FULL BLEED: DIVISION RUINE

No, don't worry. That's just the song playing right now. By Carpenter Brut from their third EP, which only feels like it came out a million years ago. Probably more like five or six. Or eight. Tracking time gets harder and harder with so much of it piling up.

So in case you missed the news of yesterday, the pledges for the Fake Believe Kickstarter campaign hit the funding goal in less than twelve hours. At twenty four hours, it was past 150%. Right now it's just under 200%, but I'm asking folks to honor the consumer walk-out today and hold pledges. It's not crucial that the threshold gets passed quickly. Just that it gets passed. I'll be crazy pleased if we can get to 300% over a week. Not sure how likely that is.

It's still weird to participate in what is rightly regarded as a success. That's something that I've struggled with for a long time. Let's just say since I first sent off a manuscript in 1992 to an editor at one of the big SF houses then. Got a nice letter back passing on the book but asking me if I had a fantasy novel ready to shoot to them. I said I didn't. And by the time I did, there didn't seem much point in sending it to them. By lots of measures, that was a success. I got personal attention from an editor and my manuscript back on their dime. I should have been over the moon. I was not. It was a no. It wasn't a no, never and fuck right off. It wasn't being ghosted. I should have seen that for a success. I didn't, because the writers I'd observed (namely my parents) didn't conform to what had happened to me. Yes, that's dumb, but myopia is dumb and I was a naive kid at twenty... five? Something like that.

Here I am now, thirty-plus years later running Kickstarter campaigns. Something I should have done a long time ago, or maybe it had to wait until now. That's an imponderable. Can't calculate all the variables and can't change the past anyways, so not even worth talking about. Point is that I'm doing them now and at the one a year rate, they seem to be succeeding. Honestly, though, I'm still appalled at how much I have to charge for books to make a little more than production cost and pay for postage. Folks are rolling the dice on these things being worth their time and money, and yeah, that's probably something that I shouldn't be overthinking, it's something I can't help but think about.

But, as I've said before, the money really isn't the biggest deal. It's the sense that there's an audience out there for these books and that they're not merely being swallowed up into the churn of titles that come and go and disappear and it continues forever and ever. We can't go on; we must go on. That's not a motivational poster. That's recognition that we're in the existential struggle, the only game in town and you play or leave the game or give up. Those two not necessarily being the same thing, mind you.

I've largely tried to withdraw from the game of publishing because it fucking sucked. I rarely got the sense that my work was appreciated, though I've had editors be impressed at how quick I could turn things around from an outline to a short story. As it turns out, you can do that too fast, so don't appear to be really really super fast. You'll never impress anyone; only make them suspicious. Even when I had a contract with a well-regarded though small indie press, I felt disconnected from the whole thing. Of course, bookeeping wasn't really a thing, so I never had a sense of sales. Any reviews that happened were because I was beating the bushes for them. Blurbs, too. But there wasn't a sense that these books were going anywhere.

At least now I know they're headed to actual people. The money is nice to keep things going (though according to my tax guy, it's not really very much money and it would better to be written down via business expenses which for some reason rankled me.) And, in truth, I'm making more percentage wise off these books than I did for anything in indie publishing. My one good contract paid a bigger chunk up front. But this went away in taxes and eventually in my paying that publisher/editor for his editing work and the cover artist for a cover that would go unusued -- but I felt bad because this was all on me and it felt like a dick move to not pay people for their work even if that left me with pocket lint. I'm accustomed to the feeling. My self-published comics never broke even and every distributor and artist got paid before I realized that there wasn't much coming to me as writer, creator, project editor and publisher. Say la veeeeee. (I know French, please don't correct me, I'm being funny.)

Writing in isolation sucks. Sorry, it does. All that effort and seeing it just get swallowed up? Yeah. I almost gave up. And it's still tough, but this makes it a lot easier. It's a tiny audience, sure. I'm also an outsider writer who bares his teeth when asked what genre I write in. Those teeth are sharp and I'm longer in 'em than I used to be, but they're still teeth. I don't regard it as a friendly question. I regard it as a way to put me in a box. So, yeah, a small audience of people is fine. They're willing to put energy into it. I can keep doing so. I can keep writing the stuff that makes sense to me, doing things the way I think they should be done. Not have a committee of franchise review making sure that I'm keeping the exact tone right and not maintaining shareholder value.

We're very early in the campaign. And it's a success. I'm taking it as a win. It's difficult for me to do so because of my own history and inclinations and everything else. I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to demonstrate some level of neuroplasticity and not just repeating the dumb stuff and dumb assumptions of the past. It's not ever easy.

So, again, thank you for your faith in me and my work. As much as it's weird to call it my work since I try very hard to just be a conduit for something else when it's time to sit down and actually draft. But I'll save that for another time.

I'll be back to boosting the campaign tomorrow. Then I should probably get to page layout of the actual book and acknowledgements and any supplemental material that ends up in it.

Then writing the next one. Actual writing, not plotting or thinking. I try not to think when I'm actually writing. Really gets in the way.

And since I've been reminded that I need to talk about what the book I'm actually selling is about.

Fake Believe is seven short stories from the streets of (mostly) Eighties Los Angeles that is slipping into a much weirder place. They weave together weird fantasy, horror and crime into something that defies easy genre categorization. My writing has been described as "smoky" and "elegaic" and "the good shit" so take from that what you will.

The Kickstarter campaign for Fake Believe can be found here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/highway62/fake-believe

A breakdown of the stories themselves, plus a long preview of the one entitled "Suicide Jewelry" can be found here: https://www.highway62press.com/single-post/full-bleed-let-s-fake-believe