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#dystopolisMore you might like
9/10/2014
First, some housekeeping.
Both Dystopolis and Tales from the End are now available on Gumroad, Smashwords, and hopefully a bunch of other places soon. If you’re into owning digital files, I really recommend Gumroad - they have a slick interface, and make it incredibly simple to buy and download digital stuff. Reflecting this, they’re now $6.99 and $5.99 respectively, but that’s still pretty cheap. A Fireball and Coke at the Paradise Rock Club is $8, and that didn’t kill me, so I doubt this will either.
(Don’t buy drinks at the Paradise Rock Club. Good God.)
Also, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the audiobook. Turns out that audio fidelity on my current microphone isn’t exactly perfect, so either I’ll figure out a way to tune things up, or delegate it to someone who has a recording studio in their bedroom, or just not do it. (Do you know someone who has a recording studio in their bedroom? Let me know.)
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I have an essay in the latest issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room, about Monsters University. You can subscribe or buy the single issue here (if you go for the latter, you’re looking for School), and I absolutely recommend you do - BW/DR still showcases some of the best film writing out there, and I promise I’m not just saying that because I somehow swindled them into including me among their ranks.
Everything below this is about stuff I’ve been consuming, media-wise, so for the sake of brevity I’ll throw in a cut here. But please, do finish this if you feel like it. I think my taste is okay.
Making progress
Progress on Dystopolis has been incremental, but steady. I hit a thousand words today, which doesn’t sound like much, but I’m still warming up - in these clumsy first steps, I’ll throw out a hundred words here, a couple of hundred there, but before long I’m writing a couple of thousand a day. It remains to be seen if any of it’s any good, of course, and I have old fragments that could be reused here and there, but… it’s coming together.
The biggest stumbling block has been building the world - something I’m usually quite good at, but I’m usually using a roughly similar version of this planet as a setting. Dystopolis is a newfound civilisation, with shadowy people pulling the strings, in an idyllic city where happy endings are accepted as the norm for everyone, and deviation from the advised course of your life is extremely rare (and unbelievably dangerous). The society I’m building is one where the beliefs of a strange, apocalyptic cult have metamorphosed over the course of three hundred years into a much deeper cultural understanding.
And the worst part, I want the core kernel - the basic idea that art imitates life, and it’s perfectly ordinary to strive for a life with a beginning, middle and end full of meaning and purpose - to be grossly flawed. I want to take these stories to dark places, and to find happiness in the most unconventional places. I don’t quite want to call Dystopolis a giant middle finger to Aristotle, but that’s part of it.
But there’s so much to build if I want it to appear coherent. I’ve made notes - pages of them, now - on details that’ll never make it to the page, but need to be there so I can write about people who live in the space in between those details.
That said, I’ve advanced. It used to be that knowing this was such a challenge was preventing me from doing anything about it. I stopped writing for at least two years - and possibly three, now that I think about it. I rode off the slight wind generated by Tales From The End for too long. Some of the stories in that book, I wrote in 2007. They’re six years old. That’s intimidating, but also reassuring - I have got better in some respects since then, and the rusty bits that need oiling are slowly getting the proper maintenance.
I’m excited about this year for so many reasons, but the idea that in a few months I might have something approaching a book is really exciting.
Check your lapel
So hard to articulate everything happening to me at the moment. In a little over a week, I will be married. That’s such an insane and beautiful concept that part of my brain has decided to shut down rather than fully process it. I feel like I’m floating, still.
Starting with the creative front, because that’s easy to talk about: Dystopolis is finished. You can find a synopsis here (along with the lovely opinions of a couple of lovely people) and sign up for release updates here, and I absolutely, definitely recommend that you do. I’ll also apologise in advance, because I intend to plug the hell out of this book. It’s the culmination of nearly three years of work, and I want as many people as possible to read it. On which note, if you’re a person who makes things and has released them into the wild (preferably writing, not industrial machinery, but creative things in general are good), I’m happy to give out review copies for free to anyone who’s willing to volunteer one.
Comments - positive or otherwise - are my bread and butter in terms of promoting this book. I’ve been doing all of this without the backing of an industry - no publishers, no agents, just my own know-how and a core team of wonderful editors - and as such I don’t have the same marketing machine that other books have. Every reblog helps. Or something like that.
Also, a quick note on release schedules - I’m hoping to publish it early in March, in both print and digital formats. It’ll start on Amazon, and spread from there to people who have other devices. You’ll also get a free digital copy if you buy the paperback, because fuck publishers who try to make you pay for the same product twice. (In the interest of exclusivity-related promotions on Amazon, I might wait a little while before openly publishing a multi-platform ebook edition à la this one, but it’ll be available on everything eventually.)
I’m also aiming to record an audiobook version of this one, and that’ll be distributed through Bandcamp; I have no idea what the ETA is on that, though, because it involves recording a 153-page manuscript. That sort of thing takes time. But no doubt I’ll be screaming about it at the time.
This barely touches my life at the moment, though. I’ve been planning a wedding, and that involves so much more than you initially think. Last night, we decided on our entrance music (Interlude - Gymnopedie No. 1 by Anamanaguchi), but there have also been decisions about food (New England clam chowder; butter poached lobster served with biscuits and asparagus tips; turkey pot pies; roasted chicken in a porcini cream sauce with fetuccine, peas and corn; a fucking tier of cupcakes), decorations (purple), flowers (also purple), guests (mostly family and Arden’s friends), playlists (as yet undecided), vows (sentimental), the justice of the peace (a very intuitive lady) and an ever-growing catalogue of things to take care of.
There’s also the fact that in the moments in between, I’ve been trying to settle in this new country; I have a bank account now, but no debit card or means of looking at my balance short of visiting a branch (though I should add that this isn’t a problem; I’m just impatient). I have a state ID, where my pre-haircut head looks twice its usual size. I have a social security number, albeit on a card that has the words VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION stamped above it, because god forbid I actually be considered a viable taxpayer. I even registered with Selective Service, effectively consenting to conscription, even though something like that is meaningless; if the US ever tried to bring in a draft, the first thing I’d do is flee the country. Unless it was a war made entirely of donut bullets. Or the sort of fight where it’s over when you pull a flag out of your opponent’s pants. I’d go for that.
This all sounds overwhelming, and it is, but I’m also wonderfully, ecstatically happy. Being constantly alert to new things, as I have been, brings with it a certain level of stress that I’m unaccustomed to, but it’s all surface-level chatter. At the root, I’m smiling. I feel ready to face anything, and that’s a relief - because I have so much more to face.
I finished the third draft of Dystopolis on Friday. It’s a little over 41,000 words, which seems short when I state it like that, but I’m hoping that it’s satisfying to read. I’ve retitled all but one story. A couple of character names and traits have changed. Everything is now as consistent as I think it’ll get without extra oversight, which is why a couple of people have agreed to give the whole book a few extra passes before it’s released out into the world.
Giving something like this up is intensely nerve-wracking. I haven’t shared my writing with anyone for a very long time, and I’m scared of disappointing others; this is quite unlike the stuff I’ve done before. It’s a little less weird, and attemps to stab at something resembling profundity, and when you stop using bizarre events as a crutch it can expose you.
So. This is all longhand for “I’ll be hiding in bed for the next couple of months”. I hope that’s okay.
No outrage is mustered here on behalf of anyone in particular; nobody is precisely to blame for the way things have turned out. And the writing is never less than thoughtful, understated, philosophical.