SHADOW AND SILENCE - intro

Here's the new intro for the Hazeland books, as seen in Shadow and Silence, the collection that just dropped today. I'm putting it here just in case someone is curious. Nobody should pay full price for three pages of this.

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In 2016, I started writing a book called Queen of No Tomorrows for a small publisher in the Pacific Northwest. I was excited about the prospect of being paid to write a book under my own name and to be published by someone other than myself. It remains the only time that this has happened for a novel of mine. Either I put them out myself and made typical self-publishing money or I wrote for someone else and nobody ever saw my name, but I was paid pretty well for my time and effort. I won’t get into how long I’d been off and on writing, trying to get published. It’s a depressing figure.

But I’d lucked into a situation where a publisher who’d been the first to buy an over-the-transom story of mine out of the slush pile asked me “Hey, is there maybe a short novel you’d like to write for us? Maybe base it on that story we liked?” Now, I liked that story well enough, but it was a closed loop, a mean joke on the Lovecraft and Cthulhu cottage industry which had been (and forever will be) running through weird horror, smashing buttons marked “buy me” and “you love this stuff.” In short, I’d done this in the spirit of (cyber)punk and stripped the sentiment out of things. Hell, I’d written a story about an industrial fishing operation pulling up Cthulhu and carving him into chunks of protein to be rendered down and turned into freeze-dried ramen bowls. Who’d want more of this? Well, they did. I guess they didn’t get the joke. Or I wasn’t mean enough about it. Hell, I still don’t get why they even bought the story. But they did.

Anyways. The publisher asked if I could write something that could be broken up into a serial and run online as a premium sort of thing for subscribers.

I said “You bet.”

And committed to 30k words in about four pieces. A tidy little package. So I started to work in, I want to say August or September of 2016. I wrote the first pages while I was fretting in a hotel ahead of my wife getting a life-altering surgery, along with everything else happening in that year, which was more than nothing.

And, figuring this might be my only chance, I jammed everything I wanted to into the book. Music, Los Angeles and everything that place is to me, punk rock, urban texture, weird and inexplicable events that are nonetheless real and with teeth, turns of phrase and voice that only make sense in as much as they don’t make sense, but only need to be accepted by a willing reader. I figured this was a one-time thing and that the publisher could at any time come to their senses and realize I was taking them for a ride, so I might as well make it a good one. They wanted neo-HPL and by that time, I’d gotten well-bored by him (this itself is subject enough for another essay.) So I made sure to include enough sorts of Lovecraftian hooks to make them happy as I took them for a ride to parts unknown by way of Los Angeles in the eighties, underground clubs and unlicensed cabs and a city that nobody ever intended in the first place yet was nonetheless real and there. I told a story of a book forger who made up a book only to find that someone had been waiting for that book to be written long before the wild hare had been struck. I told a story of a cynical post-punk creator making a thing just to prove the audience was duped and gullible and wrong, only to find that there was an audience waiting and hungry and grateful. I told a story of a Latina sorceress who could have gone toe-to-toe with any of the sorcerers that HPL had conjured up and left them in the dust. Of a creator who could only face the idea of creation while wrecked on vodka and separated from herself. I’m still pulling meanings out of it and wondering how it even happened.

But it did.

The book came out and only a handful of people noticed. I’m not sure I can count the original publisher among them. I sold some copies at shows I attended. I still have no idea how many copies were sold, even after promises of quarterly sales reports, etc etc. My guess is that the numbers were too depressing for even the publisher to grapple with effectively. Even so, they promised to publish more books, minus advances and splitting the revenue on the back end.

So I wrote the follow-on, presented here as All Waters Are Graves (originally titled My Drowning Chorus, an uneasy compromise on my part). After promises of publication, post-editing and even cover commission, things... just... sorta fell apart. By then we’d had the world of Covid and all the other changes wrought. I frantically wrote the third book in the series, under the name Asphalt Tongues (later Fake Believe), in the hopes of showing that I was committed to the process and...

Yeah.

After a year or more of flogging the book in person when I could and online when I could and trying to get it reviewed and gather up positive attention for it, Queen of No Tomorrows had lived out its lifespan in the marketplace. Nonetheless, the publisher offered to publish other books in the series, minus advances, splitting the back end after production costs. Yes, that’s not a great deal. Profit split from the start, perhaps an increase after costs (carefully enumerated) are recovered, sure. But I wanted to keep being published instead of being the publisher. I wanted it pretty bad.

Which is how I got it. After completing All Waters Are Graves and being promised with a timeline, the world decided to throw a monkey wrench into everything with a global pandemic. I figured things would continue somehow, but they didn’t. Even after finishing Fake Believe, I thought things would come together. Only for them to not.

The publisher and I parted ways. Part of me is still bothered by that. Part of me wants to be outside the realm of self-publishing. See, if someone else is publishing your work, then the thought is that other people will pay attention to it. Someone decided to spend money and prestige on your work, so it’ll get covered in genre outlets and you’ll get that fame.

You won’t. I didn’t. Maybe it’s not good enough. Maybe my work isn’t good enough. But I refuse to believe that. But then refusing to believe in gravity and throwing yourself off a roof or standing in front of a speeding bus isn’t the best plan. Don’t do that. Ariela herself would tell you that for free.

The publisher and I parted ways and I packaged up The Queen of No Tomorrows (note the article, which I fought over), along with a new story and put it out myself a couple years back. It really didn’t go much of anywhere (though I did some signings and appearances for it). Self-publishing.

Then, in what might be called desperation, I ran a Kickstarter campaign for All Waters Are Graves. Now this was something I wouldn’t have thought of until just a couple months before going ahead and doing it. Never even entered into the equation. Anyways, it went well. Not huge, but more than I’d expected.

A year later, I did the same for Fake Believe, which did appreciably better, but it’s not a steady income or anything like it. Then again, what is in writing fiction these days?

Don’t answer that.

So, if you’re a new reader, please enjoy these stories, some much longer than others, but most all of them too long for most outlets that publish short fiction these days. If you’re already a reader of Hazeland and you purchased this, well, I have to ask why, but I’ll not and instead thank you for your support.

I’ll do my best to keep this going. Keep an eye out for the announcement of The Missing Pieces (which may or may not lose the article) once the drafting is actually finished and I might be able to figure out a timeline for it. In the meantime, enjoy the neon and razorwire, the taco shops and the smog.

Hopefully you find something in the characters, in Cait who think she knows it all and has seen it all. In Ariela who actually might, or might be a lost child playing at being a queen and wielding powers beyond recognition or acceptance. In the luckless lovers Gary and Ty who kept trying and trying and finally found success when maybe only one of them wanted it. In the struggling but not helpless cops of Open Door who know that something is up but couldn’t tell you what if you put a gun to their head. In the denizens and hangers-on and the kids of the Last Prayer club, where salvation is denied nightly. In the regular folks just getting by as strangeness gets stacked upon strangeness, but you won’t hear a single one of them complain. In the resignation of those who lost the rat race and are happier for it. In the streets of the city itself, all those asphalt tongues whose roads run not only through space but through time itself, perpetual dusk and buzzing electric signs and corner burger stands that have been there since forever and we hope will always be there for us.

Matt Maxwell

August, 2025