Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 6

FULL BLEED: WE'RE ALL JUST HUMANS IN THIS DAMN HOLE

Last week I talked about maybe talking about the Grant Morrison and company run on The Doom Patrol, a comic which came out some thirty-four years ago, maybe almost thirty-five? I can't recall exactly. It's been a long time. I read bits and pieces of it as it came out. Had to be happy with just a single trade of it (Crawling from the Wreckage) for a long time, due to ongoing threats of legal action against DC for Morrison's appropriation of the Charles Atlas character. I know. At that point, it was nearly "Charles who" and they shoulda been thanking him for bringing back to the attention of readers. I know. Corporate types are so touchy about image. Which is funny, because people take these icons and characters and put them through all kinds of changes on their own. But DC made a tempting target for legal action, being a unified corporation and all back then. But I'm wandering again.

I knew very little of the Doom Patrol when I started in on the books. Reprints of the Drake/Premiani run wouldn't exist for some time, and even then, they were expensive as these things went back in the early 90s. But, as usual, Morrison didn't depend on continuity or jump up and down shouting "Hey! This is a big deal if you know this little bit of history!" Spoilers for the books will follow. No I don't know what the status of any of this continuity is, particularly since John Byrne tried to retcon all of this stuff almost immediately and make some really boring comics in the process. I understand that Keith Giffen brought back Mr. Nobody and made him Mr. Somebody, but at this point, it's hard to express any interest in these characters on my part. I know they're still making books today that more or less hook into this series, but again, those are for readers younger than myself at this point. I'm okay with that. Kids gotta learn about the Doom Patrol somewhere, right?

Of course, when they're reading those old Doom Patrol comics, they're getting a good dose of Steve Gerber DNA in that. He's always been a missing component in the reinvention of al these characters (nearly every comics character, really) since the middle eighties. Yes, that's an ongoing process with writers and artists trying all manner of reinventions in an effort to keep interest in these heroes. Though sometimes the character gets left behind in all that. Right. Gerber. Stay on track. See, one of the great Steve Gerber-written comics runs (the greatest clearly being Howard the Duck, until the whole thing came down just as the character's popularity was perhaps cresting) was his work on The Defenders. For those of you who don't know, the Defenders were kind of the loser flipside of The Avengers. The Avengers were the popular kids in class and the Defenders were the weirdos who couldn't even sit at the lunch tables, instead preferring to hang out outside the cafeteria being weird and borderline troublemakers if they could be bothered. It was also described as more an encounter group than a superhero book. Yeah, that really dates things, huh?

So the Defenders were weirdo misfits who fought other weirdo misfits who wanted to break stuff instead of dealing with being broken. Granted, this was the seventies where villains never addressed their own damage and instead just ran around trying to take over or destroy the world. But there was an element to the Defenders where the heroes looked at the ways in which they were broken and actually addressed that, as much as the Bronze Age allowed for that sort of thing (which was more than you might think with Gerber at the helm.) Not that pepople got fixed or cured, but maybe they were allowed some manner of self-awareness which had formerly been anathema in the funny books. Some of them were even given the chance of getting off the crazy train, if memory serves. It's been a long time, sorry.

The Doom Patrol's great gift in this was the allowance to make this transformation explicit. Particularly in Crazy Jane, who was a new character that Morrison came up with in writing their run. She was a bow to line continuity (in this case, some kind of gene-bomb that gave folks meta human abilities, only hers were tied to multiple personalities, some sixty-four of them, some far more helpful than others.) Through the course of the book, and a couple different trips into her own psyche (sometimes assisted by Cliff Steele, the oft-befuddled Everyman in a robot body, a holdover from the original series) Crazy Jane is able to become Sane Jane. Of course this means the obviation of all her various powers right at the time when they'd most be helpful. But such is the price of integration and wellness. So, Crazy to Sane, superhero to civilian (getting a beautiful capstone story at the very end of the series which is every bit as wonderful and insightful and ultimately gently subversive to the entire genre as the story "Good Man Fall" from The Invisibles).

You can draw the parallel of superheroism as pathology to be fixed, or if you like, worked through and understood. Cliff Steele is made to let go of the last remnants of his human existence (that being the beautiful bit of his human brain suspended in a robot body). Jane integrates her personalities. The enimagtic and multiform Rebis suffers actual rebirth, twice even, more explicitly a union of opposites than even Arnold Drake might've suggested. Former member Rhea becomes a whimsical magnetic conscience/consciousness, though she's really a side character, a dangling thread of continuity from the previous incarnation of the team. Oh, and of course the Chief is revealed to be the Master Planner who believes so much in the power of his Plan that he's willing to sacrifice everything and everyone to bring it to pass, not actually knowing what will come of it. Faith or psychosis? You decide!

But Morrison makes it a point to put these characters through transformations to show the essence there. Not to reveal it but to show that which does not change no matter how much the body is reshaped or splintered. Is it cliche to say the book is about humanity? Or is that just lazy? Or is that what makes it really special? That amongst all the absurdity and dada and (declared) forced obscurity, the real issue is what you carry with you even when you think you've lost everything. Or everything has been changed so deeply around you that you may as well have lost it. That's a nice thing to hear from time to time, and of course it's a theme that Morrison has worked with in, well, all of their work, that essential nature of these characters.

I know. It's easy to get lost in the crazy, even to insist that there's nothing beyond that surface lunacy, the treacherous exhibitions of cut-up scripting and (sometimes forced) remixing of familiar elements (such as craven Knights Templar Willoghby Kipling, once intended to be John Constantine, but like most comics reinventions, made better by not leaning on the easy signifier.) And sure, some of it reads dated. That bit with Red Jack and scratch-sampled Mozart always sticks somehow, that and the 1991-era read of nanotechnology and Lorenz Attractors. But where else are you going to get a comic book about a hungry painting and the Gnostic Fifth Horseman who isn't defeated by a Care Bear Stare but instead by the refusal of Dada to adhere to any manner of authority including itself.

Speaking of the Brotherhood of the Dada (neé Evil), the rogues gallery of Doom Patrol is unparalleled in weird. Like some deranged and remixed Monster Manual, single-shot strangeness monsters come on fast and furious and without end. Too many to name, yet all thematically perfect. Fiction becoming real, Unmaking shadows of God, the voices of the dead in the white void, the man who leaves a feather for his foes, the army of keys leaving every lock opened and every mystery laid bare and dead. That just scratches the surface. Some of them, though, aren't even necessarily villains, though certainly corrosive to a stultifying social order (and indeed, some of the villains are a sort of super-order, so strait-jacketed they wrap right back around to crazy.) And the team recognizes that say the Brotherhood of the Dada aren't Evil (hence dropping the name, get it?) Well, some of the team does. Cliff, still rooted in a body he thinks he actually inhabits, holding onto some sense of normalcy, isn't eager to go down without a fight when Mr. Nobody and the other Dadaites mount a campaign for President of the US.

But even he can recognize the injustice of a violent and pre-emptive assassination attempt by the Normies, in this case the US Government (who'd tried to wipe out the Doom Patrol more than once by now in the series, granted through a series of very non-regulation catspaws.) Cliff's humanity brings him to try and save a dying Mr. Nobody (rapidly becoming Mr. Morten -- it's a long story) by relocating him back into the un-real-ity of the Painting that Ate Paris (did I say this was a long story?). Which, alas does not pay out, at least in the book as presented. Like I say, I don't follow the continuity now because that's a whimsical and liquid thing.

Speaking of continuity, one of the great things about this run of The Doom Patrol is that Morrison really did honor the old work and characters but wasn't afraid to let them become something new. Something new yet still true to their essences. I know. Back to the essence. I sound like Gen. Jack D. Ripper. But this is something Morrison has done in basically all of their work, particularly big team books. They're not afraid to reinvent, something desperately needed in comics (though really, inventing new characters and places and giving them the time and resources to actually grow into something sturdy would be even better. Nope, haven't changed my tune on that one.) Now, I'm sure oldschool fans of the team were probably pretty upset with the changes that Morrison put on the team. But then there's folks who are upset that they're not making comics like they were when they were kids. They're always gonna be here. Only thing we can do is outlive them.

I'd talk about how these comics read compared to today's superhero books, but, honestly, I'm not reading them anymore. With a few exceptions, mostly for art teams, and then I'm looking at the art. There was a time that these daring, even dangerous reinventions were wild and fresh. But even that can be made to feel tired and easy if done wrong. Or if you're just putting out a reskin of one property with the flavor crystals of another sprinkled on top. But you read Doom Patrol and you might see cross-pollination and inspiration. You won't see lazy two-things action.

And maybe the reinvention trick only feels fresh the first time you read it? Maybe it's the tension between what you know and having layers peeled back to reveal something new beneath that really makes this stuff sing.

It still works for me.

Okay, about out of gas on this subject. I'm sure that's a mess. Good luck getting through it.

I'm supposed to be getting ready for a trip to the UK starting Saturday, and I'm kinda mostly done, but nothing that can't be done tomorrow, really. Looking forward to it, worried about it. I've got my reasons. No blog updates from the road, maybe some posting to Bluesky.

Speaking of blogs, I did want to talk about why they're not coming back, even in the face of ever-increasing social media awfulness. Maybe I will next time.

See you in a couple weeks.

FULL BLEED: THE LAND OF LOCKS AND KEYS

I guess I’m supposed to let folks know that things are going great with writing and all. That’s the gig, right? Success breeds success? That merely by being in contact with this blog and my discourse that such success will rub off onto you and your pursuits. That’s the unspoken promise, yeah? That whole community thing. Don’t get me wrong. I love having people in the trenches to talk to, how down in this foxhole we’re all secretly praying to the same deity, no matter our protestations as to our agnostic personas. This is one thing I miss about comic shows, even though my comics career is over and has been for some time, no matter how often I tried to jump start it, even as recently as a couple years ago.

And I see in the disk horse this morning that folks are talking about making a living in comics. Yeah, well, I can’t help you with that so much. Oops. I’m giving the game away here. Thing is, unless you’re at the top of the game, it’s a real tough row to hoe. That’s some rocky soils. Purchase is tricky at best, and in case you haven’t noticed, it’s not salad days for much of anyone but for those folks who are writing books in demand. Now this goes for everything. Prose, music, movies (big yikes there as movies are real big creatures, like whales eating krill, only they eat money and that’s been in tight supply). They’re all like this and they have been forever. We just don’t like to talk about that part so much. Now, if you’re working on your art alongside a regular day job, perhaps it’s better (though perhaps not given that a lot of jobs don’t really stand up to the cost of living). Perhaps it’s better not depending on art to pay the bills.

Because a lot of people don’t want to pay for art. That’s a thing we’ve all seen and maybe even helped create, between Napster and Pinterest and Tumblr and Twitter and USEnet before that, not to mention torrenting and straight up piracy. And talk about discussions with many shades of gray, since piracy, for lack of a better word, is keeping a lot of art in circulation (just that nobody makes money from it but the ISP that you’re paying every month — they always get that nut.) Netflix and streaming music might make you think that at least some money is flowing back to the artists, but I can guarantee you it isn’t nearly as much as you think, even for mega-superstars, who are probably doing just fine but maybe would be getting a bigger slice in a fairer world.

Then there’s the issue of audience fragmentation. The shattering. Everyone lining up in little warrens or bunkers, siloing off into private servers for discussion and identity affirmation. Now, this isn’t all that different than things used to be, weirdly. For any genre thing minus the odd cultural phenomena like Star Wars, the audiences were pretty minuscule, pretty walled off, communicating via fanzine pages or early bulletin boards and then mailing lists and any of the hundreds of discussion boards (some still going, with the same wars being waged within them) before a migration to more accessible platforms like Twitter which might look like an undifferentiated mess, but were able to self-organize into more manageable eddies of discussion. There are places to reach folks who might want what you’re making, but they’re more splintered and numerous than they used to be.

This was one of the great things about conventions in years past, and maybe it’s even coming back. These were entirely alternate marketplaces, particularly for indie and self-published books. Some of that moved to Kickstarter and other crowdfunding, which itself is an entire marketplace now, a connection to a potential audience. Sure, Amazon used to be that for books and periodicals, but check out how that’s working out now for folks. Yes I say this knowing full well that Amazon is how I sell books because for all the talk of folks wanting something different, my experience is that, well, wanting to move from Amazon is aspirational. But then so is wanting to move on from the big 5 or is it 4 publishers?

There’s a whole sort of aspirational industrial complex when it comes to writing, particularly genre writing. Don’t worry. It’s been baked-in since the days of fanzines, which is to say that it’s not a new thing. Just now that it’s realtime and highly-refined in today’s world of social media, etc. Entire informational ecosystems about who’s in and who’s out and who’s up and who’s down. You know, all that bullshit that makes fashion exhausting past the art of the fashion. It’s never about the work bout about the folks making it, their personalities and cliques and such.

Yes, I know. That’s been a part of art and artists since forever. Just that now it somehow seems like it takes up a lot more space in this world of parasocial relationships. I guess it’s easier to talk about that than it is to talk about what the fiction does for you, because you gotta worry about whether or not it’s cool to like this particular work or writer or artist or not. Whether it’s a safe choice. Whether it’ll lead you to success. And yes, I know that a lot of the people making the loudest noise in these spheres aren’t actually writing, but instead spending their energy gatekeeping or feathering their nests or looking at their metrics.

So, yeah. The industry is undergoing tectonic shifts, particularly as publishers go from being part of a family portfolio as indication of prestige and instead are part of a capital group’s holdings in which case, the only value possible is to make the line go up. And they do that by converting past prestige and reputation into money for restructuring and reorganization while they fire all the creators that made it work and bring in stringers and they hope that the name they’re trading on doesn’t get stepped-on so fast that they can’t wring a bunch of loans out of it. Oh, that’s movie studios, too. Yeah, that’s some real fun. Remember, the biggest comics story of 2010 wasn’t anything more than Marvel being bought by Disney and DC being more closely folded into WB’s, now Discovery’s corporate holdings. Hey, how’s that doing? Yeah, it was great, at least on Marvel’s side. Now it’s not even great there. Yes, I’m sure they’re still doing okay, but they’re not doing what they once did, which was the promise.

Which is winding back to saying that things are bad, particularly if you haven’t already built your following (and you’ve got a face/body for radio and a voice for silent movies.) The business is down to blood from many stones or stable indies but those markets aren’t getting any much bigger, so stable is where they stay. The promotional and audience landscape is scattered and shattered. It’s harder than ever to actually get paid for your writing. Take a look at your typical anthology call in genre (which might get you a whole hundred dollars for a 5k word short – do the math), where you’ll see the editors talking about hundreds to one submissions to acceptances ratios, more likely multiple hundreds. The competition is staggering. It’s a daunting prospect. If you decide to pursue paying markets for your writing, all I can say is my hat is off to you. I’m not up to the task any longer.

I like writing just fine. I like it a lot when it clicks, when everything comes together and you end up with a surprising little facet of the work that you didn’t see coming. That’s the best.

I hate the business. I hate the process. I hate thinking that if I just bent my work this way or that, that editors or agents would give it a second glance. It’s not a thing I can do anymore. Not at my age and in my situation. I don’t have the energy. Just like I don’t have the energy to worry about everyone on social media liking me (I tried that – exhausting and ultimately self-destructive, but just not fast enough) or my work (double that.) The most money I’ve made in this business, the biggest successes I’ve had, are those that I can’t take credit for or even talk about except in the vaguest way. That said, it still feels weird to see more books I’ve worked on uncredited sitting in clearance shelves or used bookstores than I ever will see for anything with my name on it. That’s a strange, unsettling feeling. But then so’s going through remainder bins and remembering that each of these books has a story and often aspirations or hopes or successes hanging on and look where they end up. The fate of all flesh, babies.

I like writing. I like the good folks I’ve met out there in the trenches, down in the mud and blood and guts and veins in our teeth. But I’m not tough enough to do this in the professional arena. Too feral, too set in my ways, mostly too bull-headed to play the game. I knew there was a game to play and thought I could. Turns out that I’m just not cut out for that. Not today. And I don’t even have C-4 to cheat with like Batman did. But I’m not going to give up dipping into the underworld and offering up double handfuls of what I come up with down at the bottom of the well.

Just that I’m not any longer interested in convincing people that they can make money off my work. Write a book for a year on the hopes of a couple thousand dollars? Fuck it. I’d rather put it out myself. Hell, I even tried a straight profit-sharing arrangement, no advances, and it turned out that wasn’t good enough for a publisher to hold things together on anything resembling a timetable when I was on every goddamn milestone. Yeah, that still grates.

Again, if you’re out there, you have my respect. Particularly if you’re just starting out in this landscape. But after the time I’ve put in (misspent or not), it’s not a thing I can do any longer. I don’t know, maybe after the tectonic plates in the business stop moving, but honestly, that’s never happening. The earth has been shifting under our feet since before we were born and will be long after.

The only thing that makes sense is to keep writing. This isn’t noble or elevated or anything of the sort. By any measure, it’s more psychopathy than anything else. But it beats not doing it because the business chased me out. At least it’ll make sense to me, instead of trying to conform to the stamp-molds that I see a lot of genre fiction being pressed into (yes, that includes your favorite genre.)

Everyone has to pick out their own path. This just happens to be mine.

Right. That said, the second revision of All Waters are Graves (that being the immediate follow-up to The Queen of No Tomorrows) is done. I’ll do a final pass after I get back from the UK in a couple weeks. That book should come out in maybe March. I’ll start revisions on Fake Believe shortly as well. Then it comes down to actually writing new material for Hazeland. Finally. Keep in mind there hasn’t been new work in that setting since mid-late 2021 when I realized that the publisher I was working with was simply not going to deliver on their side of the deal and couldn’t offer a good reason as to why. Took some time to deal with all that and life during the pandemic. I can only hope I’m up to the task, but as it turns out, every time I’ve put in the work, it’s worked. So let’s figure that’ll happen.

Oh, probably going with a redesign on the whole line of titles, at least for this first run of stories (the first five Hazeland books). It'll look something like this, before type treatments.

I’ll try to get another blog entry out before I take off. Maybe I’ll talk about the Grant Morrison run of Doom Patrol, which I just re-read. Maybe.

Until then.

FULL BLEED: WAKING UP THE DEAD LIKE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW

Let’s just get to the point.

You can’t fix Lovecraft.

Sorry.

Nor should you try. The damage has already been done, right? He’s been in the ground for what, ninety years? Trouble is that his work got saved from pulp obscurity, for good and for ill. Where I fall in judgment of that is a changeable thing. There’s no doubt that his work has had a huge impact on me, and that work he directly inspired also has been a formative influence on me (keep in mind I’m older than you think I am, having been born before the first manned moon landing, but after Kennedy was killed, the first one.) This is true of many of my contemporaries (and predecessors and folks just coming up now — he said, acutely aware of his own obscurity after thirty years or more of making fiction.) I’ve also spent a lot of time trying to do something different from his work (as have others inspired by him, no doubt.) There’s plenty of folks simply trying to update Lovecraftian horror for today. Go nuts. I can’t and won’t tell you what to write. That’s not my job. It’s not your job to listen to me.

All that said, HPL isn’t going away. Those original works with all of those weaknesses and excesses and blind spots and toxic thought are still right there in the bedrock of today’s genre. I’ve often said that a bad adaptation (or a good one) doesn’t obviate the original work, doesn’t annihilate it. Those fingerprints are forever on the exquisite corpse that folks are continually adding to word by million words a day, an hour, a minute. But it’s also true of remakes and rearrangements and apologias. The works can’t be rehabilitated because they’re dead. Sure, what they inspire is a different thing altogether. (Aside – there’s no one, “The Call of Cthulhu” say, but one for each reader who comes up with their own associations and resonances that are formed out of the alchemy of their own lives. But, paradoxically, there is one and that’s the original text. Yes, it’s tricky.) Those works inspired by HPL are yet unwritten (or unpublished, since publishing is the only way works are acknowledged and have a possibility of being integrated into anyone’s personal canon. Oh yeah, publishing confers the possibility of being seen. That’s the real sauce.) These new works are in continuous process, sprawling in the infinite tendrils of growth that might be rhizomatic and become more a cloud of mycelia, jumping kingdoms as easily as I transmute metaphors before your very eyes. But there’s multiple strains that are going to filter back to HPL and what he wrought.

The works cannot be rehabilitated. They cannot be made to conform to how we act and think and consider things today. Maybe the ideas can be transfigured and the names used to ring in different ways, modernized and updated for a germ-free generation. We can operate in the margins and write from the inside out, I suppose. Many writers have done so, taking dusty corners of his work and using those as starting points and critiques. And maybe in time the edifice of all his awful beliefs which lay at the heart of much of his fiction can be made to crumble in the rootwork of those books and stories growing from that place. Maybe the influences can be atomized, broken down to their component electrons and rebuilt into something new, but literature is not exactly consumption and metabolism. The original works will still be there, not only literally there, but in the influences upon the (now) countless writers who’ve taken them in and used them to help make something new (as that’s the real alchemy in writing – the transmutation of experience and the marriage to imagination and then the work, the goddamn and seemingly endless work that may never even be acknowledged goes into the rawness of the red phase the damnable black phase the radiant and searing white phase and yielding something hopefully new and not simply a recombination of visible and recognizable parts.)

We may simply have to live with that latent cancer, to know that it’s there and that it’s on the roots of all things, that separating the rot from the root may not only be difficult but be impossible. Like all of us, a product of long chains of history we can pretend to understand and dissect but can not remove ourselves from except to try and surpass, to learn from and to do better than. To fail and fail again at achieving perfection.

Right. That’s what you all came for. Enjoy. Regular update follows.

Oh. While I have your attention, consider the reader reaction as the artists statement, that being the only thing you don’t want to be caught reading. Sure, I write ‘em. I’m as guilty as anyone. I even write long digressions at the end of the book sometimes, by way of apology or excuse or begging for indulgences, as if the readers were a pope or bishop of old, offering to absolve with the toe bone of a dead saint if only the proper donations were made.

The work is the author talking. Let it be that.

Right now I’m in a metal cylinder some five or six miles up, returning home from a trip all the way across the US. There’s a young dude across the aisle from me watching a video on how to create content posts, how to craft with a careful hook and then retain then reward the reader and I want to tell him that that path either leads to madness or to writing twenty posts a day so that the capital group which bought the website you work for can keep those numbers going up, that or to a path of soullessness and enslavement to a bunch of code. Just run away now while you can. Ain’t nobody getting rich on this now. That gold rush ended more than ten years ago. Yeah it sucks.

Watching the bottom fall out of blogging, or acknowledging that in fact some folks were able to parlay that gig into something that lasted, is pretty pretty pretty wild stuff when I stop to think about it. Then everyone got bought out or remained die-hards or never found a big audience (in fact many never even wanted that). That folks started depending on platforms they didn’t own or have a stake in for gigs, because those platforms had reach and the gamble had paid off in the past. Now those platforms are rapidly disassembling themselves in order to serve the wretched and pathetic egos of the dudes who bought them. I’m even talking movie studios folks, not just the obvious suspects here. Yeah, grim going. Now VC is buying up publishing houses, which previously had been the playgrounds of Old Money, but at least they wanted a veneer of something more than line goes up. How long until those Withered Brands get the life sucked out of ‘em like a mouse that’s crawled up inside a favorite chair only to starve to death leaving a flattened corpse behind? Oh, is that metaphor too specific? Yeah, sorry, that happened to me last month. Grisly.

Zombie brands being injected by jeweled parasitic wasps and driven around like insect hulks until there isn’t even enough juice inside to keep the joints moving and the chitin is left behind as some necrotic monument to greed. But don’t you worry, the wasps will go on and find new hosts. Maybe they’ll even pay pennies per impression or ten thousand impressions.

Hell, we wish for as stable a marketplace as the pulps, grossly exploitative as they were. At least you had a couple options who paid decently enough against a reasonable cost of living. Now we hope for eight cents a word and then we gotta watch what else they’re publishing so we don’t get bruised by reputation. Actually, what we wish for is a marketplace that’s big enough to support all the folks who want to get published and there’s no world big enough for that now. Yeah, that sucks too.

I know. I should get back to the good news. My kids are doing well, braver than I’d have been at their age and maybe even than I am now. Youngest starting second year of college a couple thousand miles from home. Oldest now in his career, having job hunted and interned while in school to get that set up. He’s only seven hundred miles from his old home. Looking at going to England in a long-delayed trip with my wife. Beginning to write again, now that I’ve come to a reckoning with who I am in this market and more importantly, what I’m willing to do in order to get sold. Of course, the answer is nothing. Like Michael Corleone at the end of Godfather 2. You get nothing. Nothing but my work. I don’t trust that any editor I could hire on a freelance basis will open those doors any longer. I’m not willing to pay artists to make covers to grab eyeballs (would be nice if I could — you get me and photoshop instead, but never ever AI). That’s me, too unwilling or too stupid to recognize that there’s a game to be played when all I ever wanted to do is write and not participate in nested systems that are designed to make folks think that One Weird Trick is all that stands between them and success. I’m back at work and god help everyone in my path.

Kidding. I’m a cuddly little kitten.

Ask anyone.

Right. Station ID. I'm Matt Maxwell. I write a genre-rejecting series called Hazeland. The first book in the series, The Queen of No Tomorrows, came out last month. There's lots of info about it at my site, that being highway62press.com and you're already there so you can look around now without guilt. The second book in the series is in progress and slated for a March release next year and is called All Waters are Graves. The third book, entitled Fake Believe, is a collection of short stories/novellas from the Hazeland setting. They're too long or too cavalier in hewing to genre forms to be published anywhere else. I can't write a five thousand word story and I don't have enough pull to get anyone to commit to taking up 12k words of space in their prestige publication. I publish my own books because I couldn't get anyone to publish them. Well, that's not true. I worked with a publisher previously and it didn't work out. I don't blame either of us as there's always enough to go around. At least this way I get to put out the book that I want and put my own art on the covers because that's the only thing that remotely makes sense anymore. No you've never heard of me. No following me won't get you any juice. I can't tell you how to be successful or even how to get sold into the marketplace. I can tell you that those aren't the same thing, though.

Until next time.

FULL BLEED: GOING DOWN TO THE MEDICINE SHOW

Let’s begin with some ramen. It was really great, good broth with a solid body and flavor. The noodles were thicker, somewhere between traditional ramen and udon in thickness. Some nice pork belly slices, half a boiled egg, shredded seaweed for flavor. Just excellent, even though it was bordering on hot outside in Santa Clara. The ramen place was in a little strip mall not far from the hotel that I’d just set up at, for the science fiction convention that I was attending and a guest of (though I still paid for the membership because that’s how things run). This little chunk of Santa Clara was sort of a no-man’s-land between an amusement park and the 101 freeway. It wasn’t even a place people worked (unless you count the hotels and restaurants), but a place that people passed through on the way to more fun places. An interzone.

I’m familiar with them. Sometimes it feels like I live in them. Neither one thing nor another. That’s me. Here I was going to an SF show (which did welcome fantasy as well, to be fair) with a boxful of my new book, which is horror. Or is it crime? Or weird fantasy? Interzone city. But then I’ve always been there. Neither fish nor fowl. Me, the guy who thought that doing interesting work was more important than fitting the work into categories. I’m still doing that after thirty years of rolling rocks uphill. Evidently I don’t know how to do anything else. I won’t run down the list of bent genres like so many mangled miles of barbed wire that I’ve put out there only to bother people on one side or the other of the equation. Not horror enough. Too much SF. Who even mixes baroque cyberpunk with Norse mythology?

Anyways. I’ve never particularly fit anywhere. Still don’t. So it’s always weird and fraught when I come back to various scenes or conventions after time away. The last time I did anything like this was World Fantasy in 2019, I think. The one in Los Angeles. I was fine for a few days but by the time I got to Saturday I needed to wander the city for most of the day to recharge and on the final day, I just flat out left early like a coyote chewing its leg to get out of a bear trap (pay no attention to the malaprops, I got a million of them). Wasn’t anyone’s fault but my own. Hard enough to create work but then to try to engineer an opening in any particular genre or crowd or varying measures of success and yeah, my systems lock up after not so long a time. One of the side effects of having come up feral. That’s a more hones way of saying autodidact, when it comes to writing. I don’t particularly need to try to be an outsider or misfit. It’s how things come out.

Got myself set up at the Small Press Big Universe table, a co-op of independent authors who are all putting their works together for visibility, not unlike fish schooling together so they stand a chance against much larger fish (or to confuse and beguile sea birds who might otherwise swoop down to pick them off one by one.) I’d be back there every day at the show, so I figured I’d accustom myself to the place. Then up to the first panel where I was joining a group of rather much more successful writers and talking about what we wished we’d known before undertaking this whole thing. Which is a lot, as it goes. Honestly, still felt out of place speaking at all in this company. I’m a dude who has been professionally published precisely once novel-length-wise, and only a handful of short stories. I won’t say I acquitted myself admirably or anything, but I don’t think it was embarrassing. Other than the admission that I come from a family of successful writers and after thirty years of work, well, yeah, one novel sale. I’m under no illusions at this point. But it’s still difficult to wrestle with. Jacob didn’t work so hard. After all, angels like all things ineffable will exhaust themselves simply being on this mortal plane. They’ll give up rather than be subjected to gross materiality for this long.

Wrestle with yourself? Talk about being the last guy to bleed out of a knife fight is the winner.

Spent a couple hours at the table, selling books. This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that everything went great, that I made a great impression on passers-by and won them over with my winning attitude. Nothing succeeds like success.

So I’ll just say that. It’s easier that way. Two hours of that.

Drove to a comic shop run by a friend and burned up some store credit on that lovely slipcases edition of the collected Love and Rockets comics, which is more precious to me than say most of the SF published that I’ve read since 1985. There’s a lot to experience there. Looking forward to going through the whole thing, once I tend to this massive pile of unread prose. Which will definitely happen someday. After that, had some lovely sushi (one of my favorite things, and a rare treat as most of the time I’m the only person in the house who likes it.) And since I do all the cooking, it’s nice to eat stuff that I haven’t cooked (or actually can’t, in the case of anything more complicated than nigiri.) Went back to the room and read some South Central Noir and half-slept for the rest of the night, high-flow air conditioning dedicating me slowly until the sun crept up.

Disappointing breakfast at a place that usually delivers, supplemented by a couple of doughnuts from Stan’s in Sunnyvale. Big day and no time for lunch breaks between panels I was speaking at and panels I wanted to attend and the table I needed to be selling from. Spoke on a panel about collaboration, particularly from my experience in working on comics, but also working with a big client and their IP, as well as uncredited co-writing (aka ghost-writing). Hopefully my perspectives were useful or at least interesting. And no, I can’t talk about the particulars of the co-writing that I did. Its funny how you say you can’t say something and people for interesting ways to get you to say it and nope.

Also spoke on a panel about noir in SF and fantasy, which was a lot of fun. Honestly, I could do something like this at every show I go to, even if I make people mad that I break noir into a sort of aesthetic presentation versus the content versus the periodizing term. Much like I have to with cyberpunk now. Got to tie in a bunch of things I love: Blade Runner, expressionism in film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, CL Moore (after an audience member reminded me of her work), Howard Chaykin’s reboot of the Shadow, Chinatown, Chandler. Came up with lots of SF that uses noir vibe and feel, not so much in fantasy. I suspect that a lot of that has to do with an expectation of feel in particularly high fantasy which is likely incompatible with the sort of weary existential trudge at the heart of noir. Lots of fun. Ugh, I completely forgot about Sandman Slim, though people would probably just consider that horror and not worthy of inclusion. Maybe next time.

Watched a couple other panels, mostly process-related stuff. I try to learn what I can that I think will help, though have to keep in mind that not everyone works the same way or remotely the same kind of experiences or aims. I’ll have to tread lightly here and not be too judgmental. My aims, it seems to me, are no longer aligned with trying to land a publishing deal or representation, which a lot of people seem to be after. I would too, if I were trying to succeed in the field. I’m just trying to do good work now. Like I said, after a very long time of falling rocks uphill, I know from what’s likely and realistic and more importantly, what’s satisfying. I’m out of step with the market, if not the form. It’s not a thing that I can particularly change, nor have I got any real interest in changing. If I’m not doing good and interesting work, then what even am I doing? What indeed. And my idea of what is engaging is outsider, but not outsider enough to be considered art or any other elevated version of whatever’s happening in genre or literature. (Yes, all these terms are completely fraught with various dangers and valences that may mean different things to you than to me.) That’s always been true, but a thing that I have fought and fought and fought with. Maybe I should just lean into it and not worry so much. Surely I’ll just find a receptive market segment and not have to think about this so much.

Or I could not think about it at all and just think about what works for me. Which is of course swimming uphill, considering how things are done now. You’re supposed to find community and draft up an army, hit those newsletters and eventually your following carries you somewhere, right? Jury’s still out in my case.

Sigh. Deep breath.

Spent a bit of time back at the table, struck up a conversation with someone who used the descriptor “magical realism” for one of their books, and that became my hook for talking about The Queen of No Tomorrows with them. It went well, not merely because there was someone interested in one of my books (which itself is, granted, rare and weird) but it turned out he also lived in my current neighborhood until a couple years back. And even more importantly, someone who understood what I was setting out to do (and vice versa.) Turns out that Scott is involved with Liminal Fiction, a wide-ranging genre publisher based not too far from me. Anyways, he’s at least a reader. That’s what really matters. Yes, I do a lot of big talk in terms of writing to please myself, but the point is to encounter readers who will engage with the work (and I’ll come back around to this in a bit.) Anyways, we’ll see what happens there. And if you read this, hello Scott!

Oh, I should mention that my favorite local vendor of old SF books and such was there. Dollar a book. Lemme say that again. A dollar a book. I picked up the first five DAW reprints of the Elric books (as much for the covers as anything else) and some other oddities for less than I’d pay for lunch. Always a great deal.

Skipped out on bar-con after the show again. For those of you who aren’t aware, a big part of these shows is unstructured time at the bar after the show where people socialize and gather and that’s… a lot. I’ll go do this at comics shows where I already know a bunch of folks (though I haven’t done any comics works in… well, a long time.) But going in cold? Yeah. That’s simply not happening. It’s not a thing that I’m capable of, in particular. Something about social batteries being drained easily.

Instead, I drove out to a local Salvadoran place for a plate of grilled chicken and pupusas and rice. Afterwards, off to a Mexican ice cream place that turned out to be a canopy and some stand up tables and coolers beneath that. Maybe five flavors to choose from (one of them being carrot sherbet, which I did try but didn’t get a whole cup of). Went with pineapple, also a sherbet not a cream base. By itself it was good, but when the vendor doled out some chamoy sauce on top? Wow. Stratospheric. Chamoy is a mix of fruits and chiles, salt, tamarind and hibiscus flower for some bitterness. Just stellar. Ate quickly enough to spike myself with a solid headache, but worth it. Then to the home and backyard of a local friend where we sipped very smoky whiskey and talked for several hours. Yeah, that I can deal with. A room? Full of people? Yeah, not so much.

Last day of the show. Sneaked over to San Jose for breakfast (peach pie French toast!) and to take some pictures around the neighborhood, including the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, which is as strange as you’d imagine. I still wonder how the neighbors felt when it went up in the twenties or thirties. Were these people just harmless kooks or dangerous weirdos? (Given the reputation of Rosicrucianism, probably more the former, all genteel and such.) Still, it’s nice to have an encounter with the baffling and inexplicable and (of late) unprofitable. Done simply because it needed to be done, not because someone could drive up their third quarter numbers with it. Something weird and obsessive and as much the target of ridicule as adoration. At least then you know you’re on to something.

Got back, packed up, checked myself out, off to the next couple panels before the first one I spoke at. One of those I attended was “Creating Solid Queer Characters in SF Stories” which, frankly, I find more useful than other process stuff. Mostly because it’s an opportunity for people who actually know to speak of their experience. That’s how you learn something valuable, right? If you’re not experiencing it yourself, then be spoken to or speak with someone who has been there. Now, I could write a piece as long as this whole convention report on a panel as meaty as this one, so there’s no way I’m going to be able to cover the whole thing, other than to relay the honesty involved. And to point out that there is no one way to be any one thing. Just don’t pretend to make those monoliths, right? And a good way to start is not to have just one of [any descriptor] character standing in for all of them in your work. And you get to that point by listening and looking for commonality of experience, not slapping together surface characteristics and deciding you’re done there.

I’m giving this short shrift because this is largely an off-the-cuff report, but it’s a topic that’s far bigger and more important than what’s being seen here. Also, I recognize that I’m in the position of needing to learn and listen more than talk.

Was able to listen in on “Writing a Series” which I stopped by for as I happen to be writing a series, though Hazeland is not quite the same thing as they were discussing for the most part, not just in genre but in conception. I’m writing more stories that share characters and will maybe map together in one giant narrative (but I make no promises), whereas the panelists were largely discussing more traditional trilogy structures and that sort of thing. It’s a tricky thing to juggle that many balls at once, mentally speaking. That and… well… sometimes you figure out something in book 2 that would have been good to lay out in book 1 and that’s just not possible. And you can’t plan for everything (more on that one later). As with all conversations with other writers, you gotta understand that people can only talk about what works for them and that may not work for you. Or they’re under restrictions that you aren’t. Or they’re simply different people than you are. That’s all fine. You can still learn something that’ll change a small way you approach things. But there’s never just one right answer.

I was present on stage for “The Disinformation Plague” but didn’t say a lot. My knowledge is purely theoretical and when I start talking about ontology and what’s a fact versus faith, that doesn’t always mesh well with what most SF show panels are about. Lots of interesting and upsetting theories on the Current Situation, but policy prescriptions were another matter. No, the Blockchain is not going to create a system of trust. I’m sorry (that was not an opinion of the panelists, but an audience member, to be clear.) This is also the risk of panels like this, at least for me, in going from generalist to mapping things to a specific right now political set of problems. Because the real issues always run much deeper than that, down in the construction of what is real, or believed to be real. What’s the world that different someones are trying to make? Which is a different discussion. That said, I let more expert folks talk and I’m fine listening even when I see the limitations of the presentation itself.

The last panel I spoke on was about worldbuilding. My philosophy is that less is more. At least on the page. But maybe you can totally wing it. And you can for a time. But you have to do some work to build a reality that doesn’t fall apart after a couple hours. That said, I’m writing largely in a real world setting that I want to make vivid and real (so I spend a lot of time reading on the history of the city I write in, as well as visiting because I love to, etc etc.) But that’s to make the setting a character as much as I can. If you’re creating a whole new setting and civilization out of whole cloth, well, that’s a very different matter. Then you can generate literal reams of pages about the history and cultures and languages and customs and it could go on forever. But how much are you going to show in that one story or even that one novel? Right. I’m big on figuring out what’s in the story and then what do I need to build around it. Lots of other folks want to do the reverse. There isn’t a right or wrong way. And since I came up feral, I’ve got my own way which is not likely to change any time soon, no matter how well-intentioned attempts made to fix things are. It’s not you, it’s me.

This is another subject that I could easily go thousands of words on. But since worldbuilding is intimately tied to the act of creation, that’s not a surprise. The last panel I sat in on took us right here as well, that being “Characters and Voice.” There’s a million ways to approach this. None of them are wrong. Some might be less accessible than others, some will be so open as to be transparent. Success only comes on the reading. Remember (as Catherynne Valente said, which I agree strongly with) that the writing is only half of the equation. The other half is in the reader, who digests the book and produces something else out of it. You can use a metaphor of parentage or consumption or however you choose to. The fact is that the reader makes the book. The writer (and those involved in its production) make a prompt for an experience. Everyone is likely to take a difference set of experiences out of even the same work. Sorry. You don’t get to control what the reader takes out of things. (And yes, you don’t get to pre-empt bad faith readings either. Yes, it sucks.) Once it’s out there, it’s not really yours. You hope that the work makes an interesting experience or heartbreaking or whatever your intentions are that melt as soon as you let go of the book and have to yield to the reader. I know. You thought you as the writer were in charge. Bad news from space, as they say.

Back to the Small Press Big Universe table for about an hour and a truly horrifying podcast interview. Me, not them – I was frazzled and babbling. Though I was asked about what my biggest success in writing was. I gave a kind of mealy answer about having my name on a book published by someone not me (which only took about twenty-five years of being intractable and difficult). What I should have said was that the success was boiled down to me still being here and working and not having given up in the face of a series of indifferent markets, market entry points, magazines and anthologies and yes, even publishers big and small. I can’t say it’s the wisest course of action. But nothing I have done so far is, really.

Thanks to the Bay-Con organizers and Programming and other panelists and guests whose paths I crossed over the course of the weekend. It’s always a good and valuable time, even if I come across as having difficulty with it. Which I do. But that’s me everyday. And of course, thanks to you for reading this far. Until next time.

FULL BLEED: YEAR OF EXILE

Yeah. It's been a minute. It's been a minute for a lot of things.

Hot Friday afternoon today, heat sliding rapidly from comfortably warm when you step outside to goddamn hot within a minute or two. Tomorrow will be a lot worse, but I won't be here. Instead, I'll be at Bay Con in Santa Clara. I'll be on a handful of panels where I'm sure my unorthodox opinions on writing and world-building and publishing and genre will be a thorn in the side of others. I'll refuse to be a cheerleader for genre and otherwise bite the hand that feeds. We'll see how that goes. But honestly, SF needs a nip from time to time to remind all involved that the stories are not about setting or worldbuilding or interlocking technologies or believability or even goddamn scientific accuracy. There's the line.

In other news, we're on the cusp of the re-release of The Queen of No Tomorrows, that being this coming Wednesday (though a little bird told me that due to a slip-up, you could order the paperback or hardcover editions right now and they'd ship immediately. Whoops.) I'll probably write more about that whole journey in another entry. Though folks who've been following along know some of what went down. For all the upset and irritation and anguis the process has caused (what? being published isn't a magic want to make all those bad feelings go away? Yeah, sorry) I'm really proud of the book and even the cover and design and whole package. Part of that was my refusing to bend to what the publisher wanted to do (and, honestly, even if I had, I didn't have final say over the packaging or design of the cover -- welcome to publishing unless you're self-publishing). Part of that was just being bull-headed, which I'm very very good at.

And that's a useful trait in this world. I won't say this business because I can't afford to deal with this as a business. It's far, far too depressing to do so. And it's not just SF or fantasy or horror or any one genre/field. It's the whole thing. Publishing is a thing you're expected to bleed into and over and thank those running the business for the opportunity to not make anything resembling a living. I know some folks do. Most don't. I've had to walk away from that part of it. Again, sanity. Honestly, I'm still not sure I've made my peace with that particular Rubicon and the burning bridge flindering into fleeting and incandescent embers that die in the hiss and seethe of the surface disturbed by the rain of coals and beautiful opportunities now cindered. I've often said everyone has their own path in writing as in life and this one is mine. You can fight that or you can accept it and embrace that. Honestly I'm in a position where I don't need to make money off this, so that means freedom, right? Yeah, absolute freedom is more than a little daunting.

'Cause I've tried pursuing publication. Funny thing is that I only got stuff published when I wasn't actively trying to. This isn't a flex. This is the absurdity of life. I'd published some stories with Blizzard Entertainment (that itself was an absurd chain of coincidences) and saw and open call for Cthulhu-related stories with an indie outfit. I wrote my submission as something of a mean joke, wherein (spoilers) the elder gods are cut up and reduced to bite-size snacks for a ravenous populace, alien flesh flensed from titanic bones and stuffed into styrofoam cups. I was positive I'd be told that not only was my story rejected but that it was in bad taste.

It wasn't. That story, "Chunked" (a title I loathe to this day but couldn't figure out another one for it) appeared in Tomorrow's Cthulhu from Broken Eye Books in 2014? Maybe 2015? It appeared alongside several much much better stories (embarrassingly so) but was at least out there. Not much came of it. Then I asked the publisher if it was okay for me to take that story/setting and spin my own work out of it. They said "Sure, but why don't you pitch me something?"

Okay, I did. That was Queen of No Tomorrows. Which came and went. As most books do. Really, there's an awful lot of books published every year. Even in just horror. Even in just cosmic horror. Even in just Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror (not that I necessarily write in any of those subsections, but that's an argument for another time.) There's just a lot of books out there. Nobody can keep up with it all. That's Howling Pit territory (and I wrote a whole book on that subject in 2015 and again revised last year, so if you want that rant you know where to look for it.)

Wrote two more books in the series, now under the umbrella title Hazeland. The sequel to Queen of No Tomorrows was originally due in 2020. Then 2021. Then 2022. You get the picture. Now the publisher and I have parted ways. I know I said I wasn't going to recount all this, but there's some new folks who will probably read this stuff for the first time here and oh well. This separation was necessary, for the both of us, but it was pretty jarring as a process.

After that, I tried to write short fiction to place in anthologies. This, as it turns out, was a grievous mistake. I've only ever placed one other story in an anthology coming in cold. Those odds are bad enough now that I realize this part of the world of genre writing is not for me. Hey, if you have an anthology that you think my work will be a good fit for, go ahead and contact me. I won't do it cold any more. If this is seen as elitist or snooty or not willing to pay my dues, well you're welcome to think that. I've been writing longer than a lot of the folks in the business have been alive, so I feel like I'm entitled to my beliefs on the matter, even if they keep me exiled to the garage on the ratty towel out by the water heater.

Honestly, though, going over the transom for anthologies which pay non-SFWA rates? Nope. I'm done. Even if they pay those rates, I guarantee that what I'm going for and what most folks seem to be interested in doing in the genre is not compatible. I'm at peace with this. At least I tell myself that.

All that said, a depressing process to go through. And it's not like I can even blame the outlets. They're horribly outnumbered by folks who want the prestige of being writers. Those outlets can grant that prestige, but wow, it costs, y'know? And it doesn't pay all that well. Even for the publishers. Thin gruel all 'round.

I'll even lean on external issues for some of this. That's honest at least. Lots of personal stuff. Lots of life in transition and nobody goddamn tells you how to handle the first part of it, much less the constant onslaught, no strike that. It's too dramatic. The regular grind of everyday life and the shuddering transitions that it dumps on you with little or no warning. You let that stuff add up and add up and add up and eventually your back gives out. Mine certainly did. I'm pretty sure that the only writing I've done in the last year is revisions on The Queen of No Tomorrows and the novella that accompanies it, Dreams are Made of Us. Made a pass at All Waters are Graves, but looked at those recently and saw that I really didn't dig on those and need to do them again. Sure, I'd done a lot of work on the cover and some on publicity (hoo boy, that's a whole nother series of nested rants) and design of the book. I'd even done some plotting for books after, to make things seem coherent even when they really weren't.

But that's not really writing. It's all writing-adjacent stuff, but it's not the writing. It's not the sitting down at the keyboard and shutting off my goddamn ego for a couple hours and letting the universe and the ineffable pass from whatever nameless and causeless place it comes and out through fingers to keys to electrons to the electric shadows of the screen so that someone else can read it. It never comes out like I want, but I usually like what happens. I enjoy the surprise and being thwarted by my own story when I think it's going to expess itself one way and that simply neve happens but something else wondeful comes up in its place. Yeah, that whole egoless trip. That's sometimes hard to run up and embrace. There's a lot of reasons for that. We all know what they are. Pride's a motherfucker. It stings.

So yeah, I've been away for awhile. I'd like to think I'm ready to be back. We'll know soon enough.

If you read this and you're at Bay Con, your best bet at finding me is at the Small Publisher, Big Universe table. I'll be there at some point all three days.

Now let's lean into that heat of summer which feels invincible like a king ascendant, but like all kings lies about its regency being forever.

Until next time.

FULL BLEED: ALGORITHM FALL DOWN

This is probably going to be one in a series of rants, for lack of a better word, on the new Current Situation, which is pretty much the old one just made much much worse.

Before I continue, as this is largely about a group of phenomena often called AI or AI-assisted creation, I'm going to break down some terminology. I have strong feelings about the subject, yet I will attempt to retain some degree of objectivity.

AI is a misnomer. There is no intelligence in these systems. They are relatively clever scripts that take both publicly-available content from the internet as well as a vast collection of copyrighted material that has been strip-mined as source material for "training" these scripts how to generate content. In many cases, the results look like traces, particularly in terms of staging and the barebones layout of these images. Now, to some degree, that's because what they were "trained" on used solid design fundamentals to make interesting images.

In my own view, the process takes previously-created output and mulches it into something that appears to be novel. Mulching itself is probably a word that I ripped off from Bruce Sterling, who is a much more fair-handed and sanguine observer of the processes at work. A significantly better writer and technologist too.

Oh, I almost forgot. This content is never purely machine generated. The stuff that it produces, based on the work of millions of hours of human work, itself has to be massaged and checked and tweaked by human operators, mostly overseas, mostly grossly underpaid and exploited. It's the Mechanical Turk all over again (real quick - The Mechanical Turk being a curiosity of times past passing itself off as a mechanical device but in reality being operated by a human hidden in the works simply because no machine could do these things.) So, yes, the machine is "making" stuff that is modified and adapted from human work, fixed by human work. Often created with a specific bit of text that asks the machine to use a particular artist's stylistic markers and look.

Ethically, it's a mess. Yes, me talking about ethics in the creation of art in the marketplace of today is pretty laughable, I know. Mostly because nobody cares about the ethics of the marketplace. Most readers and viewers simply don't care under what conditions the things they consume are produced. Asking them to is probably silly. I only think about it because I flirted with making a living in that world, and at times have been paid pretty well to be part of it. Nothing lasts.

So you have an audience that ultimately doesn't care about how what it consumes is produced. Well, say hello to the army of dudes who don't care about producting anything but money (and prestige, but I'll get to that one later.)

See, there's a whole group of dudes who are really not only interested but desperate to make these tools make money, and they're mostly gonna make money by selling these tools to other dudes who want to write and draw and make videos and memes and don't care enough about the results to acutally learn the process. The creators of these programs want to profit off the dudes who boast about taking six hours out of their weekend to put together a children's book by typing lines of text into a program and having it spit out illustrations. Six hours. Can you imagine the sacrifice?

Of course, these dudes can't really sell this to anyone unless it's got proven bona fides that it'll work. That these programs will unleash their unlimited creative vision and make a beautiful product that consumers will line up to read. To do that, there has to be a success story with these content mulchers, something to prove that yes, they make workable content, desirable content, tasty content with the right kind of flavor crystals on it to make the ganglia twitch.

Which brings me to what happened with Clarkesworld this week. Clarkesworld, if you're not familiar, is a science fiction genre magazine, publishing short stories. Last week, they posted about how their submissions portal was being inundated with machine or script-generated content. And yes, you can tell, mostly because the words that these systems spit out are... they're not good. (The visual content is trickier simply because it's easier to fool our pattern-recognition systems into filling in the rest of a visual image, making us think it means something.) Text is a complicated thing. Particularly since the marketplace for these short stories are pretty dedicated readers. They're tougher to fool than, I dunno, middle-managers who think mulching systems are a great way to write quarterly reports (and they may well be -- I'm not denying that script generation will have a place in dry, coroporate and scientific text presentation.)

Clarkesworld felt it necessary to shut down electronic submissions because they were getting clobbered by push-button content, so much so that actual human-written submissions were being choked out and deprived oxygen, metaphorically speaking. Well now, they're wholly being deprived oxygen. This will be the first of these such closures, but not the last.

Why? Because it's too labor-intensive to sort these submissions out immediately. Sure, once you find a script-mulch story, you can ban the submitter's address, etc. But that's laborious. And the thing is, anyone with access to these systems can wipe out a submissions portal in short order. It's asymmetrical warfare. It's spawning hundreds or thousands of submissions with very little work (note, I will not call these stories because stories are written by humans and if this makes me a chauvinist, I guess I am.) So, spawned submissions versus human readers is not much of a fight.

What happens, however, if the portal doesn't care about the quality of work and is happy to just publish these submissions? Let's look at Amazon. And they will, like it or not, come to a point and probably soon where they either have to ban machine-generated submissions OR charge some amount of money to publish a work (even a token amount) OR they will risk the algorithms, their recommendation engines, being overwhelmed and offering up keyword-filled crap non-story content simply because someone with access to a text mulching service wrote up "A Sherlock Holmes story with Cthulhu and Moriarty teaming up." There's audiences for all those keywords. They might even click on it and eat it up. Or they're going to see that these submissions are terrible and begin to lose faith in the recommendation engine.

Right now, these mulching services are not being widely utilized. That's right now. It won't take long for the grifter class to move in. Grifters have already made Amazon a wasteland with content-free books and the like. Go ahead and look up passive income schemes where you don't even have to write a book. They're out there. I even get recommended them on my Insta feed because of what? The algorithm. You bet.

I'm not arguing that the sky is falling. Mostly 'cause it's already fallen. We're already living in a shattered publishing landscape. Yes, lots of people can make a living or supplement their incomes with writing. There's thousands more trying to get in every day, though, all of varying quality levels and experience levels. The fact of the matter is that submissions for all manner of genre magazines are being clobbered by folks who are actually writing and wanting to be published, much less dudes who are trying to score a win for their scripting systems and getting something published, because publishing means prestige.

Yeah, I told you I'd get back to prestige, didn't I? Because the prestige of being a published writer is what a lot of publishers are paying in. It sure as heck isn't money. I'm not even talking about the genre anthologies who offer a penny a word or a contributor copy as payment for a ten thousand word story. It goes all the way up. And honestly, publishers can afford to pay very little because they're paying back in confirmation of identity. In prestige. Because if you've been published by someone else, you're lifted out of the self-publishing wasteland and can be talked about in blogs and book tours and in Publisher's Marketplace.

Oh yeah. Book tours. You know, where you pay someone to arrange for you as an author to appear at various blogs and podcasts and there your book is promoted. Yeah. Book tour companies won't take you as a self-published author. Check right there in their policies. Your money's not good. Because it doesn't have prestige with it.

Sorry, I wandered off the track there. I was supposed to be talking about generated content and what it means for creation in the future.

We're already in a place where only folks who have the free time to work for a little pay as writing generally provides will be able to do this full-time. Most folks who write, even books for larger genre publishers, they're doing writing as a side gig because no insurance, no pay, no stability. Some folks are getting by on the outskirts, self-publishing on *ahem* Amazon because they've found a way to make it work. What happens when that doesn't? When they have to swim against the flood of material that's being put out there?

Reminder, a quick search reveals that there's something like a million books a year put on Amazon.

One. Million. That's around three thousand a day, just under.

How do you build an audience in that manner of howling pit?

What happens when larger publishers have to fight against near-copycat works from fly by night operations? They'll spend money shutting operations down, operations that are cheaper to re-open than keep fighting.

I'm looking down the road some and nothing I see is encouraging. I'd love to be wrong. But we're in an arms race over money, and as we've seen, people will do really really dumb and short-sighted things in the pursuit of money. Hell, just now I saw that Warners is going to commission a bunch of new Lord of the Rings movies. Now this is dovetailing from AI content, but let's push that just a little. They'll get humans to write this. How long until they decide that they only want humans to sort of refresh and punch up the generated content stories these things will be based on?

Yeah, the bottom line is a harsh mistress.

I'm just imagining how only folks who really really want to and can afford to will actually be writing new books. I'm not talking about generating new content that is all vaguely familiar on pre-cut templates of accepted genres and tropes and checklists and having the right flavor crystals. I'm talking about new books, ones that come from a lifetime of reading and synthesizing new ideas out of old, not simply tracing over them. I'm thinking about the lonely and monastic work, not the performative social media presence work (such as this essay all blood and thunder, yes I see me). I'm talking about doing this by candle light in the night in a tower thinking you're alone doing this because maybe someone else wants to see it, because you want to see it. Thinking about a dark landscape of towers or hovels or abandoned apartment buildings with humble lights in the windows, pinpricks in the dark firmament of solitary humans scratching out some manner of actual goddamn life on the page. That manner of work. That manner of lonely light.

Oops. I didn't solve the problem. I didn't give us an answer. There wasn't a triumphal conclusion where the machine got turned off because people recognized the fundamental void at the center of these dead-eyed content machines, the thing that I've taken to calling Anabsence. The source that generates content only a middle manager or consultant could love. The thing that makes idea guys all powerful because the hard work is taken out of their hands. (As other smarter people than me have pointed out -- the idea guy is the most superfluous part of any equation. Sure, ideas are great, but without the dedication and skill and luck to see the idea through into conclusion, all you've got is an idea, and lemme tell ya, those are easy.)

More later.

FULL BLEED: 100% OVERFLOWING SUPPORT

I'm back.

Okay, I never really went away. But I did stop blogging. Which is something they say you should never do. Writers should always be out there, promoting their brand, building their brand, out there giving success advice and being any potential reader's best friend. You should be photogenic and performative and smiling on Insta and TikTok. Come on. You've got books to sell. You've got to be a personality. People have to want to be you or be around you. Better stronger faster happier healthier. Not drinking too much. Not eating too much saturated fat. Working every day. You've got a job to do and it's a job you love more than life itself, for it is a sacred trust. That's better than getting paid, right? Satisfaction. Knowing that you brought something new into the world to light the way for all these lost souls. Think of all the likes you can rack up. All those retweets and respouts, excess tooting, increase that reach. Go out in public and talk. Hustle hustle hustle. Always be closing.

Like an ourboros. Closing in on itself. One day it's gonna eat that tail. You bet.

So I'm back. Got a plan. Not sure it's a realistic plan, or even a particularly good one. But it's what I've got.

Last year I parted ways with the publisher of my first contracted novel, Queen of No Tomorrows. This in the middle of getting the follow-up to that book published. It just wasn't going to come together and both of us knew it, only it took a bit of work to make both parties understand that. It was a draining and expensive process on my part. I paid him for his editing work. I paid him for the cover that he contracted. He was already reeling and I didn't want to be the guy kicking someone when they're down. For what it's worth, I believe he's still publishing currently. Just not publishing me.

After that, I checked around with a few publishers. Publishers who said they wanted series. Who said they wanted something new and different, not the same old same old. Publishers who said they were hungry and ready to take a chance.

Granted, I've got a few obstacles that I put in my own way. I'm writing intergenre stuff, somewhere between horror and weird fantasy and crime. Which just disappoints purists in all three genres. Oh well. I've been doing this too long to change now. It's amusing more than anything else. I mean, how horror is simply fantasy (or crime or drama or historical) with a particular emotional effect, a particular emotional destination and not even a particular tone. But without those trappings, the flayed bodies or otherworldly creatures or whatever else, it's like you're not acutally writing horror.

So yeah, there's that.

There's also the fact that I turned Queen of No Tomorrows (that's the published title, omitting the article at the start, which I fought over and how silly was that) into the first book in a series. Now, horror typically doesn't go well with series books. And that's understandable. Horror tends to chew up characters and spit them out (unless you focus on the antagonist, or is Freddy the hero of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies? Is Michael? Are the zombies?) So series are a tough sell. But there's no way that I can separate the follow on books from one another. They all feed directly one into the other, etc. So that's a setback.

And I suspect some of this is the fact that the books are not tonally downers. Nor are they triumphalist (which is indeed the standard mode of most genre fiction these days. And triumphalism is whatever. It's fine. It's not what I write. You need emotional contrast and when you have a positivity distortion field running, well, that takes out some emotional depth.) So it's back to the egg and self-publishing.

But are you self-publishing if you're not actually publishing? Nope.

So I'm re-releasing The Queen of No Tomorrows with its preferred title. Also another edit pass to open up some lines that get explored in future books, and to, uh, knock out some commas and dashes and other things that were textual tics of the editor and not part of my voice. I'm also adding a new novella to the book, entitled "Dreams are Made of Us." For the same low price as before! It's a steal!

If your're curious about the books, read to the end to find a link that'll take you to the announcement page. Strangely, the whole world isn't beating down my door to have me on their podcasts or write guest columns or feature cover reveals or previews. It's weird right? Specially when you've been told that the indie world is always 100% overflowing support.

Which is not to say there hasn't been. Or I wouldn't be here. Just that it's not... usual. I know. Everyone's always hungry. There's bills to pay. Ain't nobody doing this for free. Except, well, most of the writers out there, hoping that their books get picked up and sell more than fifty copies. At this point, I'm not counting copies sold. That's a great road to despair. You gotta not do it.

I know. If you don't quit your job and write full time, you're a coward. You saw those stories too. The exhortation to just follow your bliss and take that leap and damn but gravity's a bitch. It's always there. No matter how many people tell you there's a feather bed just waiting and you only have to believe. It's exausting to deal with this stuff. After more than thirty years. Granted, the Writing Triumphalism thing wasn't so bad until about ten years ago. But that's what happens when you have a marketplace that doesn't buy books so much but does buy writing advice. Oh boy, do they ever.

I don't have any of that. I only have books to sell.

The Queen of No Tomorrows arrives 7/5/23.

All Waters are Graves will happen about a year from now. Maybe even Valentine's Day. Why not.

Asphalt Tongues will hit in probably September or October of 2024.

The fourth Hazeland book, tentatively titled The Missing Pieces will be early in 2025.

The fifth, tentatively titled Fake Believe, in the summer or fall of that year.

In theory, this will close out the first round of Hazeland books. The second round will be a proper trilogy, starting with a trilogy of books: The Mirror Wolves, The Enigma Lens, The Glass Diamond. I strenuously doubt there will be a twice-a-year release schedule with these, but who knows. Probably going to once a year past that.

I'm no longer interested in pursuing traditional publication with these books. They're not going to fit neatly into anyone's categories and I'm just done with trying to shave edges down so these square pegs can fit into round holes. There's no money in this. There's barely money in it now for people who are able to do this full-time. If something crazy happens, that's something else. Crazy things do indeed happen, but not crazy like this.

I'm still here. Still too dumb to quit.

More later.

Just head to the main page - https://highway62press.com for the information and full PR regarding the re-release of The Queen of No Tomorrows.

FULL BLEED: HE WHO SHATTERS

Rules absolutely.

I should say something about Twitter, since it's been my favorite MMO for several years now, part confessional, part screaming into your pillow, part stand-up open-mic-night. Only it's that for everyone else. It's also a battleground.

It's also a place that people think they can win. But maybe that's social media in general. 'Cause I see people asking "How do I succeed at [social media platform]?" And the answer is that you don't. You just exist, slip into a fictionsuit and let it go. That's asking for success advice and I'm pretty sure we all know where we stand on this. Besides, each user makes their own culture on social media. There isn't a single unified culture on any place, though sure it's fun to whine about Tumblr brain. But then you see people on a platform shrieking to "Not bring your stinking Twitter culture" to their new chosen space. Yeah, digital nativism is fun.

So it's weird to watch things being torn apart and attempted to be reshaped by one dude in particular. But you know, sooner or later, he'll probably get what he wants out of it. Just that he may nuke the entire site in the process.

Par for the course really. It's been a year. Lots of upheaval. Lots of changes. Lots of the same stuff still dragging into 2022 though I was pretty sure that it was gonna bleed out long before then. But then, I thought I'd have a new book being put out right around now. Something about plans and laughs. I'm hoping that the last chapter of that particular mess is closed, since I'm sending the final letter to that publisher. Done and dusted.

So let's see if we can really bury that. Maybe pretend to accept the fact that the way things are about as good as they're gonna be. Normal? Yeah, that's a condition of the past. We all get to play hurt now. Coach is putting us in the game, blood seeping out from under all that gauze. Go get 'em.

In service to that, I've begun re-reading the previous Hazeland novels to try and figure out what I was reaching for six years ago and then in the last couple of years when I was still drafting these thinking that they'd actually come out. They still will. Just most likely into the howling pit of self-published books. Oh yes, I know. They're just as valid as books put out by any other publisher. Only I know that's not true. You know it's true too. They don't get support. They don't get acknowledgement (by and large). They're not real. Some of that's marketing. Some of that's audience.

But, deserve's got nothing to do with any of this, right?

There's only the fight.

So, back to re-reading. There's parts of Queen of No Tomorrows that I sure want to work on. Only I'm not sure how to. Which means it'll probably be a couple of small surface level fixes of language and such. There isn't too much to fix in terms of it being the first book of a series. I had ideas but nothing sketched out. Now I've got several books planned out in this first, I don't know, drop. Five I think. Three of them organized more or less as novels (just one of 'em structured a bit oddly) and two collections of short stories and longer short stories to handle some setup and characters and situations that really didn't fit in the storylines of novels.

I always wanted to approach this like a bronze-age comic series, where there's narrative threads that more or less chunk out into a series of books, but there's also filaments that interweave and maybe don't pay off in a singular book bot over the series as a whole. That's probably overly albitious and maybe even foolhardy, but hell, I'm not on contract. I may as well get paid in doing what I want.

As for the rest of things, life is what it is. I've been bounced in and out of emergency rooms a couple times this year due to an ongoing issue that is hopefully being controlled by the third attempted medication. I'm transitioning from full-time dad to remote-work dad as my kids are moving out. Maybe they'll be back for the summer, maybe not. Watching my own parents grow older and know exactly where that leads, just the manner of getting there that's in question. It's grinding and humbling. It's beautiful and unexpected. Don't get to pull one thing from the other.

As for being present in the digital world? I just don't know. I'm not going to win. There's a lot more of everyone than there is of me, so dealing with that one-to-one simply can't happen. It's impossible to address every injustice or support every project that deserves it, buy into every substack or even read everyone's blog that they're going back to. And not having a single place to work from, having to deal with an atomized social media landscape engenders a special flavor of exhaustion if I think about it for any length of time. We're all diverting ourselves while we're at work. We're all desperate for an audience. We're all looking for a way to succeed.

We're all just trying to stay in the fight.

Talk to you later. Gotta get through Thanksgiving first.

FULL BLEED: WHAT IS WITHIN YOU MAY KILL YOU

Let's pretend we're on LiveJournal again. Not that I ever used it.

Why? Because Twitter is going through throes of transformation that it may not survive. Mostly because private capital got it. And private capital wants returns, any way, any how. Plus the current management seems to be impulsive and gripped by a fundamental misapprehension as to the value of the platform that he's purchased. Also, he's bought a big box of baby raccoons and some of them have rabies, but he has to keep as many of them in the box to prove that it's a valuable resource to sell advertising in. Oh and charge subscription fees for. After firing half the staff, but maybe asking a bunch of them to come back.

In short, it's likely not to look like it currently does, maybe even by the end of the year. And it's the only platform that has put text first and has offered a huge communal watering hole. Oh and immediacy, to get that rat-a-tat-tat of dialogue in the best of times.

So, right. Been in a funk for a bit. Let's call it a funk because spiral sounds bad. It's not that bad. I let it get in the way, let the weeds get higher than the garden. Had a lot to deal with. Still do, honestly. But I gotta get back to work, even if nobody else wants what I do. But then it's rough out there if you're not catering to a specific audience. Hell, a friend of mine who got a book published off a very modest advance has yet to earn that back. And the publisher bought publicity and everything. It's tough.

Figuring I ain't gonna get paid and honestly, I'd rather write than publish. Or rather, get published. Publishers are conservative and honestly shit-scared. There's good reason for that. Everyone else is asking for more of everything and they've got less to give or to hold onto for themselves. It's bad out there. Bad as I've ever seen it (unless you've already made it, then it's good.)

So to get myself fired up for what looks like the next year plus of writing and putting books out there, my books, the way I want 'em done, I went over a little checklist in my head about what actually appeals to me in this whole goddamn process. Here we go.

Nobody else is doing it.

Sure there’s antecedents. But Chandler wouldn’t touch the supernatural other than his own ghosts and demons. PKD was along these lines, but still wandering in a gnostic maze. There’s influence and there’s doing it yourself.

It’s fun to piss of genre purists.

Sure, that’s petty. I’m a petty guy. I also hate to deal with close-mindedness. Particularly in a genre that’s supposed to be imaginative.

Fuck Stranger Things.

Those dipshits were five in the eighties (I haven’t checked, but it sure reads like it). It was way more weird and fucked up than they’ll ever know. And their taste in music is *basic*.

You get to make your own magic.

No magic system to be beholden to. No RPG rules to suck the life out of everything. See also - nobody else is writing this.

Ariela is a fun character.

A bundle of contradictions. Streetwise but regal. Educated but direct. Queen goth who wants nothing to do with the scene.

The other characters are good, too.

Hopefully they ring at least a little true to other readers as well.

Los Angeles is a great playground.

Greater than even NYC or imperial Rome. Anything can happen here and anyone could have caused it to. Crime, movies, politics, recent history, rockets, science, all faintly unreal and dreamlike. Sure, those might happen in other places, but it seems more likely here.

Fuck you, that’s why.

Fuck your gatekeeping or genre purity. Fuck you for saying that anything is cringe or it won’t sell or won’t get adapted so why bother. Just fuck you. Fuck your content.

Because nobody will see it coming.

It’s going to go places nobody expects

Because you’re scared nobody will care and so what.

And that’s the money melon. Afraid of wasting time when that’s all we god. Time is the fire in which we burn and all that. It’s going to kill you not to do it. Okay, it’s gonna take a longer time that way.

It’s just scary to put that much into a work and watch it sing without a trace. More than scary. Futile. It hurts and it’s a hurt that most folks will never know. They’re safe and set. They have deals that they know will go through.

There’s no net below. It’s okay. You only have to keep writing.

-

That's it, the whole joke. I've given up on playing the game and instead am playing one that makes the slightest bit of sense to me. Which is to say, not much at all.

I'll be putting up the following, which marks Hazeland part one.

Queen of No Tomorrows (with at least one backup story, probably two.)

All Waters are Graves (formerly offered as My Drowning Chorus.)

Asphalt Tongues - collected stories

Fake Believe - more collected stories

The Missing Pieces - three novellas of horror, crime and weird intrigue, respectively.

Watch this space for further developments.

THE KINGDOM OF IS

As it's my birthday, I offer you a gift. "The Kingdom of Is" was written for Broken Eye Books' recent anthology of stories based around Miskatonic University in dread Arkham. This story was published in the second volume of the anthology. I offer it to you for only the price of your kind attention.

-

The Kingdom of Is

by Matt Maxwell

Ryan knew now why everyone was scared of the Linguistics Department at Miskatonic, why physicists and computer scientists, even the weirdos in the biological sciences, cleared a path when the linguists walked the halls.

"Never mess with the linguists," he had been told his first day on campus. "They're feral."

The thought bit down into his skull, those exact words branding themselves onto his brain until they became real and inescapable. He laughed, trying not to maniac-giggle about it as he turned over the paper. His hands were sweat-sheathed, and the note was as sticky as if he'd had sticky frog fingers.

He giggled despite trying to choke the laughter back.

The air above Arkham had grown heavy and dense, starting that morning. Now it was stifling as a coffin lid, bleeding sweat from every pore.

He almost believed that it was the freakish weather driving his perspiration. Down inside in a place that he refused to acknowledge rationally, he knew that it was fear.

Not the fear of the unknown but of something too well known now, too tangible to be written off as freak lightning strikes or gas main ruptures. He knew what had happened ten years ago at the Petersen Obelisk of MU. He knew that it wasn't any of the desperately mundane explanations that had been used to wallpaper over events.

He focused on the paper before him, finding the tiny mark that indicated the top of the page, which way to hold it. That mattered. He stared at the symbol, and it almost made sense.

Ryan wished that he hadn't erased the copy of the sign that had been chalked at his feet not even an hour before. But he had no way of knowing then. And even if Elizabeth had told him, he wouldn't have believed it. Not until he'd seen what a word could do.

His fingers closed around the stick of bright pink chalk in his pocket, and he started scratching out a crude copy of the symbol. Before today, he'd prided himself on his retention and precision, the directness and rationality of his argumentative approach and his grasp of any of the sciences. Now he was hard-pressed to hold a stick of child's sidewalk chalk.

The sun's trek to the horizon made the heat worse, light rippling through the burdened atmosphere like molten glass. But it wasn't just the weather. It was more than that. The way the sky itself rippled and bulged like a tumor.

It was becoming.

He put the thought out of his head and kept working, grinding the chalk to a stump.

A sound slithered through the air, like a snake on a glass window, the susurrus of its scales. He froze in place and was suddenly cold despite the stifling heat. Elizabeth had told him to expect this, only she'd used her weird way of talking, avoiding the dread word is.

Ripples and vibrations of possibility and potential resolved themselves into nightmare.

The monster went from “maybe” to “was.”

It looked like a mucoid rainbow, a spectrum itself given tumorous lesions and left to bubble over into iridescent meaninglessness. A multitude of seven-segmented arms unfolded along its length, hundreds of them in assemblage. Tipping each one was an uneven pair of claws or blades, each snicking against the other in a horrific chain of whispers. The thing oozed through the air itself, undulating and tearing.

It felt him there. It was hungry.

Ryan tried to force himself to say the word from the postcard aloud. He had to be careful. Once used, the word would lose any power. There were only so many words, just like bullets in a clip.

"S-s-s," Ryan hissed. He couldn't speak. The creature swam through water that was not there, an echo of undersea motion. In the last of the sunlight, it radiated gold with a thousand colors beneath.

He gave up and instead wrote the word in crude block letters, each one as tall as his hand. S. His fingers scraped against the asphalt such that the last letter, also a capital S—curves made angles in haste—became darkened with blood.

It was close now, close enough that its legs or cilia or claws—whatever they were, the definition didn't matter—were close enough that he could feel the air displaced as they whipped past him. Ryan sucked in a breath and spoke from his diaphragm like he'd learned in debate club.

"Squamous. You are squamous!"

The leg that raked across and snagged his hoodie was semitransparent and smelled of saltwater and boiled crab shells that had made him sick as a boy behind his uncle's restaurant. Ryan hated seafood and always would. The thing tugged the fabric a little before he crossed out the word with a savage motion of his arm. His knuckles went to fire, but he held tight to the little stub of chalk.

As he crossed through the letters, the thing was un-made. Pieces of glistening shell fell away and rainbow ooze dripped out, evaporating before it hit the asphalt. The legs, once choreographed with an alien grace, fell to twitching and spasming. The thing’s proportions snapped, as a whip in the hand of a giant, and it went straight. The last pieces of it, carapace and scissor feet and undifferentiated chitin and jelly, all of it dropped to the ground and ceased to exist.

He stared at it in astonishment. This thing, whatever it was, its trip to the land of is was over now. It never was.

"Never screw around with a linguist," he whispered to himself.

Ryan looked down at the sigil in chalk, eyes lingering at the dark streak of blood on the final strokes. If someone had told him that he'd bleed for Elizabeth Stokes and be glad for it, even a few days ago, he'd have said that person was insane.

Not so much now.

The sun was down, but the sky still burned orange as if the earth had stopped turning at this moment and the light wouldn't change anymore forever. Over in the direction of the rebuilt obelisk, the highest point on campus, the sky still roiled, and the sunlight came through it like nearly transparent oil in a vortex.

She was still over there with her postcards and chalk and her lighter.

At least he hoped she was. He started to run despite not being accustomed to it. In twenty steps, his sides ached, but he kept running, stopping only to take off his sweatshirt emblazoned with “Miskatonic Phys Ed.”

He ran toward the roil. It would be there. She hadn't been wrong yet.

***

A few days before.

"Welcome to the Land of Is," Elizabeth said. She stood in front of the chalkboard, which was so anachronistic that Ryan had stared at it for a full ten seconds before realizing what it was.

She had the same phrase written on the board. But then this was a social sciences class, so repetition was going to be key for these dullards to retain anything.

Yes, he was angry that he was being forced to take a course outside his major. Not even something useful like applied mathematics. But linguistics. Theory, outside of any manner of useful application, was anathema. It was about what could be done with a discipline that mattered. Arguing about the fundamentals was useless navel-gazing. But still, he'd dodged the requirement for as long as he could.

He only ended up here when he'd heard that the linguists were insane, and he thought there might be some kind of a challenge. Instead, it was nothing but tautology and emptiness.

But Dr. Stokes was supposed to be a good lecturer, even after her long absence from the school and teaching. An absence that had begun not long after the toppling of the original Petersen Obelisk some ten years ago.

The chalk squeaked as she drew on the board, underlining the is. "I hope you have come to class prepared," she said. Her voice was direct, ringing a unique tone, one of clarity.

Ryan was sure her eyes rested on him for a moment, but nobody else seemed to notice.

"We will spend this semester unlearning some things and hopefully in the process, open up to learning new things." The chalk fell into the metal tray with a tak.

"Language is how we fabricate the world, describing, codifying, hammering into consensus an agreement as to what constitutes reality.

"Language shares in a power that we used to accord to magic."

Ryan stifled a laugh, though no one else in class seemed to get the joke. Magic. Ugh.

She was older than any of the graduate fellows he'd seen. She didn't look like Mom back home with her tremendous wrinkles. Rather, the maturity evidenced itself in her stance, her directness. Though there was something more beneath, which he picked at but could not figure out.

"We shall examine existence under the tyranny of the great king to be, which has proven itself to be a burden and even more has served as accomplice to mistruths and misrepresentation.

"In short. Nothing human is beyond being human. I can say that I am a teacher, but perhaps you sit in a better position to judge. I am a woman, what lays beneath these Levis not mattering. I am a percussionist in a band called Anathaid, which means 'unknown' in Irish, but do you see a drum in my hand?"

Tautology and navel-gazing. And how she harps on the point, ridiculous.

There were perhaps ten other students in the lecture room, all of them lost in rapt attention, hanging on her every word.

"Am and be counterfeit a permanence that humans simply do not possess the capability for. These verbs suggest chains and solidity that do not exist."

Oh enough.

"But I am here," Ryan grouched. "I am sitting in this chair, which is in this room."

Elizabeth paused, a smile flickering across her face but that died quickly. "You sit in this room. You sit on that chair."

Her red hair shone with a faint patina in the fluorescent light of the room, skin taking on a greenly radiant cast, feeling unearthly when coupled with her weird speaking cadence and disregard for mere being.

Ryan scooted his chair and let the screech echo a moment. "I am in this room." He let his voice go sour. "I am a man."

Her smile flickered again. "You appear old enough to buy alcohol legally, yes. We'll leave it at that." She crossed her arms in front of her. "I gather that you do not agree with the thesis of this class, which may or may not reflect my personal beliefs. Or the use of is as commonly accepted.

"Where lies your objection? Excessive formality? Over-precision? Disregard for convenience? I have received that last one more than once."

Her smug expectation made him seethe.

The class stared into their notebooks and laptops, wondering if this was part of the lecture or something else.

"I reject the entire notion. You're doing away with being! I've never heard anything so ridiculous."

"Everything that I have said sustains proof. I do admit that this view brings with it a certain... rigidity.

"But you have come to this classroom to learn, yes?" She didn't point or glare or accuse. She only said her piece with a stone confidence.

The same confidence that the insane posses. She really is crazy. Maybe the rumors were more than that.

"Yes. I am here to learn."

Her eyebrow arched. "You exist in this place to learn? Intriguing. And a bold statement."

The chuckle that ran through the classroom shamed him in his seat.

"Enough of that, please," she said, loud enough to be heard in the back. "Mockery brings nothing to our experience here. Instead, Mr., ah... Kolnik, yes?"

Ryan nodded, not knowing how she knew.

"Mr. Kolnik has brought us to a place that I'd hoped to steer us toward. And in this moment, you will find the key to the class and, not without coincidence, your grades."

Another chuckle from the class, this one more nervous.

"The next time you feel hungry, do as my kin in Ireland have said. My elder kin at any rate. Please say the following when your stomach growls.

"'Hunger is upon me.' Not 'I am hungry.' If you don't wish to sound like a Hibernian grandmother, then try 'I feel hungry,' or 'Let's get lunch.' Shift from the tyranny of is to something more open yet precise."

The cadence of her voice and dodging around the simplest verb in the universe ate at Ryan. She couldn't say it without mockery. This was ridiculous. He was hungry. He was sitting in the classroom hungry. He was pissed off that he had to take this stupid class from this dingbat woman who was rumored to have spent several years institutionalized. Perhaps that was part of the glamor.

It was intolerable.

"Shake off the shackles of eternal being," she said with a laugh. "And share in a world that contains more vividness and strangeness than the Kingdom of Is." She hissed out a short breath.

"Now let us take this moment to introduce ourselves to one another before we start into our analysis of Lowery's rejectivist theory of grammar and construction."

It was going to be a very long semester.

But perhaps Ryan could find a way to cut it shorter.

***

The reconstructed Petersen Obelisk scratched against the tangerine sky like a scalpel, dimpling the skin but not yet slicing. Ryan could see a pattern in the heat ripples and whorls of the atmosphere, not just a pattern but a malignance. It filled him with dread, but he wouldn't allow it to be dreadful. He'd learned that much.

He wondered if it had looked like this ten years ago. He'd never found many pictures. That was before everyone carrying cameras in their pockets and selfies and patchwork recorded history spit out on a minute by minute basis. Just a few tiny photos, hairy and unrecognizable from digital compression and resizing. There weren't any pictures of Elizabeth at the center of the strange storm. But he knew she'd been there. A little digging had uncovered that. She'd been here before her involuntary institutionalization, lasting more than eight years and returning to school only last semester.

She'd told him herself. She even said that she had been there, dipping her toe into the Kingdom of Is.

He kept walking and saw glimpses of distorted faces in the sky above. Whatever existed there, it grew closer. But then she was calling it down to do just that.

***

Ryan's research showed the original Petersen Obelisk had stood in the central plaza at Miskatonic for nearly ninety years before it had been destroyed in a weird accident. An accident described as a lightning strike during a freak storm early in the fall semester. Though there were no fatalities, a postdoctoral student in the linguistics department had been incapacitated and remanded to the custody of state mental health authorities and then bounced from private clinic to private clinic.

The paper trail was hazy as was the digital one. But Ryan knew that characterizing this as an accident was an error. Elizabeth had been responsible for it. The why of it eluded him.

The more she talked about language and magic in class, the more he wondered. Once was a time that Miskatonic had been famous for the occult: back before transatlantic flight, penicillin, the moon landing, and the internet. Now it was another mid-Atlantic private college, using this mythology to sell sweatshirts and kitschy glasses.

And paperweights. Glass paperweights bigger than a closed fist, a cluster of multicolored globules and trailing tentacles, all made with some abstract blowing technique, all marked with the MU Cephalopods. A funny joke and a very popular souvenir, even if he couldn't identify exactly what kind of cephalopod it was supposed to be (and he'd spent an hour or two familiarizing himself with them).

Ryan had watched Elizabeth buy several of them since he started following her after class.

Just like he was right now.

He knew it was creepy and strange but no less than she was. She was up to something, finishing the work that she'd started years ago. She was still insane, only masking it now.

Not very well. This was the third seemingly identical paperweight she'd purchased this trip. It didn't make any sense. Nor did her selecting postcards out of a spinner rack, apparently by random. She'd spent an hour doing that once, and he'd almost gotten bored of it.

The purchases had to be random because she had her eyes closed when she gave the wire rack a turn, fingers fumbling over it as it came to a stop, selecting cardboard images by touch.

Miskatonic in the winter, the hurricane gates, a clutch of daffodils in a colonial-seeming graveyard. If she came up with one displaying the obelisk, she shuffled it away and never on a rack that it had come from. It didn't make sense.

This trip, she bought her latest paperweights and two buckets of sidewalk chalk from the art supplies department.

He fought with himself over confronting her. But if it was magic, like she blathered about in class, then where was the harm in it? Magic wasn't real.

His mind turned to the newspaper picture of the toppled obelisk, and he thought that she'd been interrupted last time. And how it looked more like it had been flattened by a titanic blow than struck by lightning. If that had come from being interrupted, then what would she be working toward this time?

He chickened out and watched as she walked out with her plastic bag filled with supplies, stopping only to pick up her full backpack from the cubbies out front.

***

The roiling sky above swelled and pulsed like a heart outside the body. Surging power flowed through it as something seemed to squeeze between the layers in the air like jelly pressing through a screen door, jelly that slowly reassembled itself into something like eyes and mouths, both open and hungry. It was a tornado of appetite bound together only loosely by a string of words that Ryan reached for in description.

He had been well-read once, though he traded that in for the comforting solidity and regularity of code. Code defined a world that could be controlled and harnessed, even if it was through tricks and hacks. As the thing in the sky materialized above him, he reached for words to describe and contain it and found himself without the language to carve it into being.

It could not be named.

He ran again despite the furnace burn inside his ribs.

Pieces in the air moved against one another, diamond facets but organic and shuddering as if sickened. Their translucence made it impossible to tell if there was just a thousand or a million or billions of them, compounded and amplified and...

He fell into it, staring, feeling his feet come to a leaden halt, unable to move ahead, not even wanting to any longer. It was the thing that was. It had always been. It would always be. It was a totality, the only thing that mattered, the emptiness of possibility. And it was the king.

Ryan wasn't even a subject, wholly beneath its notice, but would be obliterated all the same when the king came.

***

The bookstore had been ready to close, and Ryan had to be sneaky, embody the essence of the thought in order not to be seen by Elizabeth as she checked out.

The obelisk had been toppled ten years ago to the night. He couldn't think about anything other than that and how she had done it. Perhaps his irritation at inconvenience had started this thing. Perhaps it was just that. But that had only been the start. It had grown into a thought that crowded out all others.

He was the only one who could stop her. She was going to do it again. She was going to take the whole school with her this time. Whatever force she had called on the last time, she was going to do it a hundred times over now. She'd been to the far side of crazy and hadn't ever come back, just pretended. That's why she couldn't be sane or be normal. It was pretending. It was all so obvious.

She was going to do it tonight.

And he would stop her. Even if he didn't know how.

She walked along into the early evening, stopping to open one of the tubs of chalk as she paused at one of the granite benches that littered the campus. She carefully removed a blue stick and wrote something out on the bench itself.

Ryan stuck to the shadows and the cover of the greenery as she left, trying to see her work. There was a symbol on the bench, something he didn't recognize but received a sensation from. He was uneasy as he regarded it, unsettled as surely as if he'd been standing on a boat and a wave had risen and fallen beneath his feet. More than that, he was moved, feeling a press of unseen force, gentle but firm, emanating from the sign.

He shook it off and kept following.

She paused and marked several other spots on campus, never the same symbol twice but variations. She consulted a notebook as she drew some of them but not always. She worked quickly but not in a hurry. She never saw him.

The largest of the symbols, one she had to work from her notes or plan or spell or whatever it was, was drawn out in pink chalk at the top of the Chambers Stairway that led to the main ring of Miskatonic's architecture.

The marking was a welcome mat. He knew this as sure as he felt the temperature rise even though the sun was approaching the horizon. The weather change was weird and sudden as a car crash, atmospheric density increasing as if something was rushing in, displacing the air itself.

Ryan looked down at the symbol and a feeling surged in him: disgust or horror or righteousness or all of them. He took the toe of his sneaker and rubbed at the chalk lines. A minute of effort and he wiped out everything but a ghostly afterimage.

He smiled at his work. He thought about wiping out the other markings, really knocking her out, but this sort of paranoid fantasy was easily upset. Just the one would be enough, he thought.

He sweat some as he walked but kept his hoodie on, throwing the hood up, armoring himself. He was ready to face her.

The restored obelisk was marked off with a precise circle as wide around as the statue itself was tall. The rocks in the border were made of the crushed remnants of the original, a memorial or tribute, not destroyed but transformed.

She kneeled within that circle, inside another chalk marking. Beside her was the collection of glass paperweights. She took one of them in both hands, lifted it up as high as she could from her kneel, and dropped it. Ryan saw that it chipped but did not shatter.

Apparently satisfied, she did that with another. And then the third.

"You lost, you know," he gloated as he walked to the tip of the obelisk's shadow. It was the only place to be, filled with portent even if it was meaningless babble. Perhaps it would have an effect on her. "Your game is over."

She kept arranging her chipped paperweights in the chalk circle.

"And you're right. Is means permanence. Like. 'Your magic circle is erased.' The one over at the Chambers Stairway."

She refused to turn, and Ryan grew impatient.

"Haven't you heard me, you crazy bitch? It's over." He shocked himself with his own words. He'd never called anyone that to their faces. In text, online, sure. All the time. But that wasn't real.

"I heard you," she bit.

"Well?" Ryan stamped his foot, begging a reaction.

"I didn't think any of it worth responding to. More pressing matters now." She made a minute adjustment to the paperweights and stood, stepping carefully over the drawing and outside it.

"Aren't you going to do something? I broke your spell! I won! Whatever you did ten years ago and tonight? It's over."

"Ryan, your umbrage at having to endure my class has revealed some strange truths. More about you than me, I'd add." She half-smiled.

The sky went from boiling to transparent eruption. A great swirling commenced, and the wind kicked up, skittering leaves across the plaza like bones scraping against the concrete. Her drawing with the chalk must have sounded the same, desperate and scratching.

Her reaction was saved for the sky and whatever was in it.

"You are insane," he said.

"That judgment does not alter me, Ryan. Nor does it—"

The clap of thunder sounded more like the sky slapping into the whole of the earth. The wave reverberated through Ryan's bones, and he had to fight not to be put to his knees.

When he regained his footing, he saw something rush out from the sky toward the two of them. A multitude of wings, all of them grotesque and diaphanous, buzzed and swooped. They were all clustered to a central object, like a mouth with three arms grabbing into the air, plucking and feeding. It was as big as a car, impossibly flying, impossibly charging toward them. The voice that came from it was hollow and mocking, meaninglessly insane.

"You! You are gibbering and ichorous!" Her voice cut through everything with a dread finality. He'd never heard her say are without anything but ridicule or subversion. She was making the thing real. She was bringing it into the Kingdom of Is and then destroying it.

She held a pair of postcards in one hand. In the other, there was a burning lighter. She played the flame over the cards as the thing angled from Ryan to her, arms working in synchrony as its wings beat and blurred. The cards were consumed in fire, and she dropped them to her feet where they landed as a rain of curling ash.

The thing of wings ceased to be. Like a heat mirage when you step too close, it simply was no longer there. There was a residual humming and smell of burnt honey and bile in the air but nothing else.

"What the hell was that?" Ryan shrieked.

"Two words. I shouldn't have used both. One would have worked. Stupid."

"What was that thing?"

"The word made real," she said like it meant something.

"But it's gone now?"

"That one disappeared, yes. But there will be others." She stepped toward him, simmering with anger but focused and under control.

"Now tell me exactly, precisely which of my sigils you fucked with, young man. In doing so, you have assumed responsibility for repairing them." The firelight on her face transformed her. Whatever gentleness had been there once was lost in the sharp contrast of firelight and setting sun.

"Like I said," he confessed, "the big one at the top of the stairs. I... erased it."

"Congratulations. You have enabled that," she said as she pointed to the sky. "That thing that I just unmade? You enabled that as well. This would have been controlled without your interference. Ten years of work nearly ruined." She set her jaw and waited for a reply.

"I thought you were insane, and I didn't know it was..."

"Real? It only possesses half-reality, Ryan. I tried to unmake it ten years ago.

"I failed then and paid for it."

The dusk light on her face revealed depths that she had hidden before, depths he could have fallen into.

He dry-swallowed, tasting only shame and fear.

The look was gone now, no regret, only certainty. "And I will not allow one pissy graduate student who put his foot in the wrong mess to prevent me from succeeding this time. Now put out your hand," she snapped as she turned away from him and back to her bag of supplies.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Take this," her voice sounded as steel. She shoved a piece of pink chalk into his hand, thicker around than a roll of quarters. "And take this paper and copy this symbol, right side up. Note the orientation on the original. Draw it where the one you erased lay."

"If I don't?" he offered and didn't believe the bluff himself.

"Then your failing my class won't matter. In fact, you won't even remember taking it. But you'll have shown me up.

"So decide what you value more."

He nodded firmly.

She told him what to do if he was attacked. She even gave him a list of words to work from but told him to be careful. Each was only good once, and they needed to save as many on the list as they could for the big one. His way had been opened, and he had been trapped for ten years. Tonight he was strong enough to escape fully into the world, to take his kingdom back.

***

Ryan stood without any ability to move. He could only stare at what was becoming. It was too late. Certainty filled the moment and expanded outward, becoming hard as diamond. The crushing weight of inevitability bore down on him like a thousand dead stars. He had unmade a lesser creature spawned by the greater, but the chains had been put on reality.

It was, entire and whole. The nature of the thing didn't matter, only its being. Wind-borne debris flowed around it like a tornado mashed flat and spread on a picture plane. At the center of that was the translucent jelly-mass of unidentifiable organs and appendages as meaningless as colored globs trapped.

Trapped in glass.

A tiny voice called to him, miles away. He dimly recognized it. Stokes. Elizabeth. The crazy linguist.

"Come on, Ryan!" she called. "Don't believe the lie. Don't fall for certainty!"

He tried to move, but the weight was too great.

The voice was right next to him now. "You have intelligence even if it exhibits as a dumb kind of smart."

He felt pride in spite of himself, the heat of that flushing into his veins. He raised his left hand, still stinging from the scrape earlier.

"Right. Good job."

Then the weight was gone. He stood, sweat slicked and feeling empty inside.

"Emptiness fills me," he said.

"You have it now. Come on, and let's put a finish on this job."

He heard her speaking with the same precise cadence, almost singsong and lyrical. "The words, Ryan. These words give us power. The whole of my only meaningful teaching, what I learned when I had been broken for those years. The words make the real.

"And those words can unmake."

"You have brought me understanding," he said. "I am..."

"Be present, but don't be a word." She pressed a small sheaf of postcards into one hand, all flipped to the back side, each having a different word written on them.

"Do not speak these words until you are ready to destroy them."

"What do we do?"

"Cataloguing. Definition. Destruction or at least entrapment." She sounded hopeful, but not positive.

The whirling sky howled, and the thing within it struggled to be, struggled to evade precision. It remained glutinous, an aggregate of indistinct appetites, reaching toward solidity.

"Where did you get these?"

"I made them." She marched to a stop near the chalk lines.

Ryan realized that he had only been a few feet away, but it seemed like miles or more. "No, no. Where did you get the words themselves?"

She flicked open the lighter, spilling its yellow glow. "From books. Books I read once and realized they illuminated not a doorway but a set of locks. Locks that had been opened long ago. These protections lay buried under camouflage, the masquerade of fiction. These words, wrought from magic, make keys to relock the doorways left dangerously open."

"And you can transfer that from the word to the thing up there?" Ryan allowed himself to be directed by her, marched over to a nearby wire wastebasket, nearly empty but lined with transparent plastic.

Above them, the thing breathed out the smell of sweet and baking rot as it ate the sky.

"If we hurry and have focus." She stood beside him. "Now do as I do."

She raised her head to address the king in the sky. "You are cyclopean!"

As soon as the syllable rang, she set the lighter to the postcard as before and dropped it into the basket. "Now you," she urged with a quiet resolution.

"You are moldering!" he shouted and added the flame and dropped the card into the bin.

"You are octopodan!"

"You are mammoth!"

"You are pseudopodal!"

"You are recrudescent!"

The fire grew. The words continued in a stream, not mere syllables but things of power themselves.

The sky shuddered in response, electrified and convulsing. The eyes blinked in spasm, but its flailing was only partially real, only half here.

"You are squamous!" she shouted.

"I used that one. Sorry."

She picked the next one without pause. "You are sluggish!"

Vaporous, unclean, yonic, fungous, acrocephalic, antediluvian, bilious, membranous, heaving, oleaginous, nonsensical. All these words and more. Each one of them pinning down and peeling away another bit of its power. This continued for minutes, each word stunning and slowing its vast and drab majesty, squatting in the dusk sky.

Above their heads, the thing seemed to shrink and vibrate, faster and faster, bound to the rhythm of the speech and definition, each of their pronouncements and additions to the fire burning off more of the thing. All it could do in reply was howl and shriek. Uncounted tentacles glistened in the stalled dusk, flailing and skinned into flayed remains. Their castings shone prismatic, like rainbow-hued snail trails peeled off the sky and rained down.

"You are anomalous!"

"You are batrachian!" Ryan flipped the last of his cards into the fire in front of him. The light from it played over him and Elizabeth and the base of the obelisk. "Done."

"You. Are. Zymotic," she intoned. The voice that poured out of her could fill the world, replacing the dreadful certainty of the alien god with possibility, with chance and opportunity. The Land of May. Freedom.

Protective cilia and organelles all but shriveled and destroyed, the failed king flopped and twisted, contorting and shrinking. Its true nature revealed, its form condensed to a single and unblinking eye rendered out of transparent jelly, the king fled. It could not survive here any longer.

The wind sucked inward and held for a moment.

"Hold on!" she yelled and grabbed his hands in hers.

The dusk closed as a massive presence evacuated itself from the atmosphere, rushing past them tangibly. The eye blinked out of existence as something rustled in the collection of paperweights.

Ryan heard the sound of glass on stone and opened an eye.

"I believe it worked," she said and quickly disentangled herself from his grasp. She bent down and picked up one of the rounded globs of glass. There was a faint anti-light within it, not green, not blue, not yellow.

"Is it there?" Ryan asked.

She sighed. "That word again. It resides there. It endures entrapment there. But it does not embody the totality," she laughed. "Honestly. And here I believed that you'd grasped the concept. You may not pass my course at all."

Her laughter was welcome.