FULL BLEED: YOU’LL MURDER FOREVER

No, this one isn’t a de-contextualized line from a song repurposed, usually without any acknowledgement. Instead, it’s the title of the latest book I’m working on. Yeah, I’ve been talking about it for a little while, mostly because I thought I’d have been actually drafting the book by now and I’m not. I finally finished the chunky outline/direction draft yesterday, after thinking it wouldn’t need much work at all. Because I was being silly.

And because it wasn’t really a story when I thought it was. Sure, I had a setup and the idea of a character moving through the setup. For those of you new to this sort of thing, that’s mostly setting stuff. Setting ain’t a story. It’s not. It can fill up RPG rulebooks and I guess even now passes as story if you put enough worldbuilding in a thing. Look, if your book starts on a council meeting and goes over the history of the last hundred years before anyone does anything, you’re doing it wrong and I feel fine saying this.

So, I didn’t really have a story. Just some stuff. Stories need people in them. Okay, technically they don’t, but that’s really putting yourself behind the eight ball. Characters are really the reader’s way in to the story aside from all that pretty language and atmosphere and vibe. And, here’s where I’m going to differ with a lot of folks, you as a reader don’t need to know WHY a character does stuff. You don’t. You just need to know that they’re doing stuff. I’d argue they don’t even need an articulated goal (though that goal and set of desires will probably be spoken directly to the reader/camera in most content that’s streaming these days.)

Now, the author sure as hell should have some ideas as to why things are being done, and maybe even if there’s a goal, even if that goal is as simple as staying out of jail or paying off a loan shark or finding the girl/boy/neither/either/yes/no of their dreams. It really can be that simple. The journey itself can become pretty complicated. Or the plot or whatever you wish to call it. (For the record, Campbell found an interesting thing that people often ran into the ground or decided to invoke to sound smart without expending any effort on their part, but wow did he not consider a whole bunch of mythologies/etc that didn’t conform, but I digress.)

And I kinda didn’t have that idea set down. But this was back when the book was going to be called Rising Drone, then Flowing Pink Vapor Stew (yes, from that Fishbone song) to You’ll Never Have Time to what it is currently. So I spent most of the summer (when I was working, which isn’t that much, for a variety of reasons) picking at things and thinking and scribbling notes and trying to stuff things in, cutting some things out. There’s still some flux, some protoplasm that has yet to form up into differentiated tissues, but I think there’s enough of a structure there to start putting words to paper. There’s a sense of direction, and if you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’ll probably remember that I can’t write anything as big as a novel without having a pretty definite sense of direction and momentum. If you can sit down and write a novel and make it make sense, you’re just built different.

So now I’ve figured out the trio at the center of this book. Two dudes and… Ah… I don’t think I want to give the game away yet. We’ll just call her Glory. It’s about the fundamental purpose of practical jokes/pranks and the separation between joker and target/victim. It’s also about the dread of nuclear Armageddon that was a tangible part of pop culture in the early eighties (which gave way to a weird and premature triumphalism that helped usher in the nineties, but that’s a story for another time.)

I hesitated on this one a lot because it just ended up being so goddamn weird. I mean, I write fairly weird books. Or standard books with weird events at the center of them? I don’t know. I really don’t anymore. Not that I think anyone actually does, from readers to publishers to commentators to the army of YouTube (and I assume Insta/TikTok) posters desperate to save contemporary literature from itself.

But You’ll Murder Forever is shaping up to be way weirder than the other Hazeland books. And I was letting that get in the way. I was wondering how readers would react to this and if anyone would want to even read them.

Don’t do this. You’ll lock up. And if you’re doing this chasing romantasy or LitRPG or whatever Hot New Something is infecting publishing, well, you do you. I’m at the point where pursuing even publishing is something both silly and insane. It’s all been Chicxulub’d over the last ten years. May as well do what you want to see done. And in my case, doing what I want to see done is actually letting this work happen on its own terms and not worrying about whether its horror or fantasy or anything else enough. Or Kenough. What, I’m going to get this judged for the Stokers or World Fantasy Awards? C’mon. Who are we fooling here? That’s for books from a handful of actual publishers, not for self-published writers (who according to lots of folks there are simply too many of and perhaps shouldn’t be allowed to exist.)

Another part of the whole lack of progress was, well, everything else. I’ve got lots to deal with (which is probably why I’m constantly Posting Through It; I know, not healthy.) And oftentimes there just isn’t energy in a day to carve something from nothing, which is the hardest part of this. If I know where things are more or less going, I can keep writing. Just the amount of work that happens before the first word goes down seems to increase with every book. Or at least this one. Working on getting the ball rolling now. Which I better as I’ve got a couple vacations coming up including one that’s probably good for nuking my writing schedule for two weeks (plus the insanity of the holiday season.)

What else?

Oh, right. It occurs to me that next month will see more or less the tenth anniversary of Hazeland (though it wouldn’t be called that for some time). Started writing The Queen of No Tomorrows in October after a rapid development, maybe a couple months at most. Finished it in December. It was only supposed to be 40K words. Ended up 60K, with not a lot of room to cut stuff out. Whoops.

I have to say that my plans for the books that would follow didn’t exactly pan out. In fact, the plan didn’t even survive the first punch in the face. That’s okay, though. I’m four books into the series. Know exactly what the next two are doing (by the by, the sixth one will be called Asphalt Tongues, which was what the third one was supposed to be called right up until a couple months before I started the Kickstarter for it.) That one will be another collection of short stories. At least six, but realistically only seven. That will wrap up the second trilogy of books and I think finally get the stage set for where things will really be going. My hope and desire is that these aren’t homework books (because who’d read them?) But that they’re entertaining stories with some fun language and ideas and upended expectations. If I stop there, I’ll feel satisfied.

I’m not planning on stopping, but I can’t change stuff that’s outside my ability to change.

Other news? Yeah, got nothing. Going out of town starting tomorrow. I mean, there’s the whole wrestling with the shattered media landscape and my place in it. Figure I should be happy given that I refuse/am unable to market effectively (and, spoiler: I don’t think anyone else is unless you want to spend millions of dollars and even then, that’s just a matter of volume, not targeted reaching of an audience.) So I do my Kickstarters and sell some books at shows and get eyes rolled at me when I talk to non-genre bookstores about carrying my titles, even on consignment.

Need to love that rope, because it’s the only one we got. Especially when I see writers who’ve got decent midlist careers and maybe even getting big deals and they’re still despairing of connecting to an audience of making ends meet and that’s a whole set of different problems. Not mine. Just gotta remember the whole ability/responsibility thing, and thinking about what’s sacred in the face of an onslaught of not only automation but a cult devotion to the patterns of output that people insist make machines more special than actual humans. I can’t make that stuff go away. I can’t change it. All I can do is keep working in the medium that I can, keep telling stories and knowing that they’re not praxis or anything more than diversion.

Until next time.