FULL BLEED: QUAKING SOURCELESS

Been away awhile. I know. Fall’s a busy time for me. The start of the crazy season, really. Wife’s birthday in September, pretty early. Then mine. Then couple other family members. Then Halloween. Then my wedding anniversary (I mentioned my wife above, you were paying attention, right?) Not to mention that for horror-adjacent writers, October is a busy month for appearances and the like. Even no-names like myself. Hell, I’ve even managed to get something booked in a couple weeks, but I’ll get to that later.

More importantly, it’s time to start writing another book. I mean, it’s well past time. Should have started some time ago. The only one keeping the deadline is me, which is sometimes a problem. I should be halfway through it. Thing is, if I’d pushed it and just started, I’d probably have thrown myself off a cliff by now. Or I’d have gotten a handful of pages in and spun wheels until I fixed things. I’ve mentioned before that I’m a writer who outlines (which I’m supposed to call a “plotter” but that sounds like I’m a scheming and evil vizier which I’m not.) As opposed by someone who just sits down and writes (which I’m supposed to call a “pantser” but that sounds like something that’ll get you arrested). I’m not here to litigate for either side. Truth is, there’s elements of improvisation in both approaches, just like there’s really a structure in both approaches. To insist that it’s one or the other is best left for online discussions and success advice dispensation.

I need to know where I’m going so I can make each day’s writing stick. Now, just because I have an aim like “character needs to crash the club but things go wrong” doesn’t mean I know exactly, precisely how it’s going to go. And I might think I have an idea and something else suggests itself. Anyways, the structure is there to give me something to build on, but sometimes that frame gets a little bent. That’s okay. Roll with it. If you plan everything down to the last detail, it’s probably going to read like it. If you as the writer are allowed to surprise yourself some, you can surprise the reader, too. That lets things breathe.

The downside of this is I’ve developed a sense as to when the structure isn’t quite working. Like you’re trying to drive a truck on a muddy road and you just lose traction and wheels spin and you don’t really get anywhere. Or maybe I’m being a coward and just not giving myself an opportunity to roll with problems as they develop. Maybe. It’s been a rough year, really. I know. What do I have to complain about? Well, lots, but I won’t burden you with it right now. Anyways, back to knowing when things aren’t quite working.

I ran into this with My Gifts Are Hungry, where the central phenomena/antagonist was originally going to be a very different thing than it ended up being. So much so that it would have been a very different book. And it occurred to me that the work I’d done in the first hundred pages or so was really leading to a very very different destination. A very different monster. And ultimately, a better choice. It made a lot of the choices that I’d come to make a lot more sense and even gave things some resonance that they didn’t have before. It also required a lot of rewriting of what came in the last 3/4 of the book. That’s what happens in the writing.

Aside: I’ve seen some writers who are really YouTubers call this “discovery” and act like this is a relatively new thing when it really isn’t. My mom, who I either learned from (which would be weird as I’ve not read most of what she’s written) or was wired like (maybe more likely) called her first drafts discovery drafts, where the book actually happened. I don’t know if the YouTubers I’m describing here just want to go in cold and start writing to see what they discover and then they’re in a flow state and all of a sudden they’ve blown by eight hours and have however many pages or if this is just a fad in writing influencing.

Ugh. Writing influencers. What a horrible thought.

Well, sometimes the discovery is that what you have doesn’t really quite work. There’s lots of pieces and you’re forcing them together, or you have plot destinations in mind but are pretty scant on how C gets things to D short of acts of god. Discovery is what allows reasons to surface. But for me, the structure has to be there for the magic to happen.

Magic. Ha.

Well, I wasn’t making it into discovery. Last one, I got into it and said “This isn’t working, but this might.” I had a lot of false starts with this one, but think I’ve finally got enough of an armature that I can begin to put clay on it and sculpting it up. And honestly, even if I’m not quite there, I probably have enough to start the pumps. I’ve probably had it for some time but have talked myself out of it more than once. It’s tough to commit to the amount of work that a novel takes knowing that there isn’t much of a place for the book once I get it out of my head or wherever else it really comes from.

I know that I shouldn’t be thinking about the fate of the work once it’s done. Because that’s a quick road to “why even bother?”

“Oh, that’s just the cold facts of the marketplace, Matt. It’s much friendlier when you go out and hand-sell behind the table at shows.”

Well, it’s not. Yes, it’s unfair and unrealistic to expect that everyone or even more than a fraction of everyone, even at a genre bookstore or show, will have any interest in what you’re writing. What I’m writing in particular. For instance, I was at World Fantasy last week, I was at a co-op table. Pretty cheap buy-in, all things considered. Guaranteed to make my table charge back if I just sold four books (not counting production cost of the books as that’s sunk, babies). Four books. Not so very much. And there was going to be a huge autograph/book sale on Friday night, biggest night of the show. Slam dunk, right?

Not so much. I sold two. On Saturday I didn’t even have any bites or people asking “Hey, what’s this Hazeland stuff about.” Not. One. Like I said, not even a meaningful fraction of attendees will be interested. Now, to be fair, World Fantasy is a kind of unusual show. It used to be professionals only, as in professional sales before you can sign up. When last I went, I’d had some, and my first book not published by me but by someone else had come out the year before. It seems like there were a number of self-pub authors there without bylines in pro publications this year. That’s one cohort. The other is old guard, longtime professional authors in the field. I heard one of them describing the show as a class reunion for him, and that’s fair.

But it also means they’re really not there to buy books from people who they largely believe aren’t good enough to have landed a professional contract. Or to acknowledge that the industry has gone through several rounds of tectonic-plate-level changes. That’s neither here nor there. The old guard is the old guard. And apparently the new guard isn’t all that interested in intergenre work that places itself on the corner of Calvino and Chandler. It’s not for everyone. It’s still disappointing if not crushing to be shown exactly how much it’s not for everyone.

Friday was okay. It was Friday. People still coming in, right? Got to hang out with a friend for dinner and walk around taking some pictures before the giant autograph session/book sale started. Got myself set up for that, took my place at the table, put on my most welcoming aspect (it’s not that I’m unwelcoming most of the time just that I’m not the best in person in social situations where I’m vastly outnumbered.) Anyways, the inside of that room quickly took on the ambient sound level of a 747 engine set on transatlantic cruise. And nobody was there for nobodys. They were there for Kim Stanley Robinson or Peter Beagle. I was right across the hall from ‘em. Over two hours, no bites. Not even stopping to look at the books. Yeah. That hurt.

Saturday was notable for a good breakfast, a great lunch of curry ramen and chicken katsu, and a good dinner of hand-pulled noodles in spicy chow main. I mean, I had a good time talking with other folks at the table, but answered zero that’s zero queries as to my books, sold the same amount. That’s rough. Rolling up a goose egg for an entire day behind the table does sap the ‘ol will to keep going. Really, that’s a first. Oh wait, a second. I got a zero once on a Sunday at a comic show I’d flown down to sell at, probably in 2012, maybe 2013. It’s depressing. Here you’re supposed to be among your people. They’re looking for the new and not stepped-on. ‘Cept they aren’t. Or I’m not that.

Sunday I at least sold a second book. That’s two for the weekend. Two more and I might’ve covered my table buy-in. So, really not great. Makes you do some math. Because let’s be honest, selling books at shows, unless you’re selling a lot of them, is advertising your work. Even just getting postcards in hand with the information so you could order them later is advertising. I was in gas for a hundred miles each way, hotel for two nights, parking, food and yeah. That’s beginning to make Amazon advertising look really good (it is not really good — it makes money for Amazon, not for you.) World Fantasy aside from the human interactions here and there, was a bust. Depressingly so. Will I go again? I honestly don’t know. Maybe if I can get on programming somehow.

Had a slightly better time at a local author market that Bloodstone Books held on Halloween. Sold three in about five hours. That’s not buying filet mignon anytime soon, but it’s better than the weekend before.

So yeah, getting a multi-day face-full of indifference was enough to put me off writing for awhile. So that week I just finished up the narrative draft of You’ll Murder Forever, which is a little over seventy five pages of What I Think Will Happen. For a four-hundred page book. You’d think I’m overwriting it. Maybe I am, but there was a lot of dialogue in there as well which eats up space. I’m probably okay, in terms of the book. I’m just not sure I’m okay in terms of investing the next five months or so of work time into something that’s going to do what the last one did. Which, granted, is better than the one before and the one before that.

Given everything else I’m hauling around, I do wonder if I’ve got enough in the tank for it. If I’ve got enough “read it or not, I don’t fucking care anymore” in the tank to survive putting it out there. Getting older folks. Those fuck you reserves need to be replenished and it takes longer each time. The questioning of, well, everything gets more abrasive each year. Corrosive, even. I’ll probably feel better about things once I get rolling, but this one’s been different.

For one thing, it’s unlike any other book I’ve done, Hazeland or not. I’m gonna try some weird stuff with the structure which I hope will not get in the way of the story, but will actually enhance it some. Yeah, I’m not going all House of Leaves on you, I promise. I probably couldn’t live with myself if I did, given I gave that one fifty pages and sold it for credit. I’m still here to just tell a story in a setting that I enjoy. But I’m worried that this one is well beyond my grasp in terms of what I want to talk about, much less how I’m laying it out. That it won’t make much sense to the readers. That the big swing I’m taking, particularly with the conclusion is just going to smack me in the face, leaving teeth embedded in the Louisville Slugger that I’m tossing around without care. That this one is just not going to gel. That it’s going to go into the void and not even Yaldabaoth will see it much less the Maker.

That’s a joke. Gnosticism seems like a whole lot of explanation to say “Well, it’s not G-d’s fault that the world sucks, they just got hijacked” and my brother in the eighth sphere, if G-d can get hoodwinked like that, what’s that do for goodness much less omnipotence? I’m gonna take it up with Cormac McCarthy once I get the opportunity.

Sorry, sorry. You’re not here for theology. I’m not really an occultist. I don’t even play one on television. The closest thing that I ever got to magic was writing. I won’t bore you with how it is or isn’t. You already know for yourself, just like I do. Thing is that the trick itself might be mighty, what it pulls out of the viewer could be bigger than the entire world. But doing the magic itself takes effort and a lot of it. It’s not something that gets easier with age (a subject I think about a lot these days, for a variety of reasons). The skill builds, but not everything else does.

And it’s hard, this current publishing environment. I’m watching folks I know who some have full-blown careers, some had contracts, some made money, some never really will. There’s a large cohort out there that’s feeling used-up and burned out. Not simply because publishing is limping along on broken legs, but because there’s a thousand thousand dudes out there with theft machines that generate content that not only choke out distribution and attention channels, but some people actually read without any discernment. That makes folks feel replaceable, disposable. The business doesn’t care if they use up writers because there’s always more hungry newcomers desperate for prestige waiting. They’ll take smaller paydays and smaller audiences and in general will be happy to exist in a smaller world. Some of those people might even write their own material. I’m guessing that more and more it’ll be LLM-assisted sludge that will get massaged into shape. Hell, big boys on the order of Andy Weir are telling everyone to grow up and use the tools.

But who’s gonna be reading this new stuff? Who’s going to be able to publish it beyond tacking it into an online catalog and a searchable database? It’s like turning the base of a giant redwood into green jello and expecting the whole thing to keep standing, much less survive a winter storm.

So yeah, I know the despair. I wrestle with it. I never had a career and I’m not going to. (Oh, oh, oh, but positive thinking and you have to speak your affirmations to the universe and…) No contract, no real income or prestige. I don’t have an answer to the whole “this all seems pointless” question/statement. And even if I did, it would only matter to me and not to you. I won’t tell anyone to stop themselves from quitting this whole thing, even just writing for themselves. That’d be presumptuousness. You have to make that call. I have to make mine. Even if it’s stupid and senseless.

Anyways, I’m gonna start up a document soon and I’ll type the first few pages of You’ll Murder Forever into it. It won’t be in Word, which’ll be a first. ‘Cause fuck Microsoft. I’m done with all the big companies. Yeah, I still pay Adobe because there’s not much choice in it. Anyways, I’m going to open that document up and I’ll put words into it. I’ll be able to because I’ve done the prep work to the point where I’ve mostly internalized the spine of the script and know what themes I’m wrestling with. It’s about the only thing I’m good at. And I know I’m good, career notwithstanding. It’s the only thing that I’ve wanted to do that I’ve been able to stick with for the longest time.

So I’ll do it again.

Until next time, where I might talk about the purpose of criticism and make myself some new friends.