FULL BLEED: AND THEY WERE SAYING BIG B, LITTLE O, LITTLE M, SILENT B

It's tough to look around and think that things are going well. Living through America's Years of Lead and seeing all the obvious, flagrant and almost comical violations of the law on the part of those in power and you'd be insane to think that things are going well. I'm just talking on a relatively limited personal basis. Hell, there's stuff still going on within reach that's bad enough that I won't freely discuss it here (and don't hold your breath.)

So I'm clearly selfish to think anything's going well, right? I guess so.

All that said, things are better than they were a little while ago, at least in the way the work is going. When I can stop thinking about what happens to the work after I'm done with it, anyways. Which I'm trying to get better at. But yeah, living in the onslaught of what nearly everyone believes to be a free creative labor machine's output should be utterly crushing. And yet I feel better about my work than I have in some time. Note this doesn't mean my work is necessarily any good at all. But that good/bad value judgment isn't there to make the artist feel better (instead, it's for the marketplace and those feeding upon the work to throw around.)

See, no matter how bad a writer I am, no matter how few people read my books, no matter how much or little I make on Kickstarters, no matter how great or diminished my voice in the genre is (ha ha and ha there -- I abdicated this), my work will be better than anyone's who uses AI for anything more than spellcheck. Which, to be clear, is not an AI thing at all and is technology that I've been using for more than forty years. Yes, my parents had a dedicated word processor, not a home computer, in the house, forty-five years ago. Spellcheck is brute force word comparison. Dumb as rocks.

But anyone who's using AI just for ideas or just to help bang out the structure or to get past this one scene which is just gosh so hard and messing them up? They gave up. They're not writing. They're not doing the work.

Am I a hard-liner about this? Yes. Am I inflexible and arbitrary and unfair? Also yes. Get used to it.

My work is better than all the slop that's out there. Because it's only here if I do it. No machine is going to. I don't care how convincing it reads or blah blah blah. It's not me. But then it wouldn't be me even if you shoved an image of my brain into a positronic computer and made it generate text. Stopped being me the second it was ripped out of the meat. Whoops, sorry. So much for Cartesian dualism. Or is this the ultimate embrace of it? I dunno.

I did the work. It's there. I can't tell you where it actually came from, other than something that's been filtered through a lifetime stored imperfectly and recalled equally imperfectly. Whether it's a barbaric yawp or carefully-structured and meticulous verse, that's from me. That's my bomb. I made it. If you want to be convinced by the other stuff, then go ahead. I can't stop you. I wouldn't dream of it. Be free. Do as thou wilt.

The machine just barfs. It doesn't know or care. It can't. It probably never will even if programmers assert variables that state a level of care in the program and its output. Sure, call it that. Won't change anything.

So yes. My work is better than that. And I'm feeling better about it, even though this current book (My Gifts Are Hungry, if you're tuning in for the first time) has taken a much longer time to write than I'd thought. But then I'd been fighting with it for some time and fighting the whole idea of writing for a couple years. I won't say it's a daily habit, because it wasn't even when I was writing regularly before all this. But I'm spending a lot less time thinking about chucking books into the ocean and watching them disappear.

Which is, realistically, what happens. But that happens to most books. Nearly all of them really. They're meant to be forgotten. Maybe they get read before they are. Most won't register in their market segment or genre or even their community. No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful, or so the song goes. Okay, so Stephen King maybe did. I don't know. I don't know him, not gonna. That's okay. If you read this, Mr. King, thanks for Night Shift and Salem's Lot in particular.

Maybe not wanting anything other than to be writing is the deal. And lemme tell ya, as deals go, it's the shortest possible end of the stick. It's a hobby which you get to think about all the time and carry around with you and have drive you insane and back. It's a terrible job, can't recommend it. But then, truthfully, I've never been good at jobs. And yes, this isn't good enough for nearly anyone who writes or creates. You can't pay the bills with it (sorry, most folks doing the creative work that you see don't get paid all that much, even if your books are in Barnes and Noble). But they call it writing, not paying the bills.

Even pretending to be a writer gets expensive. I'd love to have an editor on my books (well, not quite the right word, but finding the right editor would be nice). I'd love for someone not me to do the covers in maybe a more conventional way. I'd love to have a publicity team getting the word out there (even if that means pretending to be everyone's best friend on social media, which is still a winning strategy it seems). All of these things cost money that I can't justify. Because writing, not paying the bills. And yes it's a bummer to think about it in these terms, but nobody at the grocery store is taking stacks of books to pay for a bag of groceries. But keeping those two things separate? A much better idea.

Not saying I'll keep this up for any length of time. But it's working now.

So, yes, feeling better about the work. This current book might even have a draft finished by the end of next week. I might be able to send it out to first readers by the end of the month. Probably fine with starting the Kickstarter for the book on the first of May this year. Probably maybe.

Of course, it doesn't take much to shake this whole feeling better about the work. Not much at all. It's great to know there's a community of writers out there, which I see every day out on social media. They're out there working and trying and most of them are having a pretty ragged time of things. Which makes me ask "What makes your work so much better than theirs to ask the same people to maybe buy a book of yours which means they won't be buying a book of someone else's?" And being trapped forcibly in a zero-sum game fucking sucks. Sure, in reality, it's not quite like that. It's certainly not actually zero-sum, no matter how much global conservatism (is that big or little C?) would have you believe. That we've been tricked into passing so many resources up the chain where they just get parked at the top and don't really go anywhere. Yeah, that sucks.

It sucks that publishers are seen as the sole givers of prestige and let's face it, worth, in writing. That price tags and grosses and sales are seen as the pinnacle and not something that's really not even entangled with the quality of a book, much less the quality of person that the writer of said book is. When writing a good book means very little about you being a good person. Yeah, that's all awful stuff. It's been awful since well before I wrote The Howling Pit some ten years ago, after ten years of observing then-contemporary audience building and author as icon processes all against the backdrop of a publishing industry (or a couple of them) getting absofuckinglutely wrecked by the nascent and ascendant internet.

All that stuff is awful. The work itself is great. It's a paradox at best. I don't really have an answer to that. My writing doesn't have an answer to that. And folks, if a piece of art is presenting itself as the answer to anything (even the solution to itself, which yes, is a real thing) then brother or sister or non-reporting off the binary others, you can pass that piece of art right by because it is fake. And not the Fake Believe good kind of fake. It's selling you a lie. All the art can do is lead you through an experience so that you as the participant in the art can begin to make up your own mind about it. There's no easy answers, mostly because humans have been at being human for thousands upon thousands of goddamn years. This is back to the savannahs and under the stars or gathered around fires in icy valley floors or canoeing between strings of distant islands stuff. It's older than we are. Older than any other human artifacts besides maybe ochre handprints on cave walls.

The work is great. It is ongoing. It started before any of us were born or the world we live in could have been conceived of. With any luck, it'll continue well past the onslaught of the sweaty desperation of the tech lords who are trying to buy themselves a legacy when the fact is, even if they succeed, it'll get washed away by something else in a generation. They're trying to buy immortality. Yes, yes, writers and creators might be too, but they're not buying it. They're making it themselves.

Only it won't happen in the way they expect. It never does. 'Cause the world is being assembled, emerging out of every second into another one. It’s not planned. Anyone telling you that has got something else to sell you like your own soul. Don’t fall for it. There’s no magic formula for success other than luck and that’s something you have or you don’t. How many great and memorable books or bands or works of art or movies came and went in their creators’ lifetimes and never registered, never found an audience, never made back their budget? A lot of the ones worth remembering. Sometimes abject trash (derogatory) gets to the top of the heap and makes a terrible person more money than they or their children could spend in three lifetimes. There’s no plan, no guarantee, no nada. There’s only the work and that’s oftentimes between you and the work and the Maker. More times than you’ll want to think about.

It’s hard out there. Probably always will be. I wish I had other news, but I’d be lying if I did. I’m trying to enjoy the work while it’s good. At least I’m in a position where I know I can finish this thing. Which was not any kind of sure thing a couple months ago, and at a couple other points in this particular escapade. Every project ends up being the worst one when you’re up to your armpits in it. More excitingly, every one ends up being the worst one in its own particular way. That’s something that you get to live with. And the work ends up improving for it, even if the sales don’t show that. That’s something the machine will not ever feel. Nor will the person who uses the machine to spray a firehose of pages all over. (But that might end up wrecking the systems that allow for free submission of stuff to sell, which might not be the worst thing in the world. That said, I think that High Frequency Transfer programs that sell equities hundreds of times in a second just to shave off a little bit on the price should be charged a tenth of a cent for every transaction. That’s literally the only thing that will stop the practice.)

Anyways, I should get going. Remind me that I want to talk about that recent Alien: Earth miniseries and The Bone Temple and maybe even The Boys and prestige modes of entertainment sometime. There’s a lot of meat on those bones to pick over, though some of it is straight rancid.

Catch you all on the flip side.