A Sunday Drive

Ever coughed yourself unconscious? You know, cough so much that all the pressure and blood rushes to your head, you get weak kneed, and have to lean against a wall to stand up? No? Lucky.

You know what’s unlucky? Coughing yourself unconscious while driving. Yes, that happened yesterday.

I was driving home from my folks’ house and made it within a block before a coughing fit seized me. Next thing I remember, the airbags had deployed, my head was on the steering wheel, and my hood was smoking. The only reason I was awake, though, was because of the people screaming at me to get out of the car.

Confused, I looked at the passenger side wondering why my wife wasn’t there. Did she leave? Did she go to get help?

“Can you open the door?” Someone was asking.
I didn’t know. I tried and it wouldn’t open. My chest felt like someone had hit me with a wrecking bar and I couldn’t get a lungful of breath.

A little more conscious now, I see that I have swerved off the road in the neighborhood, a total of a 1000 feet from my house, and managed to go right into the drainage ditch in front of a house. Since I was driving around 20mph, I’m pretty sure I passed out and went into the ditch going that fast. Might explain a few things.

Once they pulled me out of the car, and told me that in fact, no, my wife was not in the car, I remembered she hadn’t been with me. That made me feel a little better—I only tried to kill one of us.

Neighbors gathered around my car or stood off to the side watching the lunatic neighbor sprawled out on the ground babbling incoherently in pain and wondering how the fuck this actually happened.

After a trip to the ER which included a CT scan (yes, I hit my head and have a new beauty mark which is hopefully temporary), chest X-rays, blood work, urinalysis to prove my kidneys still work, and a “gentle” probing of areas injured by both shoulder and lap belts, they sent me home with pain pills, muscle relaxants, and enough ibuprofen to service a football team. I’m supposed to see my GP later this week once the swelling is gone down. Joy?

So what’s the damage? Well, the car is doubtlessly totaled and considering it was 8 years old, I doubt I’ll get much for it. In a state where a car is all but required, I now have no car of my own.

For someone who works from home, this isn’t that big of an issue. For someone who helps out his elderly parents on a fairly regular basis, it’s a possibly huge issue. I imagine I’ll have to start taking the wife to work and pick her up afterward, or do without for the time being. Inconvenient, sure, but nothing terminal. Time to get my bicycle fixed up, I guess.

Needless to say, this little incident has put me further behind some deadlines, and my wife is adamant I actually rest rather than work. Hate it when that happens.

Now what?

Write it now and worry about selling it later has been my mantra for a long time. Although it’s one I sometimes forget to abide by, it’s how I survive.

But there comes a point where you actually have to start thinking about what the hell you’re going to do with this book you’re about to finish. Are you going to submit it to a publisher? If so, small or big? If not, and you’re going indie, what’s the cover art need to look like? What’s the layout need to look like? What does the marketing plan need to look like? And how the fuck will you pay for it all?

Shadowpublications.com has been releasing my work in podcast form for over 13 years. During that time I’ve published eight indie works, and seven through Severed Press, an indie small press. Severed got me on the map by publishing The Black and the two paraquels Arrival and Outbreak. They also took the chance on The Derelict Saga and I can’t thank them enough for that.

Those two series with Severed Press earned more money than all my indie works combined which kind of points to a massive failure in marketing and visibility on my part for my own books, or that their genres just don’t sell. In other words, I suck at the business part of being an indie. Really suck.

And to be honest, I’m not surprised. I don’t have much of an attention span for all of that, my sense of graphic design is terrible, I have the artistic inclinations of a five year old on speed, and roughly the same skillset. Okay, it’s not that bad, but it’s close when I compare my skills to folks like Scott Pond.

Marketing requires ad buys. Marketing requires making inroads with other podcasters and content creators to help get the word out. Marketing requires taking the part of my brain that loves to create and forcing it to do something it really doesn’t want to do.

Sounds like a lot of whining, doesn’t it? It is.

The infuriating part of all of this is that I can learn. I can learn to do damned near anything, but I’m slower and older than I used to be. It takes much longer to pick up new skills and as I look at the clock of my life running down, I realize I’d much rather be creating content than selling it, which is a serious problem if your income depends on that very thing.

In my mind, the whole point of having a publisher is entering into a partnership. The writer writes, the publisher sells, and everyone makes some money. That model has been broken for the entirety of my life. Maybe for most of the 20th and all of the 21st century. The media monopoly of the 90s into the 2ks is what destroyed “traditional” publishing as a realistic, reliable income for “mid-listers.” If you followed the Penguin/Randomhouse merger trial, you know what I’m talking about.

The benefits of going with a good, small press are incalculable. They typically offer a good royalty rate, are engaged with their authors, and are devoted to the marketing madness. They kind of have to be. Small presses are also the best place to find a home for the occasional outlier of genre bending fiction. Although their advances are meager, aren’t everyone’s?

That “token” advance (usually somewhere $0 – $5,000) is sometimes a month’s car note, a rent check, or a mortgage payment. It’s money you’re essentially borrowing against the book’s success, but it’s money that goes into the checking account the moment you sign. When you’re on the financial edge, it sounds like a pretty damned good deal and sometimes it is.

Small presses also have their own downsides. Many have collapsed in the recent years due to mismanagement, outright embezzlement, or because the owner died and left a twisted legal wreck in their wake. Some are little more than scams. It’s always caveat emptor, or buyer beware. Or, um, writer beware.

Then there’s going indie. As I said, my shadowpublications.com titles haven’t sold much over the years. They’ve always done better in audio than in ebook/tpb form which may say something about my voice or my real audience than as a testament to my writing skills. Regardless, there are expenses beyond simple time.

Professional editing will cost upwards of $200. Cover art? $200 and up. Layout for ebook and TPB? Another $200 or more. So let’s say I get a deal from everyone and upfront costs are only $300, rather than the more realistic $600. That’s still $300 I have to have in order to get things moving.

Doesn’t sound like a lot of money, does it? It is. Want to know how many books I have to sell to make $300? How many patrons I have to have? How many house and medical emergencies I have to evade to have that kind of money left at the end of the month?

And while I’m managing all of that, I’m not writing. I’m not creating content, and I’ll be stressed to the gills if the book doesn’t sell.

My neuroses and sense of entitlement not withstanding, there’s no easy answer to the publishing equation. I know folks that have been wildly successful hybrid authors, others who’ve made more cash with small presses than they ever would have with a large one or by going indie, and still others that have failed on all fronts and left the industry altogether.

So what do I do with An Ancient Trap? What I do is finish the damned book, finish recording it for my patrons while I write the next novel, and maybe send off a query or two. Then, assuming someone bites, I’ll have to make the decision to either fight to keep the audio rights, or get paid for them. Or, walk away from the contract. This part is always going to be a stickler.

Now that I’ve excised this brain vomit, I’m going to record another chapter and do my best to remember that I have to finish before I sell.

Entropy of Age

I haven’t been sleeping well the past week or so. Part of it has to do with my knee pain, part of it has to do with new meds, and part of it just has to do with my brain being too stubborn to shut the hell up. On top of that, Luna has been suffering incontinence again and although the wood floor is already mostly destroyed at this point, I’d rather not invite mold.

I woke up at 0400 this morning, walked into the kitchen, and, of course, found Luna had left a large puddle for me. Once I took care of that, I tossed the soiled towels in the washer and started a wash cycle–I was now out of towels and would have to for the washer to finish before I could dry them. With both washer and dryer going, I retired to my study to get some audio work finished so I could start recording the new serial. After blearily managing sound levels and editing some script, I required coffee.

While waiting for the water to boil, I decided to check on the dryer and stepped int a puddle of water. Confused as to how Luna managed to pee in the gated laundry room, I stared blankly trying to figure out why there was standing water and why I was standing in it.

After the shock, and my brain finally started to work, I moved upstairs with a pained shuffle, found the last of the dry towels in the entire f’ing house, and returned to the laundry room after putting on a pair of shoes. I quickly drenched four towels to get the standing water mopped up, shut off the water to the washer, and prayed that’s where the water was coming from.

It would appear it is. After I turned off the water to the washer, no more water spilled out from beneath it. Crisis solved! Oh. And no more clothes washer. Shit. Another crisis.

With a few towels drying in the washer, we should at least have coverage for a day or two. However, I’m going to have to call someone to come out and look at things tomorrow. I’m sure the repair bill will be quite affordable…

Entropy is a force that slowly gathers, gains strength and spreads chaos through neglect, ignorance, and denial. It corrodes the shiny, neat, comprehensible reality of things. Entropy is rust, entropy is dust, entropy is the dry rot in the tree, the decay spreading through ancient boards, the cracks spreading through the foundation and its sinking into the earth.

Entropy can be managed, it cannot be defeated. Regular maintenance of anything helps stave off entropy, but again, even maintenance is vulnerable to the growth of chaos. The more things collapse, the more they collapse until ultimately, there’s nothing left but rubble. But even if you scrape away the entropy, take care of everything, follow every rule, and be mindful, time itself has the ultimate say.

I have lost quite a few of my furry familiars the last few years. Luna’s continuing deterioration is merely another sign that change is nearly here and that I’ll once again have to adapt. The biggest difference between the washer and Luna is the washer can be repaired or replaced.

This week I’ll get someone to look at the washer and manage that entropy. Perhaps also this week, I’ll have to manage the ravages of time once more.

Social Media Is Dead! Long Live…

Today I pinned a tweet to my Twitter timeline that announced I’ve reduced my account to promotional information. In other words, I’ve left Twitter in favor of Mastodon and Counter.Social (@paul_e_cooley)

In truth, I left Twitter a long time ago, long before I left Facebook and all the other Meta subsidiaries. Twitter stopped being interesting when all the fiction folk deserted it, when the readers I so often interacted with moved on to greener pastures, before everything became angry, political, and insane.

As more and more of the online friends and readers I’d cultivated since 2009 disappeared from the platform, it became less and less useful, ultimately becoming a sad, ridiculously polarized cesspool that made finding meaningful content all but impossible. Not to be a snob, but the average user that joined after 2014 more or less ruined the place. Hasn’t been the same since.

I’d planned on leaving Twitter this year even before the recent purchase and etc. I just didn’t know where else to go apart from Mastodon, and that place made no sense and was a barren ghost town.

Once Twitter and Musk announced the legal wrangling was over, I went ahead and got back into Mastodon and tried to learn how the damned thing worked. Turns out, it works so much better than either Meta’s monsters or Twitter.

Facebook, Twitter, and even Google’s offerings like YouTube, were useful tools to connect with folks that shared your interests. It worked for a long time until…MONEY. The advertising mechanisms that Twitter, Google, Amazon, Meta, and etc use are not monitored for bad actors. They are not fact checked, they are not questioned, they just are. Sold to the highest bidder without issue until someone complains or the SEC, FTC, FDA steps in. By then? Far too late.

But that’s just one problem. Another problem is that in order to make money, these social media constructs have to drive you to content. And what content is better than that which enrages you? Or misinforms you? Or straight up lies to you? Goebbels would be so proud and probably is.

As we’ve seen the past couple of years, selling advertising is a diminishing return. The only way you can entice more advertising money is through user growth, content growth, and metrics convincing companies to spend on the platform. The problem with that model is that it is brutally finite. The moment you begin hemorrhaging users, it all falls apart. If you couple that with a change in user mindset, you’ll either find a new economic model or go bankrupt.

I am one of the former consumers of so-called advertising driven content. But no more. The algorithms are dead to me and I couldn’t be happier about that.

Mastodon, and its petulant, lovable offspring known as counter.social or CoSo, do not have algorithms. The user is responsible for finding the accounts they want to follow, to search for tagged content, media that contains actual descriptions, and folks to speak with. If I type in the hashtag #writingCommunity on mastodon or CoSo, I get a ton of folks talking about writing. They’re not all hawking their works, but actually having conversations. Unlike twitter, trolls are not welcome.

The Mastodon/CoSo ecosystems are quite different from Twitter. Without an algorithm to drive traffic to me, and without disinformation and rabid insanity fouling up my timeline, it’s easier to find the content I want. Someone posts something I consistently don’t want to see? Like nothing but RTs from Twitter? Mute ’em. Never see their shit again. Yes, twitter can do that, too, but how many people actually did it?

The community admins police the fediverse. Whatever server you join in the Mastodon Fediverse (a decentralized web of Mastodon servers that communicate with one another), an admin can read your posts. Period. Unless you’re running your own instance, there are no false assurances your data is private because it’s NOT. That changes things quite a bit, doesn’t it?

The expectation that you ever owned your data in any capacity was the largest delusion big tech ever convinced the public of. Any “free” service has gotchas that inevitably make it cost more than you think. Mastodon and counter.social are, in many ways, the cure for this.

It’s free, so how does it keep functioning? The community funds it. Mastodon has a patreon, many server instances out there have tip jars, subscriptions, and the like. CoSo does that as well, giving you premium features for $4.99 a month. Interesting concept. You pay the server admins to do their jobs rather than rely upon shadowy, digital backroom advertising deals for revenue.

But is it social media?
Absolutely. Remove the algorithm, the ridiculous inconsistencies of account blocks and locks, and you get an ecosystem that is social media before it became a toxic cesspool. Don’t get me wrong—it’s no panacea. There will still be bad actors, still be fights among folks that just can’t agree to not to talk to one another, and there are always scammers trying to sell you shit. But that’s true of walking into a damned bar, let alone a digital public square.

When you compare Mastodon to its CoSo offspring, it becomes clear that Mastodon is the free-for-fall-ish of the alternative ecosystems. Counter.Social, on the other hand, blocks all IP addresses from certain countries accused of bot-ing and misinformation. This includes North Korea, Russia, and several others. The result is that Counter.social is an island somewhat detached from the Mastodon network that has very different rules.

In both cases, advertising is absent, there’s no algorithm at work, and it’s much more sane. Thus far, I’m quite impressed with both. That said, remember it’s early days yet.

So that’s where I am and where I’ve ended up. If you want to give Mastodon or Counter.Social a try, please please please do not expect it to work like Meta products (Facebook, instagram, etc) or Twitter. Read the docs. Read the tips. Get to know your server before you render judgement on anything. Give it a chance and you might be quite pleasantly surprised. I know I have been.

“The Black”–RIP

Many years ago, The Black podcast resulted in my first Parsec Award and the novel itself was my first bestseller. It brought a lot of people to my work and still does. Today, I nuked the podcasts and the YT vids in prep for the new editions. It hurt. It really hurt.

I hadn’t expected that, to be honest. Ever since I immersed myself into The Derelict Saga, my favorite mistake of all time, The Black became this series I was associated with, loved for, and didn’t want to write anymore.

Wait. I didn’t want to write it anymore?

No. I didn’t.

The challenge of a series like The Black is finding ways to constantly raise the stakes, do something new with the creature the audience hasn’t witnessed in previous volumes, and make it all advance both the mythos of the creature and the characters caught in its maelstrom.

At some point, you feel like your plumbing the ridiculous just to put out another book. I didn’t want to be that person. Still don’t.

Fear of failure is a special neuroses that all folks have at some point or another. You’d think after so many years of writing books that didn’t sell, but were well received, I’d be completely immune to that kind of self-doubt. I’m not. Probably never will be.

It wasn’t until after I struggled my way through Evolution that I saw a new book that could successfully wrap up the entire series. I started work on it, but Derelict: Trident demanded to be written, and therefore, I abandoned Extinction yet again.

However, Oceania popped into my head. A chance to do something new, something cool, and drag one of my favorite characters from the series into a new and hazardous situation that spawns new horrors, new possibilities, and more importantly, would add significant portions to the mythos that will help Extinction become an absolutely incredible finale for the series.

I think the series is well served by my extended absence from it. Perhaps it will do even better with someone else’s voice reading my words and adding their non-mush-mouth performance to the tales.

For better or worse, the deal is done, and it’s time to move forward into an uncertain future.

RIP, old me.