Matt Weber's Blog, page 9

Work week 2023-02-20

Maker: NA

Manager: Transcribe HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT (28 pp remaining)

Marketer: Think about formalizing POSSE strategy, but mostly stay out of the way of transcription

(Sometimes it helps me to have notes on my intentions, so I can at least know I’m doing what I’m not supposed to be doing. Format is cribbed from Orna Ross’ three-part framework.)

POSSE is a term I picked up from Cory Doctorow (of course). It’s a strategy I’ve been following sort of haphazardly with this site, more so as I’ve found myself having to turn my plugins off to keep it performant; I had each post automatically going to my Facebook author page and Twitter, but I’d twiddle it a little depending on what I thought might be more or less interesting on any given site. POSSE isn’t what you’d call a revolutionary idea but it is possibly clarifying. I’ve heard a fair bit of advice that you want to differentiate the content across your social media services, so people will follow you everywhere. The point of POSSE, in contrast, is that people can follow you anywhere. That seems more realistic, both in terms of what it’s asking from the reader (“follow me wherever’s good for you” vs “miss out if you’re not on all my socials”) and what it’s asking from the writer (one stream of output, broadly syndicated, vs. tailored outputs for each social).

If I’m serious about this, I probably ought to change my email onboarding sequence. Christ on a bike.

This week is about transcription, though. Unfortunately for me, I’ve picked up DON’T FEAR THE REAPER from my local library, so staying on task is going to be work. Well, more work than usual.

Speaking of which, I shouldn’t dwell on review-adjacent material at the time, but it’s been interesting to note while I’m reading DON’T FEAR THE REAPER a thing I did with the first book in the series, MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW: I loved the book so much that I read it fast, and I read it so fast that I forgot a lot of what I loved about it. I do this a lot, especially with comics. I don’t know if it’s necessarily something I should stop doing? But maybe I should consider slowing down. Or just reread more. (One thing I do remember about MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW is there’s one very salient scene that doesn’t make a ton of sense in light of the resolution, and I do want to go back and reread it with solving that in mind. By the way, if you like SGJ and you like twisty Wolfeian mysteries without in-text resolutions, his book GROWING UP DEAD IN TEXAS is fantastic.)

This week’s image is my Duolingo streak, because I’m hungry.

Currently reading: DON’T FEAR THE REAPER, by Stephen Graham Jones.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Remarkable

I got a reMarkable 2 for my birthday. What it’s supposed to do is help me cut down on transcription time while still letting me write longhand—its OCR is decent for my handwriting and it’ll email scribble-to-text even if you don’t sign up for their cloud program.

But since I am currently in actual transcription hell, I’ve been playing around with drawing instead. I developed a sort of unfocused fascination with pen-and-ink drawing thanks to August Lamm’s Instagram around the turn of 2021, which led to a couple months of drawing my kids’ stuffies and then a lot of wishing I was drawing more but it not actually happening. A certain amount of this was because getting set up was a production; setting out materials took up time and space, and the subject of the drawing couldn’t be relied on to stay in place…

… anyway, this doesn’t fix all of that, but it does make it an awful lot easier to just sit somewhere and start drawing. And the results are surprisingly credible. I quit this one in midstream because I’d started “inking” in the same layer as the “pencils”, but in theory you can sketch in one layer, ink in another, and then just hide the sketch, which is almost as magical as erasing pencils out from under inks. You get a bit of latitude in brush type, thickness, and color—my “pencil” is actually reMarkable’s “ballpoint pen,” because you can make it grey, which means you can actually see the ink on top, versus what they call a pencil, where you can’t, which means you can’t.

I’m sure there are many better digital tools for actual artists. But as an off-label use for a tool that I was planning to use primarily for writing, this was a nice surprise.

Currently reading: 5 WORLDS Book 4: THE AMBER ANTHEM, by Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma, Matt Rockefeller, and Boya Sun.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Work week 2023-02-14

Maker: NA

Manager: Continue transcribing HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT (46p left).

Marketer: Complete book list for Shepherd; publicize WINDBURN WHIPLASH go-live on social media.

This week’s picture is sunset over the Delaware, from the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex parking lot. The nights are getting shorter, is the point.

Currently listening: IF BOOKS COULD KILL: “The End of History,” by Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

The carceral state as Beszél and/or Ul Qoma

Hidden worlds are a staple of imaginative literature: the London Below of Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE, the Faerie of Emma Bull’s WAR FOR THE OAKS, the bustling extraterrestrial commerce of MEN IN BLACK. Part of their seduction is their seeming impossibility, especially in 2017. There is so much we know and can know, and new, surprising information is so valuable in an economy of attention, moved by sensation. How could such secrets ever be kept?

In China Mieville’s book, THE CITY & THE CITY, there’s a riff on this idea: Rather than the mundane world and the occult, imagine two mutually occult worlds, geographically interleaved, separated only by the mutual resolve to ignore one another. From Beszel, you don’t see Ul Qoma because you do not allow yourself to see Ul Qoma — even though it’s right there, close enough to touch.

THE CITY & THE CITY is straight noir: There are no faerie glamours, no neuralyzers, no Obliviate charms to bring off this bizarre geopolitical conceit. Only the power of the human mind to force itself not to see. The book reads as surrealism, the requisite mental feat almost unimaginable.

But, imaginable or not, it is an American reality; and, in THE NEW JIM CROW, Michelle Alexander carefully explains how it has come to be.

The premise is that there have been three racial caste systems limiting the rights and freedoms of black people in the United States. The first was, obviously, slavery. The second was Jim Crow: The system of laws developed during Reconstruction that limited black access to the vote, to housing, to education, and all the other indignities, large and small, that a white legislature and judiciary deemed it acceptable that they should suffer. The third is mass incarceration, whose seeds were sown in the ’80s by Reagan and Bush 41, put up tall stalks and dark flowers in the ’90s under Clinton, and are now cultivated as a cash crop on the watches of Bush 43, Obama, and now Trump. It has three main components: The War on Drugs, which makes potential criminals of us all; the broad discretion given by police to stop, search, and detain almost anyone on almost any pretext in the hopes of finding drugs; and the denial of basic rights, including access to food stamps, federally subsidized housing, and the vote, to anyone branded a “felon.” All of this is race-neutral on its face, but it is as fertile a breeding ground for racist policing and justice as you could imagine, and the outcomes are there for all to see.

Or not to see. We’ve all heard about, and most of us have at least pretended to lament, the liberal and conservative media bubbles in which liberals and conservatives are rumored to find themselves, neighbors as invisible to one another as Beszel and Ul Qoma. But to white people, at least, the white bubble is a fact of nature so unremarkable as to deserve no comment. Of course our communities are segregated. Of course our social groups are segregated. Why would it be any other way?

And, of course, it’s this that makes it news to us that 1.5 million black men are missing from daily life — imprisoned or dead. Because otherwise it would be staring us in the face, as self-evident as the segregation that hides it.

The book can’t be done justice to in a review; it takes the thing itself to understand how thoroughly the Supreme Court has gutted its citizens’ protections from police search, how starkly tilted against black Americans both “law” and “order” are, how meticulously we have stripped our felons of rights we declare otherwise universal, “human.” Even the electoral power of incarcerated black Americans is horribly inverted: While they themselves are stripped of the vote, usually for life, their count in the census is redistributed from home, usually a city with a substantial minority population, to prison, usually a rural county, mostly white. The echoes of one of our founding document’s foundational flaws are inescapable (and I am far from the first person, indeed possibly the last, to fail to escape them).

… can’t be done justice to, is what I was saying. Which is fitting. But I just keep coming back — because this is what I read — to the Neverwheres, the Faeries. We all like to think we’d be the ones to notice if there were another world around the corner, or beneath our feet. But there is, its rules set by the politicians we elect, the judges they appoint, and the money we pay for the privilege of being governed by them. There’s no wall at all between it and us; it is public in the most basic sense.

And yet, to me, even now, it might as well be Narnia.

I’ve been looking through my old newsletters, mostly because that’s where most of my long-form writing other than fiction has resided over the last several years. This is from the first “issue,” distributed to probably under a dozen people almost exactly six years ago. (There’s a joke in here about that old Tom Arnold book, HOW I LOST FIVE POUNDS IN SIX YEARS, but you’re not here for my self-pity.) My general ethos is that newsletter subscribers get the good stuff first, but I’m going to start surfacing some of the older bits that I’m proud of; rightly or wrongly, this is one of them.

If you’d like to get the good stuff first, there’s a signup link at the bottom of this post.

Currently reading: STOREYS FROM THE OLD HOTEL, by Gene Wolfe.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Work week 2023-02-07

Maker: NA

Manager: Figure out why I can’t write posts on this site without getting a Critical Error; continue transcribing HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT.

Marketer: Couple blog post ideas in the tank but, honestly, may need to fuck off with this in favor of just being done with transcription already.

Item #1 under “Manager” is already done, but I’m giving myself future credit for it because I spent all fucking evening on it. Seems like the Jetpack plugin is a resource hog. Which seems weird, and I’m not sure why the issue came on so suddenly, but whatever. In the process of fixing it, I deleted a lot of unused themes and plugins, which will definitely make the experience of using the site significantly calmer. (I also ended up having to deactivate some plugins I was using, like the ones that auto-update Facebook and Twitter with these posts. Might be for the best.)

This week’s image is a striking panel from my “Currently reading,” Zoe Thorogood’s IT’S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH.

Currently reading: IT’S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH, Zoe Thorogood.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Subtle syncopations and latencies

… the plan directed the last dreadnought, with its hypertrophied weapons, to open with a power chord against the more discordant forces of the Diamantines’ enemies. The orchestration manuals of the day called for a ratio of a single dreadnought to one hundred battle cruisers or equivalent. The percussion line alone should have demolished the other side, especially with the chimera missiles deployed as a basso continuo.

The urtext does not go into granular detail regarding the timing of the cannons’ broadsides. Records suggest that the tutti passages favored in most scores of the period were honored more in the breach. Instead, subtle syncopations and latencies on the order of 5 to 30 nanoseconds caused a stochastic form of polyrhythm, especially during opportunistic crescendos.

“The Ethnomusicology of the Last Dreadnought,” by Yoon Ha Lee

Currently listening: THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA, by Ray Nayler, read by Eunice Wong.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Happy to be here

I have a couple of friends from middle school whose houses I was at a lot as a kid. Later in life, I always thought it was a little odd — in the best possible way! — how nice those friends’ parents were to me, both while I was at their houses a lot and after, in high school or early college when I was still seeing them around a bit. I’m not saying it’s odd that adults were nice to me, but they seemed to have a real affection for me that I hadn’t particularly done anything to earn; I wasn’t that interesting or friendly, I didn’t talk with them that much, I ate a lot of their food and probably made a lot of noise and mess in their houses.

Anyway, my daughter is in middle school, and she just had some friends over for not quite the first but close to the first time in a long time, and now I get it. I don’t have to be involved, I don’t particularly have to click with the friends (although they’re very good guests and seem like fine young people in general). I’m just happy to be here.

Currently reading: STOREYS FROM THE OLD HOTEL, by Gene Wolfe.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.

Work week 2023-01-30

Maker: Finish newsletter

Manager: Continue transcribing HEATSTROKE HEARTBEAT; research Kobo promotions.

Marketer: Ideate a promo stack; send out newsletter; maybe a couple of small blog posts?

Last week we were a sick house, and we’re still not quite over it. Trying to take it slow for a little longer. Photo is a magnolia bud on one of my regular walking routes.

Currently listening: THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA, by Ray Nayler, read by Eunice Wong.

The enfloofification of TikTok

Cory Doctorow, “TikTok’s enshittification,” January 21, 2023.

As a human who’s never done more than beer money from fiction sales, I’m not here to tell anyone to quit something that’s working, but I think this article ought to give some pause both to all the folks who are hoping to kill it on #BookTok and those who’ve actually succeeded. Social media platforms woo creators just long enough to lock them in; then they throw them under the bus to appeal to advertisers; then they throw the advertisers under the bus to line their own pockets.

Being an influencer takes creativity, talent, and a work ethic that I am never going to love social media enough to muster. I don’t want to dump on the efforts of those who’ve built their followings over years. But at the end of the day, the platforms giveth and the platforms taketh away.

Currently reading: THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY, Sarah Kendzior.

WINDBURN WHIPLASH available for preorder!

Preorder WINDBURN WHIPLASH!

It’s been six years since Zaya Shearwater lost her wife and her dragon in the most dangerous race in Yemareir. She’s retired from the dragon-racing circuit, supporting her family as a security guard on long-haul trade expeditions… until she comes back one night to discover that her newly adopted daughter, Vanako, has been dealing for a mob boss. Worse, she owes him a sky-high sum of money for lost product. And there’s not much he wouldn’t do – to Vanako, to Zaya, or to anyone in their family – to get it back.

Zaya doesn’t want to go back to the racing circuit. She doesn’t have a trained dragon, she doesn’t have anyone to ride with, and she thought she’d put those memories of pain and loss away. But even if she does ride again… after six years away from the scene, can she win what she needs in time to pay what she owes?

Windburn Whiplash is the first full-length novel in the Streets of Flame Quartet. Start with Brimstone Slipstream, the novella that opens the series, and keep an eye out for Heatstroke Heartbeat and Wildfire Riptide, forthcoming!

This is the book I’ve spent the last several years working on. It’s got bright-feathered dragons racing through the streets of a magic-warped city; it’s got a queer found family; it’s got fantasy drugs, it’s got implacable transdimensional predators disguised as animals, it’s got walrus-bats and wagonloads of durian and a graveyard that makes you hallucinate the dead; it’s got love and grief and friendship and death.

It goes live on February 14, but you can put in a pre-order now!

And thanks so much if you do. I hope you like it.

Preorder WINDBURN WHIPLASH!