FULL BLEED: JUMPED INTO THE RIVER WHAT DID I SEE

I'm spending more time these days responding to writing from other people than I am writing my own work. That's probably not a good sign. Though it's good in that there have been works worth responding to. That's something, right? Totally worth not getting back to my own work for. Sure, I guess. I'll lay the blame at the feet of the holiday season, which is a time of year where I have to do more and more with every year that passes. There's reasons for that. Maybe I'll be brave enough to talk about that someday. Not today. And writing fiction from nothing, that takes energy and focus which isn't in any manner of supply these days. Wow, bit of a wander from the main thesis there. Sorry. I can't be trusted to stay on any particular path. Though according to some folks, I don't have any choice in the path I'm on in the first place (yes, even Alan Moore coming out and saying that, and wow, I'm still not clear on a response to that one.)

Anyways, this week, it's Magen's turn. She wrote a long, personal/universal piece that hit earlier this week (or was it last week?). You can read it here. I'll quote from the pieces that I'm most comfortable directly replying to. Comfort? Well, Magen's and my life experiences are rather different, so I'll speak from that which I have experience of. Everyone's got their own lives, just as everyone reading a book comes up with a different book than the person next to them. This is how I can survive daily life where people can rhapsodize about a thing that I find 'meh' at best. They experienced a different thing than I did. That's okay. Hell, it might even be necessary. We aren't all a uni-mind, even if there's interleaved levels of agreement.

Okay, here's her essay:

https://buttondown.com/magencubed/archive/the-daughters-of-frankenstein/

She has lots to say about various incarnations of Frankenstein. I, in turn have nothing to say about the book or Shelley herself. All I can speak to is taking chunks of imagination or memory or whatever it actually is and trying to sew them together into a thing that has a semblance of life, that a person can sit with and have an experience. Even if it's an experience that I as the author have little actual influence over. Yes that's an odd thing to say and yet, it's not wrong. Sometimes the creation isn't what you expected at all.

That said, Magen's reading Victor as mother in reckoning is worthy of consideration.

What is a writer who doesn't write? What is a writer who doesn't tell stories? A liar.

This doesn't begin the essay, but it's at the heart of it. I'd say "I suppose" but it doesn't need qualification.

Writing itself is soul-baring. Whether you're writing essays or deathless prose or even if you're writing the crassest of commercial fiction, you're still exposing yourself. You're exposing what you'll do, what you're capable of, what choices you make when you're putting words on the page. Every one a little nucleotide pair in a greater work. The only writing I'd say is soulless is that which is autogenerated by an algorithm or LLM system. But we already know that stuff's devoid, right? It's a manifestation of things where the essential nature of them has been scooped out and taken away (if it even was there in the first place.) I spent a lot of pages a couple weeks ago talking about this.

And writing itself is lying. At least in fiction. It's a catalogue of events that have never actually happened, and in many cases (most, really) they are of things that could not ever happen. They, in short, are lies. Yet there's an agreement between the reader and writer that things will have some baseline level of consistency. Yes, they're lies, but lies we willingly participate in. I won't get too deep into unreliable narrators here. It's not a thing that I'm super-interested in, just like I'm not real interested in stories that are revealed to be all a dream. I'm a simple man and I'm sure lots of folks would say naive. It's fine, it's whatever.

Weird that writing is lying, but lying too much is something I'm not cool with. Like I said, some sort of baseline agreement between the writer and reader is necessary. Unless it's all just imaginary and made up and then you better have a damn good hook to keep me going. Which, I suppose, explains a lot of my exhaustion with weird and fantastic fiction. It's often presented as "Anything can happen! There's no rules! We are unmoored from reality!" and then what we get is, well, not that. Or when there's a Very Real World and suddenly something strange happens and nothing is the same and the longer you look at it, the more it becomes obvious that the thing that happened was Inexplicable Magic and the more that is danced around but never touched on, the less interested I get. But I wander. Agreement. Some foundational level where an exchange can be made. Yes, sure, let's talk about theories of consciousness that explain the inexplicable but the more that is said, the more you come to realize that they only apply on a level that you as a mere human are never going to have access to and is that helpful at all?

What am I even good for? All I've ever managed to do was entertain people. There are a million books published every year. Every day, slop is pushed out for the masses. Fiction is meaningless, disposable trash. People don't even read books, they just skim them and make TikToks about it. Whatever I have to say is useless if it's just entertainment for people who don't care. There's no point in mourning the absence of art that should not even exist.

This paragraph coming from a direct line of examination, where Magen explores questions of her own work and a piece that has been written and rewritten. Now, I've never taken a piece and wrote it out and threw that out and rewrote it etc. If I've ever done anything like that, it's at the outline phase where I run into a wall (three times or so and counting on my current book which was supposed to be done by the end of the year and will not.)

That said, I have stared into the pool of "What am I even good for?" for a good long time, on the regular. Last bout of it was towards the end of last week. Pretty bad. Wheels spinning and bogged down. Maybe I'm still stuck in it.

And I don't have an answer. I really don't. I'm sorry, was I supposed to? Was I supposed to be doling out writing advice (hint: nobody wants writing advice, they want success advice, to feel like they're not wasting their time and energy and bad news, Dr. Jones.)

Like everyone has their own experiences, everyone has their own answer to this. A sort of Precambrian bedrock level of stone that chews up diamond-tipped drill bits and you just can't drill past. Everyone's going to have their own. Mine will not be yours.

Maybe there isn't one.

I can't speak to Magen's condemnation of entertainment because that's all I can hope to do. Yeah, I'm trying to sneak some though in below it, that whole sugar-coated pill, which often gets mistaken for the command that all fiction be moral instruction because yuck. I suppose I'm looking to do more than entertain with my whole conviction that the writing deliver an experience. But maybe, phenomenologically speaking, that's a distinction without a difference. Is that grim or honest? I don't have an answer. I'd question anyone who did. Because at that poing, we're dangerously close to declaring which pieces of art/work have value and which ones don't.

I can speak to the struggle of trying to survive out on the margins (and I'm not talking about being paid -- that ship sailed a long time ago) as a writer. That part sucks. It's downright Sisyphean. Particularly in the face of, as Magen calls out, the vast armies of people online who are determined to take what I feel is a magical if not holy thing into greasy and grubby content, reducing the experience of writing to like and subscribe, to easily-digest buzzwords and tribal allegiances (not to mention personal vendettas.) It turns books into fetish objects (mea culpa - I prefer printed if not hardcover books because I stare at a screen too goddamn much as it is) and reading as consumption in preparation for discussion. The book and the experience of the book itself is made secondary. Primary is the discourse. Like and subscribe, leave a comment below and ring that bell. Because these are tracked and monetized transactions.

There's no point in mourning the absence of art that should not even exist.

That's a big one. I can't answer it for Magen. I can barely answer it for me. I like to think that we can't determine the fate of a piece of art out in the world, my own or anyone's. Yes, it's pretty easy to say that a piece of independent art is not going to gain traction, will have a moment of ripple at the surface and then is quickly consumed by time. Particularly since the content industries are working very hard to only push work that's likely to get clicks or gin up controversy or hate clicks. There's no surprises, only well-funded grassroots campaigns that are more astroturfed. That's an easy call. And it's likely to be accurate. Certainly is in my experience. I've never had thousands of readers for even work I've given away for free. Does my work even exist? Do I? Depends who you ask.

Is my art necessary or should it even exist?

I sure feel it more necessary than something like say, Wicked, which is someone else's work turned inside-out and injected with a mind-boggling amount of capital to become... what? Something symptomatic of the fate of art in 2025? Sure. Is it necessary? Is it needed? Should it exist?

It does. It is anything, but inexorable. It'll be forgotten by next year. It won't make anyone's end of the decade list, much less quarter century or century's best (Maker willing and we're all around to discourse in such manners).

Most art is destined to be forgotten, maybe not even participated in. Is it still worth creating? Pull the camera back far enough and the human in the frame disappears and all you see is a little blue dot hanging in the black. Does the human still matter? Even if they get blotted out for the sum of ten thousand pounds (that's tax free, mind you, tax free)?

What am I afraid of?

Of not having made a difference in the whole wide world over the span of your own life? But we already have. We are right now. Sure, this will only be read by fifty people if I'm being generous. No money changes hands. No klout or influence, either. Is it still worth doing? Will any of this live on past me or will it be snuffed out for me to see within my own lifetime? Nobody knows until it's done. It's easy to say that the work will be of no consequence, stillborn or linger for only days like Shelley's children. It's harder to believe that the work will have a life beyond yourself, even if it's flickering and meager. That's why we carry that coal-filled horn in the winter night. I know that's not what Cormac McCarthy was talking about, but I'm going to steal his metaphor like a common thief.

Writing, though it is magic, is lonely work. And like magic, not every working yields result. It's effort to jump into the void, effort to build up the strength to do it. It also takes effort to maintain the belief that the work won't come to anything, not even something the writer themselves is happy with, much less something that causes not ripples but waves through their community whatever that might be. That itself takes work. Maybe the energy is better directed towards other ends. Yes, this essay is for me as much as anyone.

I can't comment as to the assertion on Magen's part that essays are here to spread the truth and fiction is to entertain. I've seen plenty of essayists out there flat-out lying to give their ideas more purchase. Open up the NYT. It's right there. Besides, those are entertainment as much as any fiction is.

Back to fear. Magen comes to this conclusion.

At once the inventor and his creation, I was a malformed creature and a negligent creator. I made something that terrified me, and so I refused it. I cast it aside. I wrote everything but the truth that was right in front of me.

Alyena, my creation, is the story. Hers may very well be the best story I have left to tell. And I owe it to myself to tell it.

We're all in some way broken. In some way not working "correctly." Not a perfect exemplar of any identity, no matter how they're measured. Perfection is a thing not for human beings, no matter how much money is spent or hours in the gym or lifestyle assembled in Instagram-ready stills. We as creators are always negligent. Just that some appear more studious and industrious and successful than others. The only writing output system that's perfect produces sludge fit only for C-suite dudes. Being malformed and lumpen is the only thing that makes art viable at all. Obsessions, complications, fractures, short-sightedness, weakness, perspective. That's all that makes unique art possible. Doesn't make a bit of it easy.

Thanks to Magen for writing this piece in the first place. It's more honesty than I can manage and I’m pretty clear that I didn’t do the piece justice. Mea culpa. Hopefully it finds a wide readership, wider than the latest piece of success advice making the rounds, whatever it is. You know there's always going to be a new one. Always.

---

In other news, I'm working on different cover treatments for the work in progress. It's about all I can manage right now. I had a cover made up last year, or the year before. But the story has changed so much (and, honestly, the cover was not my best work) that I've gone back to the drawing board twice on it.

The first is this very graphic treatment (and sharp eyes have spotted the debt owed to the Black Lizard-published books of the 90s, how I encountered many of my mystery/noir favorites like Chandler, Thompson and Willeford). I like it a lot, but it's a huge divergence from the previous books. I'll keep it in the back pocket but am not likely to run with it, no matter its charms.

The latest obsession builds on the template and texture of the older covers, but takes things in a different direction. There's thematic links back to the book itself, which I really like. Though it does make things... more difficult than previous covers. And generally my work is pretty overworked as it is, so I'm likely on dangerous ground, design-wise.

Maybe I'll be able to start writing again after Christmas. If I don't start overthinking things.

Speaking of which, there's probably going to be another missive before the Saturnalia, much less the Solstice, much less Christmas itself. Gotta get fitted for a fur-lined robe and crown of holly. Maybe get a custom tankard made.

Until then.