FULL BLEED: WE ALL HAVE TO MAKE SOME KIND OF PLANS FOR OURSELVES

It's a free concert from now on. That's our world. All the ticket booths got taken down and the hairies from the Wild Zone have crashed the scene. Woodstock without limits. The old world of outdoor festival and money at the door just took the first helicopter out. If only there had been a better plan. The organizers had to head out of there pretty fast. Hey wait a minute, this isn't Woodstock. It's Altamont.

Only the world isn't so much planned as cobbled together from moment to moment, uncounted hands, some sweaty, some desperate, some comfortable, some will never know comfort. All those hands all working independently of one another putting bricks together, building something they won't see the culmination of in their lifetimes if ever because there's never really a culmination, only an ongoing process. An eternal process.

So our plans only matter to ourselves. But still, they should be made. There should be some kind of understanding as to where things are going or where we want them to go. One hopes that would be seen in the artworks we create, some kind of expression of an intention, even if we know that it will only ever be intention because it's beyond our power to reshape an entire world the way we'd like it to be.

But not today. Today we get artworks where the makers of the art are trying to prove themselves to be good people, of good character, beautiful and well-dressed and without neuroses or insecurities. Paragons of success, even if that success is a level which is indistinguishable from something like poverty (raises hand.) We get works today where the author is one of the primary characters discussed out in the land of perpetual text, of endless opinion. Yes, that's right. The Howling Pit. I wrote a whole book about it more than ten years ago. (Or you can buy and read it here.) If you're confused, I'll recap.

The Howling Pit is the place where art goes to die. Yet it's the only place where outsiders can even hope to sell their work as it's the only place they've access to. And even that has been choked back by link-throttling or the requirement to buy ads to even reach the people who've asked to read your every breathless utterance on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and I suppose TikTok. That's right. The internet is the Howling Pit, everfull of opinions and stakeless wagering and clout-seeking where the easiest cudgel to wield is the judgement that a creator has been good or bad based on the surface qualities of the art they make.

Which is, of course, the foundation of a generational artistic cul-de-sac, where work flows in and gets mixed into the soup that's never replenished. You've seen those stagnant ponds which are slimed and overgrown with algae, where the only thing that ends up surviving is said algae and over time even that becomes so still that it fills in and becomes maybe wetland then field than disappears altogether? Right. That's the final destination. The only way to win is not to play, etc etc.

But hey, if you can sell yourself as one of the good ones, a real ace bloke, a good thinker and all-around nice gal, then you... Well, you don't have it made. But you can become part of Team Good Guys/Gals/Not on the binary. Maybe you can get gifted enough on TikTok that you don't need to have a job anymore. For awhile.

That doesn't make for good or interesting art. I suppose it makes for great content. And lots of folks want to make content these days. Content is all that easily sells. It fits into categories and gets solid casts and competent writing and competent but not interesting photography or prose and a cover that looks good shrunk down to an inch by two thirds of an inch on a screen (even smaller on a phone.) Then you can become part of the endless parade of content just like the content you've made, drops in the firehose of content that's being blasted out at any given moment. More than anyone could watch even if that's all they ever did for the rest of their lives.

But if you're lucky, you can get picked up as football of the day in the Howling Pit and maybe get some eyeballs. To find your content mixed with all the content just like it. Hooray.

Yeah, it's grim. That's why they call it horror. The horror of making sanitized content wrapped in a package of mere competence and expecting folks to be excited about receiving it. Ray Bradbury was right! And so was Aldous Huxley, for that matter. Moreso than Eric Blair in picking up that the dystopia masked as consumer choice and numbness would be far more pernicious than the grim and heartless tyranny imposed from the outside.

"We're taking away the word for bad or awful so that people won't be able to describe the world that they find themselves in as anything but good and will rule forever."

"Oh, cool, Mr. Orwell. How about we instead put humans into a world of comfort and endless entertainment choice and wonderful drugs at our disposal so that they'll be made so happy they never wish to leave no matter the cost to themselves? Check and mate."

Oh, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. We don't really live in a world where the works of art themselves are actually dead upon arrival. Of course not. Who would want to live in such a place. Who'd want to make it?

Wait. It's not a matter about wanting it to be made, but about it having been made around us. Of course no sane person would want this, other than the people who make the systems that trap attention and boil things to simply adding a like and repost, smash that bell and subscribe, throw your neighbors on the pyre to keep the furnaces going. More content. Content for the content gods! Likes for the throne of likes! Best of all, you can't make any of that stuff you need from it, but the dudes who run the platforms and connect all the computers to make it possible make bank.

Yeah. Insane.

Sure, intend to make the world different than it is now. But don't expect the execution to be an easy process. And if you're not selling what easily sells, expect it to feel like swimming upriver like a salmon to maybe mate and then die. Better love the feeling of your muscles pushing against the current because that's the reward. Better love making art because the world wants to take even that away from you. Just push these buttons here and you can make more content and reduce the value of anything attached to your name or handle forever. Only there's some folks that just worry about keeping the volume up because half the stuff they put out is being throttled by the platform so they can wring pennies from their user base. What do you mean I can only publish eight books a day? I can ChatGPT up ten by noon!

I'm still waiting for Amazon to put some kind of financial throttle on this, but maybe they won't. Maybe it'll just be more and more and more books of ever-lessening value until nobody buys anything but dudes will keep churning out AI slop titles because something has to click.

So the world I want to make is a little different than all that. It's a world away from being told what and what doesn't sell or have traction in the algorithm. It's a world away from preoccupation with genre and category. You want to use this thing but are afraid to because that will make your book not-horror or not-fantasy or too romantic or not enough? Do it. That's what I'm doing. You should too.

I'd love to say it's a world where I don't care what's said about my work. That's an easy thing to say because, well, it's not talked about by more than a handful of folks. Which means only a handful of folks outside the circle I can reach will ever hear about them. Trying to imagine what would happen should any of these significantly slip past that particular enclosure and I got no clue what that looks like. Other than blocking a lot of people and locking my account.

But that's wishful thinking. Too much attention. Right. Talk about a dream world.

Is it a world, these books, that's sustainable? Good question. So long as I've got the energy to do it, which is an open question some days. I'm the sole proprietor of the shop. There should be others, editors, designers, cover artists, marketing team. There aren't. All that takes resources I don't particularly have, so it's on my shoulders. (As would a lot of it even if I was indie published and maybe even full traditional publishing - which is something I don't have to worry about.)

It's just me out here, beating the bushes and posting threads of photographs to convey feel and texture and eventually me saying ever-more outrageous (yet brave and absolutely true) things about... everything, in an effort to get people to take a look at these books.

Hell, nobody else will. It's down to this.

We don't have a choice about the Howling Pit. It's here. We can try to reshape it as best we can. Whether that's from making the books we really want to make (regardless of perceived popularity or chasing the current trend or selling/sequestering ourselves in furtherance of all that - and yes, I'm aware that I'm selling myself even as I stamp my feet and protest that I'm not doing so. It's paradoxical.) We can try to swim in it. We can not get swarmed by every ridiculous character that gets paraded under our noses and dogpile. I know resisting that one is impossible. I just sideways did one of those today. Oh, don't worry, the guy runs a very profitable genre franchise. He's fine. He's also wasting his time saying dumb stuff on Bluesky, but whatever.

All we can do is try to do better even when we fuck it up.

No, none of is any manner of guarantee. It's all pulls on a giant cosmic slot machine, only the pulls are sitting down and doing the work. Knowing what's the work and what's just fucking around (and nobody can just do the work all the time; we all need some fucking around time). Making the work quality and resisting the whole siren shriek of producing content. Because that just puts you on the treadmill of making content and pretty soon that's all you're doing. Unless you can pay a team to do it for you, then you're Brandon Sanderson or Mr. Beast and you're not really human then. Then it's an industry that you've just slapped your name on.

I'd love to say that I'd be able to say "No, thanks. Not for me." If that opportunity got dropped on me. Maybe I even would. Maybe even considering this a possibility is pure pipe dream territory. All those huge industries, those content factories? They're made up by design, brick by brick, because that was an aimed goal by someone some time ago.

I just want to write books and keep writing books. It'd be nice to be able to feel like I'm actually providing for the household with this creative work. My primary job is, well, taking care of the house and my wife and the cats and looking out at the backyard and thinking that it needs more work. It's all good work, valuable work that needs doing. I'd like to think that I'm doing more than just writing books that me and less than a hundred other folks are reading. We'll see about that figure. I think it's 51 backers this time so far, and the book before was 60. Who knows. Who fuckin' knows?

But then I didn't know what numbers looked like when I wasn't the guy publishing my books. Maybe knowledge really is dangerous.

I started this entry out relatively infuriated and despairing of what the world of independent creation looks like now, even in this golden age of anyone being able to be their own platform and blah blah fucking blah. I'm still angry and despairing but the reality is that emotional energy is misplaced. You or I aren't controlling it anytime soon. We're not shaping the discourse, and in fact would do better just giving it a hard pass. All these critiques and opinions flying around, all the takes? They're not to improve the aesthetic world. They're for the folks writing them, myself in particular. Maybe even you, too. Maybe not. Maybe you're made of sterner stuff.

I promise the next one of these will be more conducive to making folks interested in my books, in particular My Gifts Are Hungry. Got less than two weeks to get these things moving and out the door. This is the time to shine. After this, it's yesterday's news and the churn has already moved on.

Probably resurrecting something about the borderlands between fantasy and horror. Maybe I should instead talk about something that people would actually want to read, huh?

Maybe.