Market Theocracy

I am back from my labor-intensive wanderings and will be updating the blog daily for the foreseeable future. My part o’ the world is currently suffering a heat wave. 104-106 degree temps with high humidity. Birds are falling dead from the sky, their eyeballs boiling. The only sane plan to spend the day is naked in a tub of ice water.

It.
Is.
Fuckin’.
HOT.

And I have no air conditioning, alas. All this means that I plan on spending the next few days moving as little as possible. I’ll be concentrating on writing. This sucks all the more because I was planning on being AWAY from this place before the Dog Days of summer kicked in. That plan is continually pushed back. It’s still a plan, but I’m getting tired of planning and not doing.

A nice thing that happened yesterday was that my brother fixed our friend Cleve’s computer and he gave me 7.5 gigs of scanned in comic books. Big chunks of the Marvel Ultimates line, most of The Exiles (up to issue 85 I think) and various other etceterata. I’ll be doing some reviews of them here and there when the inclination strikes.

Part 7 of The Map Of Mankind will be up tomorrow, and tomorrow will see the first installment of my very long story The Ballad Of I Know Damn Right. This involves a little back story so I’ll get that over with now:

A few years back I started a story called Roadkilling. It was a sort of second-gen cyberpunk thing with a lot of market anarchist ideas rolled into the batter. It was also a nice way to put a few of my friends into a story in fictional avatars. The main character was based on an alter ego of a friend of mine that he used to troll anti-state.com. I was so fond of I Know Damn Right (IKDR to his friends) that I started to obsess him into an almost operatic style tragic hero. Roadkilling stalled on me, and I blocked on it for-freakin’-ever.

Then, to make matters worse, I had a killer idea for a sequel to this story I couldn’t fucking finish! That’s a real pain in the ass, my friends. The Ballad Of I Know Damn Right continued from Roadkilling and turned second gen cyberpunk into a prelude to singularity style space opera.

A few years pass and I finally finish Roadkilling. But the finished version is — in my own opinion — a very inconsistent, tonal shifting thing that doesn’t really work. It also didn’t set up the sequel the way I wanted for various reasons.

I started the sequel anyway. Part of the way into it, inspiration struck. I realized that Roadkilling wasn’t a separate story at all: it was part and parcel of The Ballad and would function as both revelatory material and a very important plot device.

Things moved quickly after that. I’m currently polishing the last parts of it, and am confident enough to start serializing. There are a few people who have been waiting very patiently on this story.

In other writing news: I am just shy of halfway into The Crumbler second draft and feel the need for another break. The second draft is grueling. I should have expected that since the first draft came out so quick and dirty. It goes against my usual writing style which is to make the first draft very close to final draft. In this case, I basically left out all the dialogue and only rough sketched a shit-load of scenes. The main problem I’m having is the ’shattered reality’ that takes up most of the middle part of the book. It’s a bitch to keep the timelines straight.

On a positive note, I’m very very satisfied with the second draft so far. I am almost certain I’ll be able to sell this when I’m finished.

During this break I am going to finish The Woman Who Hitchhiked With Cats and try and finish King Of The Road. My goal is to finish all of the in-progress stories during breaks in the novel second drafting. This includes my sequel to Roberta — Virginia Jones (Or A Familiar Tale).

Symbols Flow, a collection of my stories, essays, poetry and etc. will soon be available to order in dead tree format. This boasts a superb set of covers, an introduction by Claire Wolfe, and my stories in a medium that people who hate reading on computer screens will appreciate. I don’t really expect it to sell many copies, but it will be a nice thing to have and I might even get to autograph something! Woohoo!

After that I plan on making the radical move of offering things to sell that aren’t available for free on the net! I’m feeling almost visionary!