invent yourself every day

or, the liar's manifesto

This one’s a two-parter.

This post by Freddie deBoer got me thinking about writing, which is always a stupid thing to think about, but here we are, writing again about writing.

Hiding in the Flow

I’ve sort of touched on this already, even, but, as always, I have more to say.

I think Freddie gets at something very real that isn't maybe understood or appreciated by readers (of course, part of this is because Freddie has always been an opinion writer and so there's a sense that the person behind the opinion remain consistently the same person).

But much of writing, to me, is like trying on hats. I get an idea and twirl around in it a bit in front of my mirror. The next day I may pick the same idea but this time I sew it into pants or a rhinestoned polyester vest. And while this is obviously most common in fiction, I do it in my nonfiction as well.

Which makes my nonfiction a bit slippery, though no one but me really knows that. Which is to say: even when I write about myself here, I'm sometimes writing about someone else who looks and feels and talks a whole lot like me but isn't exactly the same me that you might encounter from day to day.

The line between fiction and nonfiction is blurriest for me when I write about myself. And so while some of my favorite essays are more about me even than the subject I'm writing about, they're sometimes versions of me that I either shrugged off—maybe even long ago—or that I have never been.

Writing is an act of creation and memoir—like memory itself—is an act of recreation, and so we are always rewriting ourselves, reinventing ourselves, even when we're standing there naked, dreaming alone in an empty room.

Despite writing so much about myself here at this newsletter, I find the process strange. Sometimes quite fun but often exhausting (once, it even made me cry), but also the only real way for me to write about art.

Long ago, in a different life as a writer and critic, I used to write as objectively as possible. I suppose I wrote this way because this is the way most people write criticism. Eventually, I grew tired of the process and especially tired of the terrible books I was forcing myself to read in order to write a review or to write interview questions.

When I started this newsletter, I’d been writing essays for the first time in six years. But these essays were a different animal. I find, the older I get, that objectivity has just fallen from me. I can’t pretend to have no perspective or to wear the perspective of someone who knows anything about anything. To write about art, now, for me, is to write about myself.

My whole life has been shaped by the media I’ve consumed.

Raised by TV and videogames, comforted by books and music, given a reason to live because of movies made in Hong Kong and Japan and Russia.

But I’m also trying to do something new. Hopefully you’ve all felt that here. To use all the lessons I’ve learned from writing fiction to tell a story using the structures and assumptions of a personal essay. To reach beyond my experience or to dive deep down into and make you feel the things I’ve felt so strongly.

When I was young, so angry and sad, I longed only to be understood. To have one person tell me just once that they understood me.

I often find myself communing, here, with that sad angry boy. Hopefully, you’re understanding something about yourself by reading these essays.

That’s the goal, anyrate.

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J David Osborne, on the other end of things, is writing about the Bestseller mindset.

I love this.

It’s through talking to JDO and a few other wonderful people that I’ve decided to really start putting my fiction back out into the world. After I dropped out of the indie publishing world, that’s when I rediscovered the joy of writing. Not by writing to expectation or to be understood or to be celebrated, but by writing all these stupid books for myself.

Always, of course, there was some vague notion that people would be reading them. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want an audience. This newsletter wouldn’t exist if that were true.

But I just wrote things that made me laugh. Things that made me cry. Often, I wrote about things that terrified me. I spent six years writing books this way.

When my friend died before he turned 26, I wrote a novel specifically because I thought it would have made him laugh. Before my first son was born, I wrote a book that held every fear I didn’t know I had about the dangers of childbirth and everything that could go wrong. When my son was two, I wrote a different book about every fear I had concerning everything that followed birth. It’s still the most terrifying thing to me. It’s the single book I’m most proud of yet I can barely read it without wanting to throw up.

But the first thing I did once I dropped out of the publishing scene was write a 400,000 word epic fantasy that attacked everything I hate about the fantasy genre. Someday, I hope you’ll see this book.

But it’s these two very different principles that have guided my writing life over the last two years:

• to live in the flow of words

• to always have fun

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A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was writing a cyberpunk novel live in google docs. Well, I finished it last week and am currently getting it ready to release on December 1st.

You can preorder it by clicking here. Or, if you’re the goodreads type, you can add it here.

The cover is up above, this time done by Kelby Losack. Because of how rapidly and randomly it came about, and because Kelby is one of the reasons this novel exists at all, he wanted to take a crack at the cover.

I love it. I love really simple covers like this, honestly, despite what my two previous covers look like. I love those covers too. They’re exactly what I wanted and Chris Olson is the best of the best, but I’m also a simple person who likes simple designs and, too, I wouldn’t even know what to begin to ask Chris for in terms of artwork for this one.

It’s wild!

But what is this book?

Sort of a mix of cyberpunk and solarpunk set in a future where the earth is a wasteland but people attempt to regrow it and make something new. Others dig through the detritus of our broken civilization for new tools of control.

In between all that, the rules of reality broke and magic boils alongside cyberpunk science.

Two people get banished from their isolated village after being cursed by strange magic by a person with antlers. Out in a forest of towering mushrooms, they meet Lady Agova, a giantess who wants them to help her hunt a vampire

After some tarot magic, we’re onto a wild monster hunt.

I wrote this with no plan flying by the seat of my pants and just having as much fun as I could, throwing any idea that brushed against me into the novel.

I think it’s a lot of fun. I hope you think so too.

More to come.

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Have you Glossolalia book yet? Want to read the first twelve chapters for free?

How about Sing, Behemoth, Sing? First two chapters are free here!

As always, I’d very much appreciate if you rated and reviewed these on Amazon.