FULL BLEED: REMEMBER THAT DAY?

Hey folks. Yeah, yeah. Long time in not posting here. Well, posting blog entries requires this thing called work which is sometimes in short supply. Shitposting’s easy. Like catching a dagger thrown at you and throwing it back and the original tosser.

So, I put out a book today. Compared to the Kickstarter itself, it’s a total non-event. Particularly because I royally screwed up and put the release date at October 15 of this year at Amazon, only I didn’t actually push the change through so it never took. I really should find a more detail-oriented publisher.

Kidding. I’m not looking for a publisher. Haven’t been for a couple years and I’m much happier for it. Now if someone wants to take a swing at my backlist, I suppose that’s something I wouldn’t dismiss out of hand. But my last experience left a pretty sour taste in my mouth, like licking Hollywood Boulevard after sundown on a summer night. Who knows what’s been there. Yuck. Anyways, it’s just me. And the Kickstarter is the real event. I bet I won’t move as many copies as I did on the Kickstarter in ten years of Amazon sales. That’s about seventy copies, for those of you keeping track at home. No obfuscation. No shade. No shame.

Hell, I’m proud to be moving that many, because I don’t think I sold that many books period through Amazon in more than a decade of selling multiple titles. Can’t get coverage, can’t get a rep, can’t get a posse. So I scratch and claw for every reader I can over on Bluesky. Not Twitter, not Meta, not TikTok or Goodreads or I’m sure I’m missing your favorite platform. That’s because those platforms aren’t in the business of selling books. They’re in the business of the platform itself. I know I’ve said this before so I’ll keep it short. When you as an author are in a video, you’re selling the video platform and your appearance on it. You might find a couple folks who are interested enough to cruise over to your site or book’s page, but it will be less than a single percent of whoever sees it. Meanwhile the platform is getting your effort to sell ad space.

Like James Caan in Thief, I’m thinking about the fruits of my labor sitting in Robert Prosky’s pocket, not in his own. No, I’m not doing this for free. Okay, I really am, but I like to pretend that I’m operating in this world where nothing happens for free and that my work is worth something. Which, coincidentally is why I walked away from getting an agent or a publisher. I get it. They’re literally swamped by folks with hat in hand asking for a shot. There’s so many more hungry mouths than there are plates to feed them in that regard. You have to be brusque and develop a thick skin and get used to rejection and fuck all that. Yeah, you heard me. I got tired of other people’s opinions forming the basis of my own when it came to my work. So I hit the bricks.

It’s still a frustrating process, don’t get me wrong. I’d be lying if I didn’t wish for a publicity department or distribution to bookstores. But here’s the thing. How much do those move the needle for anyone but folks who got into the system years ago or became the hot new something like The Thing of Thing and Things and Dungeon Crawler Blah writers. Yeah, my grapes are sour. My Gifts Are Hungry, too. I doubt there’s a publisher on earth who’d have let me run with that title. If it’s confusing, fuck it, it pleases me. And yeah, I’m still the first audience for all this work. Yes, I re-read my work from time to time, particularly if I’m stuck and maybe I left myself a little present back in the past.

That actually happened with My Gifts Are Hungry. The main character, Grace Cather, originally showed up in All Waters Are Graves, from two years back. I don’t think she even had a last name then. And I know that she has some opinions which are… in conflict with a couple things I wrote about her in the latest book. Oh well. People evolve. But back when I was coming up with this story, I was a little stuck on where it was going, so I went back to her first appearance. And there it was. A sentence which told me exactly what to do that I’d forgotten. I won’t repeat it here because spoilers. But it was plain as day. I’d left myself a little guidepost assuming I was going to get back to this character, which I did.

Maybe I’m unimaginative and unkind. Maybe publishers would put up with this sort of meandering half-plotted arcs navigating by clues left in the past approach to putting together series of books. But I really don’t think so, not when I see the really very vanilla kinds of things that get lots of attention from larger genre publishers, I am dubious. Press Y to DOUBT. Press ita over and over. Again, horror is an exception, but I doubt most horror publishers are interested in my approach to the genre and would question if I even write horror at all, which is their prerogative. At any rate, I’d rather not argue over it. I got tired of arguing with my last publisher about how people who weren’t doctors or drug dealers did indeed have and use pagers in the eighties. Yes, they called it weed back then, too. Meaningless, but every meaningless fight saps energy.

So I stopped fighting. Which is why I am where I am, running Kickstarters for books I can barely get to come out once a year and selling them at shows and on consignment to stores or doing show appearances. Beats the alternative, which was quitting the entire thing. Maybe I’d have been better off. I don’t think so. And I’ve managed to entertain some folks along the way. Oh, I said it.

En-ter-tain.

I’m not here to change your mind or demand action on this or that. The only cause I’m interested in is that of living something like an actual life and getting through everything that gets thrown at all of us. Maybe unsettle. Maybe let you think about something in a new way. Maybe totally confuse (I’d be shocked if I haven’t.) I’m not interested in shocking or repelling or dreading. Hell, being a decent human is shocking. Giving something of yourself and expecting nothing in return is inconceivable these days. When we live in a world of billionaire yachts ignoring distress calls and governments are casting off obligation to citizens in exchange for favor from wealth, the whole idea of selflessness is anathema. Oh oh oh, we have to burn the world in the short term so that we can fund the transition of a handful of minds to immortal digital bodies and save the future! Entropy dies at midnight! All those useless fantasies that serve only to disguise rank greed.

My books aren’t there to fix the world or inspire you to. Maybe they’re able to inspire a small kindness or glimpse of perspective or shift in observation. But mostly they’re there to be an engaging set of experiences, to pull that engaging set of experiences out of the reader. All of whatever people get out of a book comes from themselves, the book just catalyzes it, tugs it awake. This is not to diminish what books can do. But I try to be realistic about it.

So yeah, my books. My terms. My art direction. My page layout. My flailing attempts at marketing on my own terms. It will never pay the rent. It might help me stay sane. Which is something that requires more and more effort these days, watching where things are going. And hey, it may be that self-publishing is about the only way that anyone but the insanely lucky will be able to publish in not too long a time. We still don’t know the outcome of things. We don’t know what’s going to happen to book even as a thing in the face of push-button content generation (unless the ai companies start charging what it actually costs them to make this stuff, in which case you’ll see the bottom feeders run the hell away because they can only make money when the process is basically free.)

We don’t know what’s going to happen to anything. All we can do is keep moving. We can’t go on. We must go on. You get the picture. We’re all in this together. I call it out in the dedication to this latest one.

Whew. That was a lot. Let’s get back to why I’m even writing this today.

I have a new book out today. It’s called My Gifts Are Hungry. It’s about a girl who runs away from home to join the goth circus for a night at the Last Prayer Club in Hollywood. Only she finds that the circus calls for a longer hitch than that. Particularly when you catch the eye of the Queen of No Tomorrows. And she invites you to a place to stay, just until you get on your feet. It’s an old house up in the hills, built back when it took real money to do that. And all those houses have stories. This house has one it wants to tell to Grace. It’s been waiting for someone like her for a long time.

It’s the fourth book in a series I’m writing called Hazeland. It’s intergenre — horror, fantasy, coming of age, crime, tone poem. Nobody would publish it. Nobody but me. I hope you give it a look.

Cover looks like this.

In the meantime, I’ve got another book to work on. This one called You’ll Murder Forever. It’s about friendship and betrayal and the Apocalypse (nuclear armageddon flavored.) I hope to have it written for you all next year. It’s been a bear to wrangle into the starting blocks, but I’m nearly there.

Catch you on the flipside.