked again at the train of tracks that circled around the splatter behind and the place of departure before. There were half-erased boot-tracks, that much was clear, little bits of tread marks that didn’t match his own.

But maybe they matched Poly’s. And probably for sure matched Gilly’s. Just pieces of them, though. No complete prints; like someone else had walked all around them after. Maybe whoever had scattered the pine needles and brush in a half-assed cover up had done it. Maybe it was that.

Whatever had happened, Lyn decided that he didn’t know shit about it. And he wasn’t in any hurry to bring it up with Gilly. He tapped his fingers on the broken glasses frame in his hand, cursing himself. His prints had to come off it, which would make it tough to pull anyone else’s as well. But he wasn’t in any mood to burn for whatever Gilly had done. Lyn rolled the frame around in the fabric of his long flannel shirt then tossed them back into the trees, nowhere near where he’d stepped on them. Just dumb luck that he even found them to even start thinking about questions. Just like it was dumb luck that got him this job. Dumb luck that he hadn’t ended up like Angelo had.

He tried to figure out something smarter than just doing tonight’s shift and playing stupid. For the life of him, he couldn’t. Gilly figures out that he knows and he’s dogmeat, too. Poly was in the operation. Lyn was just hired help.

A gap in the tree trunks ahead called out to him, feeling like he could slip right through it pretty easily and just disappear. Just not come back. Maybe he could wander far enough back to find Angelo’s bones and bring them back to his mother, tell him that he was sorry, but at least you don’t have to bury an empty coffin and pretend now.

He wanted a drink and a couple hits. He wanted that more than disappearing into the woods. At least the drunk you can come back from.

Lyn continued his patrol, keeping an eye on the steady burning bonfire on the far side of the trailer. Whatever it was burning took a lot of effort or there was just a lot of it. He walked and hoped to hell that Gilly could keep it under control, knowing full well that he couldn’t.

At daylight, Gilly met him, hollow-eyed and sooty, doused in the smell of soot and gasoline beneath that.

“Any trouble out there?” Whatever had bothered him before was gone now, more likely doped-out.

“Nothing at all,” Lyn said. “Didn’t see a god damned thing.” He shoved the shotgun into Gilly’s arms, then followed with the box of shells.

“See you tonight, then.”

“Yeah, like I got a choice.”

Lyn didn’t wait for the wiseacre reply.

Lyn diddled around thinking about calling the cops. Maybe the local deputies were goofballs or maybe they were even in on it. That’s the problem with money. It gets everywhere. And while Gilly wasn’t living like a king, the guys he paid up to did. He thought about how little it would take to pay off a deputy in an ex-logging town with no prospects anyways. Probably a lot less than he thought.

So he gave in and went back to take another bite of the shit sandwich. Sometimes all you can do is take that next bite. He stopped off for a bacon cheeseburger with everything that Rosie would put on it and a plate of fries so big that he ended up only eating half and wrapping the rest up for later. If he was going to go out, at least it would be with a clear head and a full stomach. He’d skipped the bowl and just had a single shot of Jack to brace himself before he left the house. As clean as he got.

Lyn parked and walked over to the trailer then stopped. In the falling light of the sundown, he saw what looked to be a pretty clear track that had been walked around the trailer, just a couple yards away from the building itself. Without thinking, he followed it, seeing where the dried grass had been tramped down in an oblong trail almost a couple feet across in places. Like something big had just… paced around the trailer for a good long time. He tried to imagine that he’d seen it before, that it hadn’t just come up, but he couldn’t convince himself of that.

He flashed onto the time he’d seen a wolf at the zoo once, how it just paced the length of its enclosure, whether people were there watching it or not. It trotted as if compelled, ribs all but brushing the walls that closed it in. This felt like that. Like a compulsion enacted.

Lyn paced it out once and stopped himself from falling into it a second time. He looked real hard and couldn’t make out any individual prints, even though the light was clear enough. Just the grass laying down under the weight of something. Big.

He sighed and went up the steps of the trailer and through the door to start his shift. As he opened the door inwards, there was a scraping of something metal and plastic all scattered in the linoleum of the front room. Looking around the door, it was spent shotgun shells, five of them bloomed out like plastic flowers. He bent down and picked one up, twirling it in his fingertips. Still a little sharp, maybe fired a couple hours ago?

“Gilly? Where are you man?”

He let the shell clatter to the floor. There was no sound aside from that.

Gilly was nowhere to be seen, just a scrawled note in thick pen strokes telling him to “watch for some shit tonight” and that he’d would be back later. The shotgun lay crosswise on the little scarred kitchenette table. Lyn checked the chamber and found only three shells in the clip and no box anywhere around. It took him only a couple seconds to find where they’d gone. The front window was slid open, but the screen there punched and torn like someone had pushed out through it from this side.

That explained the shells, but not whoever Gilly had been shooting at. Maybe Gameboy and Cheeto heard what happened with Poly and decided to take a shot at Gilly. Maybe the Altarboys weren’t all dead. And maybe Gilly just felt like it for the sheer hell of it. Impulse control wasn’t his strong suit, particularly given whatever had been eating him. And he wasn’t here now. Just the cryptic message.

Lyn crumpled that into a ball and dropped it to the floor while he cursed his own cowardice at not having up and run tonight or having punched Gilly’s teeth in years ago for what happened to Angelo. He could believe what they said, that the forest did Angelo in, but Lyn knew that it was just kids fucking around with consequence. Seeing how far Angelo would go to be cool enough to go with him and Gilly. Halfway through crossing that finger of woods that ran almost to the edge of town like the ghost of the forest all but forgotten. Then the sound echoed through the trees and the blue moonlight didn’t show them anything more than shadows. Angelo was only supposed to be there for an hour and he wasn’t even scared not until they heard the cry, all of them.

Then there was the wide-eyed fear that made his blue eyes black and empty. And instead of all three of them running, Gilly socked Angelo hard and laughed at him.

“You always were a little chickenshit, Angelo. Now you can find your own way back.” His laughter was a sound worse than whatever filtered through the woods. Until that sound was just steps away. Impossible, nothing that big could have come that close without giving itself away. Not a bear and not a man.

Angelo gasped in a ragged breath, cheeks slicked in the moonlight and he pointed into the woods. Lyn turned and saw something big and thick around as a tree trunk move from shadow to shadow, silent and deliberate, hunting. Too big to be anything but a monster, muscled and heavy as a storybook giant.

“Run!” Gilly screamed. “Run!”

He took off, frantic pattering like he had four feet now, running at a gallop. Lyn didn’t even look back at Angelo. He’d seen enough with the shape melting out of the woods behind them, arms too long and thick, legs too short and the suggestion of the whole being covered in shaggy and matted hair, strands the color of quicksilver in the scatters of moonlight.

Lyn ran. He ran and left Angelo behind. Though he never heard Angelo scream or cry or anything after that. Just running and running until the furnace of exertion had burned everything out of him. Both he and Gilly stumbled past of the treeline, scratched and brambled, wrung of everything and short one little friend. Nobody was supposed to be there or even out that time of night. There wasn’t supposed to be consequence. It was just fucking around. Kids did it all the time.

Lyn stomped out of the trailer to take his bite of the shit sandwich. No less than what he had coming to him. He crossed over the stomped-out circuit of grasses and headed down to the perimeter, half hoping to find that the Altarboys were back or hell, even Gilly’s mysterious bosses were here to shut down the operation and put a bullet in the head of everyone who could point a finger at them. At least then it would be over.

The sun was down now, leaving just the salmon colored boil of clouds. Ahead of him, the treeline waited, that old growth that couldn’t be logged wholesale, a remnant of what used to be, what could’ve been if humans hadn’t turned it all into two by fours and yard furniture. How it could still all be like this with darkness and quiet and no other humans trying to fuck each other over.

Lyn stared into the gap in the treeline, the missing tooth big enough for a big man to pass through easily. He wasn’t even that big. He looked back over his shoulder like maybe he was being watched, like Gilly would see him ghosting, then took a step closer. The beam of the light wouldn’t penetrate far enough for him to see anything back there, just dark. Dark enough to disappear into. He pointed the beam down towards his feet so that the light spill could illuminate his next steps but no further.

As he passed into the darkness, he heard that wind-sorrow sound that had stirred and deadened him the night before. It was closer than it should’ve been. Or maybe he’d been hearing it all the time but somehow pushing it aside. Only inside here he could no longer do that, such was its proximity. It was a child’s sound, but too big. An adult crying in a child’s voice.

Lyn passed the beam over to where he thought he’d heard it. There was a large trunk interposed between himself and the source of the sound.

Then a snap behind him, nearly at the treeline. He spun in place and looked back, seeing only a pale pink channel of watery light back behind. It was further away than he’d thought, but nothing was there, nothing watching him.

The sniffling cry set out again and Lyn circled the tree trunk, unthinkingly large to him, impossible in girth. His feet crunched on litter as he finally got clear of the trunk, clear to see what or who was making the sound.

He saw the first glimpse of large and sturdy bare feet, soles toughened and almost scaly from a shoeless lifetime, before dropping the flashlight to the forest floor. There was a scuffle of feet and limbs in the dark.

Lyn cursed and reached for the flashlight, heart screaming at him to run, but unable to find the strength to, or finding curiosity powerful enough to overturn that. The sound of rapid breathing through an open mouth hit him, something else behind that, tightened by pain.

“Hey, you hurt?” Lyn asked as his fingers closed around the barrel of the flashlight. He turned in place and brought the beam back over.

The tilted oval of light shook as his hands did. He swept back to where he thought he’d seen the feet, seeing now only a disturbance in the needles, a suggestion of where something had been a moment ago. But its pained breath gave it away.

“Look, I don’t want to hurt you.” Lyn probed with the beam. He tucked the gun in the crook of his arm and pulled out the cold bundle of French fries from his inside hoodie pocket. “Maybe you’re hungry?”

Lyn didn’t know who he was talking to. Maybe it was just himself. Maybe it was the memory of Angelo still stuck there at ten years old after all this time. Maybe it was something else.

The pained snuffling gave way to a whimper and that pulled at Lyn, like tearing off a decades-old scab that had never scarred over. He only moved the light enough to see a hint of hair, long and dirty and tangled. He didn’t want to break the spell, to see it and have it see him and maybe make them both disappear.

“Here. You can have these.” He fumbled with the now-greasy wrapper and fingered it barely-open before gently tossing it to not what but whoever it was. He knew animals and this was more human, maybe more human than Gilly. It was just a hungry kid lost out in the forest.

Tears were streaming down his face as he mouthed the name he couldn’t make himself speak. The kid was okay. He’d be okay now. There’d be an end.

Lyn saw that there was something dark and shining matted into the litter that the kid lay in. Unable to help himself, he swept the beam a little further, closer to the sound of chewing and gulping, strained breaths between.

The kid was bloody along one of his naked legs, all the way down thighs wider than Lyn’s own, over coarse skin and hair down to those feet he’d seen before. The kid was hurt, badly, probably bad enough that he couldn’t walk any further. Which explained him being here and not deeper in the forest, far away from humans, closer to his own kind.

“What the hell am I gonna do with you?” Lyn asked.

The kid continued to gulp down the cold fries, stopping only to belch with surprising gentleness. No longer distracted by the food, the kid’s pain took over and he whimpered from it.

Lyn thought about what he could possibly do, from driving the truck down here and getting the kid in it to dragging him out bodily to just walking away from the sheer crazy of it all. The kid quieted for a moment and Lyn heard something behind the both of them, gentle pressure on needles and leaves almost like a resigned sigh, not a crunch.

Lyn swung the light around and caught a shine of something metallic before he heard the shot.

BOUM BOUM and then another after a ghastly pause BOUM.

“Got you, you little fucker,” Gilly snarled, barely audible over the ringing in Lyn’s ears.

Lyn couldn’t move, bound up in rage and revulsion. He wanted to puke. He wanted to snap Gilly’s neck. He couldn’t do anything but shake in place like a rattlesnake’s tail, just uselessly buzz and vibrate.

“Didn’t mean to scare you, fam,” Gilly said. “Saw you going into the forest and thought maybe you’d run out on me.” He knelt down by Lyn and took the light from his stiff fingers.

“Oh shit, you’re all freaked out. It’s okay though. We got that little fucker.”

Lyn begged for Gilly to stop talking but all he could do was grit his teeth together so he wouldn’t scream.

“Dude. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Gilly’s hand on him felt welcome as a bloody stump. “I’d have told you but I didn’t want you to freak out. I winged this guy yesterday. I was out… well, it’s not important what I was out doing. But let’s just say Poly won’t be able to rat on anyone.”

What was left of the kid gurgled and sighed and Lyn’s blood set to slow boil, guts being churned by unseen but somehow hairy hands, fingers running through his insides trying to make them outside. He was aware of his now-freed fingers moving down the length of the shotgun, still haphazardly leaning in his arm.

“Yeah, didn’t believe these fuckers were real. I mean there was that night with Angelo, right? But we was all twelve and scared little shits. Probably made it up. And these fuckers,” he jabbed with the barrel of his gun “all up in my fields and breaking plants, getting at my supplies? Naw, fuck that.

“And I thought it was bears for the longest time. Only found out a little while ago it wasn’t Gentle Ben, you get me?”

“Bears.”

“Yeah, man. Bears.” He clapped Lyn on the shoulder and squeezed down to the bone, like ownership. “Hell, you can’t shoot bears out here. That’s worse than doing an unlicensed grow.” His grip tightened. “But these? There isn’t a law for that. They’re not even real. ‘Cept when they’re eating your profits.”

The kid snuffled and whined, a pitying cry that dug at Lyn even harder than Gilly was in the moment.

“Fucker’s not dead yet,” Gilly said with a gloating sizzle. “You gotta finish the job, man.”

Lyn’s stomach boiled, nearly spilling up its contents. Instead there was only a crawling burn of acid at the back of his throat. He spat empty. “The fuck you talking about, Gilly?”

“The job. Now that Poly’s out the way, and Cheeto and Gameboy, they’re not gonna believe that he had an accident out in the woods.”

“Is that what happened?”

The Kid’s whine turned to a low and drawn out screech of wounding. It went through the trees and underbrush like the wind had, carrying further than anyone would ever think. Lyn knew that he was calling for mom, he knew the timbre and the upset and fear that drove it.

“Poly disagreed how things were gonna be.” His eyes gleamed distant, drawing all the warmth out of him. “But that ain’t your problem. Taken care of. This thing, though. Can’t have it around. You know that a kid will tell its mother what happened.

“Can’t have that,” he said.

Lyn swung the light back, just enough to see Gilly clearly. Not for the first time. He’d always known what Gilly was. That he’d have done anything to keep winning, to keep in business, to draw another breath even if that meant sucking it from someone else’s mouth. Angelo couldn’t go home and neither could this kid.

“What you say, Lyn? You ready to step up? Get promoted.”

Lyn’s blood went cool and slow like brooks getting that first rime of frost, spreading out through him. Everything turned to crystal with a clarity that was not horrifying or hollow, but simply necessary. Everything became easy.

He stood up slowly.

“Yeah. I got this, fam.”

“Good man, Lyn.”

Lyn drew to his full height and passed the light over to Gilly. “Keep it on Angelo, man.”

“Angelo? You trippin’?”

“Yeah, I’m trippin’. Keep that light steady.”

“Okay, yeah. You got it,” Gilly’s voice caught on something, like a swallowed fishbone.

Lyn lifted the shotgun up slowly and watched the giant hairy child there, eyes big and wide and watery and brimming over with unexplained hurt. Their lips twitched as the whimpering fell to silence. It was almost as if they knew what was coming next.

“Sorry,” Lyn said.

“Do it already.” Gilly’s voice was rancid.

Lyn whipped back in a sharp arc, pointing the shotgun towards the bright blue-white dazzle of light, firing when it passed over the burr of the front sight, barely visible in the gleam. Then he racked a second shot and fired as quickly as he could. The sound of one report melted into the second and echoed through the now-darkness of the forest.

Gilly fired a spastic single shot into the tangle of boughs above them both only spatters of stars visible above.

Lyn cycled another shot and pointed it down at the ground, trying to hear if Gilly was still alive over the ringing in his own ears. The only ragged breathing he heard was from the kid behind him, the stupid and luckless kid who’d been fucking around and caught hell for it.

“It’s okay, Angelo,” Lyn said, knowing that Angelo really wasn’t here. “Your mom’s gonna hear and she’s gonna come help.”

The Kid whimpered in the darkness, more from pain than fear now. In the distance, there was a sound of branches being pushed aside at a height no human could hope to reach. There was a sound of massive weight moving almost in silence, betrayed only by the soft crunch of litter on feet made bigger than God ever made. There was a sound of soft but rapid breathing, like Angelo’s mom had made when she first heard the news.

The sound grew no louder, only closer.

FULL BLEED: IT WAS SO CLEAR TO ME IT BECAME INVISIBLE

I love going places, but I hate travel. And having spent nearly two weeks traveling to a time zone that was eight hours removed from my own, after a week I'm almost recovered. But not really. That return flight, all three legs of it, was pretty rough. Okay, the first leg was fine. As much as can be expected. London to Montreal. And when you're transantlantic, they treat you pretty nice, give you snacks and little wipes to wash off with, headphones to watch the in-flight entertainment.

Then you get to the domestic legs of the flight and you're treated like, well, a domestic airline passenger in economy class. When you're working on basically zero sleep for most of the day before (had to be up by 4 to make the taxi and didn't really sleep because I had to be up at 4 and was paranoid about sleeping through the alarm), little irritations become gigantic. Sitting in the interzone of the airport becomes both boring and anxious-making. Then you get on the plane where your frame is just a little too big to sleep in the chair, even leaned back, so you merely exist and if you're lucky, you just shut down for minutes at a time.

Then I get home and there's a leak in the house that takes two days of phone calls to try and nail down and a four-hundred dollar charge from a leak finding company which did not, in fact, find the source of the leak, just where it made itself apparent. This is not the same thing.

At least my car's back from the body shop and having been away for the last nearly five months. There's a couple minor things and some quality control issues that I should have made a stink about, but I guess not even the inanimate makes it through traumatic events without some scarring, so I'll chalk it up to that.

Then I get back and it's finally time to consider getting back to work.

Yeah.

This part's tough. It's real tough. I talk well about refusing to play the game, this whole publishing thing, about how the work itself is enough. But there was this really weird and unsettling moment where I was at a chain bookstore in Dublin (which has more than a couple chain bookstores with outlets in it -- imagine that!) and looking over their science-fiction/fantasy section (some of which was plainly populated with horror novels such as Mexican Gothic, but I suppose even over there horror is a label that folks don't want to get stuck with.) Anyways, I was there, looking at a lot of these books, some familiar, some brand new to me, and I was feeling utterly and totally left behind by the whole process, of writing and books and everything in it. Like slip me beneath the surface and not even a ripple would escape to mark that disappearance.

And I don't know if that's me or the whole business of things. A sort of mutual rejection. Having spent so much time on the outside, just scrabbling to get a handful of readers (which was way easier in comics than in prose, but that's another story) maybe there isn't a way back into things. I don't want to deal with the business and how it distorts my own relationship to my work, the value of it or even the urgency of doing it. And it sure as hell doesn't want or need me. Go ahead. Count all the books in your favorite genre that are coming out this week. This month. This year. Now make yourself really crazy and count all the ones that are coming out because people thought that leashing a couple prompts to a sophisticated set of autocomplete algorithms will get them the fame and fortune that they deserve, that Writers and Publishers have always denied them. Look around, those folks are out there on the social media platform of your choice, all so proud of the little bits of Anti-Life that they've coaxed out of these systems, showing both their absolutely insensate perceptions of art or literature and their fundamental misunderstanding of what art even is.

But then I wrestle with that particular is. A lot. It beats putting something with your name on it, tying it to a brick and watching it sink in the seethe of Genre Discourse. What's the thing that's worse than being talked-about? Not-talked about? Yeah, try never having been. And sure, I can go to local science fiction/horror shows and get a jolt of being treated like a Real Author, but that's not much of a jolt, nor does it last. Nor should it. That's not what the gig is, right? Maybe it was at one time, the whole construction of author as persona, which in my case is probably grounded in varied and myriad misreadings of history and expectation. What is it even to be an artist, an author? What makes it real? Is it the celebration or the dying in poverty (Picasso and King notwithstanding). I've spent so much time on it that I don't even know that I can see it any longer. Maybe I'm tired. I know I'm tired. Tired from being the (mostly) only one to take these things from nothing and filter it through my experience and background and history and whatever else comes through while I try to shut off the thinking brain and just let the work write itself; tired from trying to get these out to a world that is (mostly) utterly indifferent and certainly an industry that is; trying to exist in a world that really can't be bothered. Yeah, the weight of worlds gets to be a real one, that carving and shaping and tweaking and worrying and I have to wonder sometimes why.

Maybe I'm just tired and need to go back on vacation. Or go meditate until I can come to terms with the koan that I've tied myself into. And maybe those things just aren't possible and all there is to do is to keep picking at things and sticking my hands into the void until something comes out of it, drained or not as I may be.

Anyways, Ireland and Scotland and England were pretty great, rough travel aside. Lots to think about, even if it made nothing else clearer.