FULL BLEED: HERE COMES THE OCEAN

In case you've somehow missed the news, my new book, the latest in the ongoing Hazeland series, is out now. Entitled Fake Believe, it's seven short stories, loosely linked, starring characters that might've been in the background in the previous books or entirely new (but may show up again, so pay attention.)

You can grab copies here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FB22P6X1

The stories are as follows:

“The weird tales contained in Fake Believe offer hypnotic excursions through the interstitial psychic environs of a timeless LA populated by an interacting demimonde of rich freaks, bemused lowlifes, and players on the cusp of an awareness they may eventually regret. More please.”

- Jamie Delano, writer of Hellblazer and the Leepus books

Seven all-new stories from the streets of Hazeland. Stories that resist easy categories, falling between fantastic horror and weird fantasy and strange crimes.

A weary and ragged veteran returns to his childhood neighborhood finding it gone but for one house and the ghosts within it need his help.

A private detective digs at the secret behind gentrification in downtown and the fabricated and inhuman residents who’ved moved in.

A girl at a mysterious block party confronts her past and future and a finds herself in a place that might not ever exist.

A ragtag crew of filmmakers chases down the Bigfoot of the Southland and instead finds something terrible that wants to be set free.

An industrial/goth singer flees to LA and finds that someone just like her already blazed the career she’s seeking, haunting her assumed identity.

Two luckless strongarm men try to rob the wrong bar on the wrong night, finding not easy money but a witch who is painfully bored.

A book forger attends an auction where her former career is one of the featured lots, yet even that isn’t the strangest thing for sale that night.

Kickstarter backers already have their books, if the postings on Bluesky are to be believed. If you didn't back earlier this year, the book is up on Amazon now. The POD version will be up on Ingram Spark this week (I hope -- things are a little up in the air right now.) I'll work on getting the digital version up on itch.io as well. Though I wonder why I bother, but people insist they want a non-Amazon store to purchase books from.

I don't have too much more to say about this other than it's great to see that books are getting out to readers. In the tug-of-war between obscurity and publishing (and not that the latter guarantees you avoid the former, but it would be nice) it's good to know that actual people will see all this work. Writing this stuff doesn't come out of nowhere. It's not like digging ditches, but it's effort, mostly the effort to keep going when you're not sure it's even going to be seen.

And while I'm trying to put forward the whole idea of process over product, the product is what other readers see. The process is buried in it. All the research and coming up with story structure and the drafting and worrying about the draft coming together and and and... With any luck, the book comes out as easy as breathing in the hands of the reader. All that work just subsumed into the words on the page. I don't know about other writers, but I don't want to come across as labored. I want it to feel like it's happening, unspooling in front of you (the reader you, that is). With any luck there's nothing drawing attention to itself, to break the spell as it were. Because, let's face it, reading a text is a magical act. There's more to the process than we can easily wrap our arms around, mostly because each reader is going to make their own book out of the one before them. Of course that's magic.

I suppose I should talk about magic and ritual here, how the purpose of alchemy isn't to turn lead into gold but how that's a metaphor for transforming the magician themselves. Though there's a lot of argument over that, I guess, maybe how that's strictly a modern interpretation and how really those dudes all just cooked their brains playing with mercury until it poisoned them. Oh, and I just thought of another metaphor, that being the brain-poisoned AI researchers who will bend all manner of things to the thesis that they're onto the greatest toolset that mankind has ever made etc.

But I don't want to harangue. I'll leave it there and drop back to ritual.

Ritual seems to me another word for practice. And why to basketball players practice? I had this argument with my son when he was young. He wanted to do the stuff he saw on TV, like all boys do, really, and why wouldn't they? Then I pointed out that if he really wanted to do that, he had to do lots of practice. Dribble practice. Shot practice. Ball-handling. You do that stuff over and over so you can do it without thinking about it. So you don't overthink when you're hauling down the court and have one guy and can pull off that crazy swerve or fake that makes the other dude lose footing or whatever it takes to take that ball home.

Ritual. Practice. Process. You do the process so that instead of tripping yourself when you're on the stage, you do what needs doing. Not that I can talk too much about ritual and practice when it comes to magic other than writing. The only kind I've been good at.

And as I've brought up before, maybe even recently, how crazy is it to dive into this world now? When writing and any other creative pursuit is actively devalued by the amounts of it out there, even before we factor in the content barfing systems that go by the name AI. But maybe it should be left to the weirdos and outsiders and folks who simply can't do much else. Maybe through all those folks practicing their process, we'll get somewhere. No, not that someone is going to write The Great Work that will save humanity and make the small-minded and monstrous into caring and empathetic individuals. That stuff is already baked-in, right to the bone. Some folks may change over time, but most don't see a way to.

But maybe the practice and process will let the those practicing actually move forward if nothing else than improving their own skills as they tell their stories, deranged or sober, genre-sleek or wooly and dusty with flecks of everything they've ever touched. Maybe process and growth is the only way forward. Which is why the content barf systems will always be no more than that, at least in their current iterations (and all those iterations built on them.) If you as a content-barf-system-analyst, firmly believe that language is this fixed system that can be replicated easily, instead of an organic mass of lives and cultures and experiences lived through this spoken and coded set of systems for thousands of years, then you're already starting behind the 8-ball. It'll be original sin for those systems, which will only ever imitate and token-generate in such a way as to fool those who want to be fooled. Or bosses who want free creative labor. Like I said, want to be fooled.

In other news, my plans for the week got shot to hell. Those plans involved doing family stuff and probably not a lot of writing. So I guess I get to put my money where my mouth is and get back to the process that's been hung up since flying out to DC to see my daughter graduate. Maybe get a couple solid weeks in before I head off to Bay-Con in early July and a signing over at Word Horde in Petaluma after that. You should go. It'll be fun. Maybe Tom Waits will show up.

How cool would that be?

Until next time.