FULL BLEED: YOU CAN SAY THESE STREETS ARE RIVERS, YOU CAN CALL THESE RIVERS STREETS

Rough patch writing. Rough patch several things, really. I know you know what I mean because everywhere I look amongst folks I know, it's the same feeling, same vibes, same rancid, same quiet recession because nobody wants to fucking say it because they're all terrified that it'll be the Big One This Time. It won't be an inconvenience. It'll be a fundamental warping of how things are and everyone but everyone knows who's the captain of the ship of state right now and these dudes can't manage a simple cover-up much less the economy losing faith in itself everywhere all at once.

So instead I'll focus on the smaller part of it, the manifestation of all this that I can deal with. My own work. I can't, like Howard Beale, tell you what to do about the recession or Congress. I can't even tell you to get mad because that's gonna happen on its own or it isn't. Besides, my own solutions probably wouldn't be very popular or even tenable and we all saw how Howard Beale ended up, right?

Still struggling with How Things Are Now. Still impossible to shake the feeling that they should be some other way. But just like Marlo on The Wire said, "You want it to be the one way, but it isn't. It's the other way." Still tough to swallow where we ended up after so carefully chronicling how we got there over the last twenty five years almost (yes, that's how long I've been blogging/commentatoring, starting with comics and ending up with The Whole Media Environment.) How we've got publishers who are primarily interested in paying for their office real estate and squeezing every last dime out of mostly dead properties and authors they're terrified that they can't break into the next Stephen King, and those writers who get big enough can just take their act right over to Patreon or Kickstarter. Assuming this keeps up, that the ability to grant prestige is finally squandered in exchange for another infusion of AI VC dollars, just another pile of money to train new works on and this time, this time, this time they swear they'll get the formula right and they'll be able to generate material that'll sell like the bestsellers of old.

Yes, that's really happening. The endgame will be a Primer from The Diamond Age, where you can get it to tell you a story any way you want, exactly like Bronté would have done it, or Faulkner, or Brett Easton Ellis or your favorite fanficcer. And what's this? For double the cost of a Netflix subscription, you can give money to Amazon's AI dudes and they'll spit out animated episodes of your favorite show that you can't get enough of or from characters whose authors died fifty years ago (and people are still silly enough to believe it's the character themselves, not the author's voice which is the thing that really makes these characters compelling). They'll just make it for you. What you want. Over and over and over. It's like dying and waking up in a hotel with a casino and show girls/dudes/inter/other who hang on your every word and you're a winner every night and the very nice Mr. Pip tells you "Oh, by the way, you didn't go to Heaven but to the other place and you'll go insane here ha ha ha". Thanks for the prophetic nightmare, Charles Beaumont and Rod Serling.

You'll have your own room full of mirrors to live in. Won't even have to go into the outside world at all (it's such a fright!). Hell is other people, right, JP? Well you won't need 'em, soon enough.

I can't even begin to describe how much this vision depresses me. And maybe it'll turn out to be a sort of psychic disease that we'll have to shake off and break the fever of. And it's definitely something I should stop thinking about or I'll end up never making another thing again because what would be the fucking point of doing so in a world where only slop is going to get attention in all the algo channels (and why wouldn't it? Go ahead, I'll wait.)

So maybe that's my excuse for being stuck a hundred pages into The Missing Pieces. It's not like I have a firm deadline other than the fact that I should run another kickstarter in February or March and stay consistent, and that I will not run said kickstarter campaign unless the book is at the very least drafted. I've got fifty-sixty folks who backed things and I'm not gonna end up one of those dudes who makes endless excuses after taking fundraising money. I'd quit before I did that.

It's still hard to go through the effort to do all this in the face of a world that doesn't seem to want anything other than stuff to turn into punching bags online. But that's been a problem since we had an internet and people decided that pointing out plot holes and perceived inconsistencies was a better use of time than actually engaging with artwork. And, to be fair, it's probably easier. It's certainly easier. Just like trainspotting-level-detail in talking about bands and songs is less personally risky than saying things like "The first album by This Mortal Coil showed me things and made me feel things that I didn't know I was capable of before I came in contact with it." Because being real and having emotions is cringe or unmanly, particularly now, or some stupid shit. So, it's much more satisfying for most internet commentators to have a realistic magic system to pick apart and see in use than it is to engage with an artwork on its own terms. Hell. You don't even need to read a difficult book like Blood Meridian. Here's ten tips to help you read it in a two-hour-long YouTube video, and folks, Blood Meridian is not that hard if you've spent much of any time reading. You might have to look up some of the SAT words. They're really scary.

Good grief.

Again, though, there's folks who'll teach you how to triumph over these works in totality. You can beat them harder and more savagely than that Elden Ring boss you spent a week on before quietly giving up and breaking the disc in half. You can beat these works. You can dunk on them, chromed and eternal. Take that, Cormac McCarthy! In your face! Posterized! I know why the Judge does what he does! I win! You hold no power over me! Now I'm gonna get the cheat codes for The Outer Dark. I'll collect the whole set! And how can any artist even survive when a large part of the audience out there doesn't want to participate in a work but rather find a way in to blow it up for likes. That's your Hobbesian nightmare out there. Not society at war with itself but the folks who should be supporting art at work with it, knives sharpened and bright in the twilight gloom.

There is a sense that people want to triumph over these works. Maybe they're suffering PTSD from being assigned reading in school. I don't know. Maybe they got beat up by the English Club after class. "Oh, you missed the central metaphor in The Secret Sharer! You so dumb your momma gained IQ when you dropped!" I know. English majors are savage, ruthless.

It is, unfortunately, easier to substitute a definite kind of "here's your win conditions" checklist on a piece of art. Hell, we're training audiences to do this stuff now. Those checklists of story items and world views and such that you see all over the goddamn place? Yup. Like Pokémon, you can catch them all and triumph. We've allowed people to substitute this sort of thing, or the shouted "plot hole" for having a genuine experience. Why have thoughts at all? Why when you can read the checklist to put those thoughts in your head instead. Particularly if they're uncomfortable thoughts.

Lots of people talking lately about the idea of total safety being a sort of seed crystal for fascism. You can argue that the whole safety thing is really just the flipside of control. It's good that these things are at least being talked about in public, though I don't expect them to get much traction. Not in a world where more and more content, and let's face it, most of what's being made now is simply content run in front of focus groups. Maybe that's a defense mechanism? If you make something super inoffensive, nobody is gonna rake it over the coals or give it more than a lukewarm promotion on social media and enough of those will look like a tidal wave of "You may as well watch it" in the current environment. That's safety. I mean, it really isn't. Of course not. It's just cowardice.

So, yeah, being a creator in these times is hard. Constantly being your own wellspring of enthusiasm and support is hard. I know. If I really loved the process, I'd do it for free and wake up every morning thanking the Maker for letting me do this at all. I'm just an ungrateful son of a bitch who can't even be happy with talent (ha -- but that's a whole 'nuther discussion) to even do this stuff. I should be pushing out work as fast as I can every day.

Or I'm human and subject to human pressures (I do actually have a life outside of this with its own daily challenges and feeling like very few triumphs to offset the grinding notion that Maybe This Is All There Is). I want to write. I think. Just that it's tough to remember that in the face of, well, everything out there. In the face of a handful of companies who want to be the middleman of every creative transaction that takes place, from the content aggregators to the distributors who pretend they're studios, to the influencers who demand tribute, to the companies who control the advertising (who are also the distributors -- whoops), to the critics who don't understand criticism but command huge platforms to the individual readers who are loudly proclaiming that they don't want anything they can't beat or might possibly make them work or might possibly make them feel a negative vibe for a second. Yeah, it sucks. And the pay sucks, too. Maybe if you've got a field of typists under you or are okay with serving up AI slop fast enough to stay in the Kindle Unlimited charts, maybe you're okay with how things are.

But that's just an excuse, right? A real artist doesn't give a shit about the outside world. They just have this burning thing in them that they need to exorcise and if they don't have it, they're not real artists. And why haven't you submitted more work and why haven't you posted more free stories and and and.

Ultimately everyone and that includes every artist, is different. And sometimes the really big artists don't even know how they're impacting people. Sometimes the small ones don't know that they're making an impact at all. Like, Nick Cave honestly doesn't care that everyone I've seen is aghast that he's embracing generative AI. He's not even thinking about them. He can't. There's too many to safely take in. Just like Laurie Anderson doesn't know that I read the story that she'd made an AI Lou Reed as a writing partner and that it helped her move things along and I felt really, just abysmally saddened over the whole thing. It's not her place to care what I think. Nor is it Nick's. Yes, I'm on first name basis with all these people. I'm well-connected. Just a linguistic shorthand.

And maybe I shouldn't care about this stuff. Maybe I should be like the rider in the last page of No Country For Old Men, carrying that glowing horn of coals at his breast as he rides through a night that has no end because he can't do anything else, because he has to carry these thoughts and hopes and values close to him and maybe there'll be someone they can be passed to one day if that night should ever end.

But goddamn it's hard to be that strong day in and day out. This isn't a flex. Because I haven't lived up to it. I'm noting the difficulty and that I haven't lived up to it, maybe I don't even know how to at this point. And again, why should I bother? I only exist to enrich Amazon, according to a bunch of commentators. If I was really punk rock, I'd just sell these books out of a van going town to town and sleeping on floors and I have a fucking life that prevents me from doing this more than a couple days at a time. Is this an excuse or a fact? All signs point to yes.

Living in the future is exhausting, mostly because it's become exhausting by design. Because it's become extractive by design. I'm supposed to be a calculating merchant of entertainment who has found out what people want and I'm just supposed to give it to them over and over. There's entire podcasts devoted to this insipid truism. But not many of them want to tackle how that dude got 70k Patreon subscribers or how Brandon Sanderson became an empire (or the fact that his prose is... workmanlike on a good day -- but who am I to judge because I'm nobody and he could retire today a millionaire over and over). There's the answer but never the question of "how?" Or "what does this actually mattering look like?"

I relayed this on Bluesky (where most of the readers of this blog live) but I'll hit it again. Talking to a writer this weekend and they relayed a question posed to them by their agent. That being "What's your endgame? What's your goal? Books can't be the goal. They're only a way to get somewhere else." And that's where I'm fucked. Because I wanted and maybe still want to do this, just that the landscape got shattered and there's an even bigger Chicxulub on the horizon. And maybe the only way out of it is through, no matter how stupid and how much of an own-goal in resources and psychic damage it's all gonna be. Maybe we don't get to pick the future but only our reaction to it and how terrifying is that.

Anyways, time's almost up in this interzone, this bardo, this waiting room. Literally. I doubt I'm going anywhere. I don't know what else to do, how to do anything else. Just need to scream and in that moment try and assess where things are. I'm going ahead and publishing a collection of the first three Hazeland books, called Shadow and Silence. Probably will tack a new introduction on it. Maybe I can even find someone to write an intro for it. Definitely stripping out the extra stuff from The Queen of No Tomorrows. Gotta make those singles worth buying. Cover's done. And after that maybe I can stop stalling and get to page 101 of this new book. Maybe I can do that much.