GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #626: MY BIBLE

 In case you missed it my Kindle-only book, It Changes a Man, kickstarted my SF series which will be home to all the crazy and fucked up shit that I just can't fit into any other books or stories. I intend to spend most of the rest of my life writing these things, which are all part of a saga that I'm not going to publicly name yet. The name involves a spoiler for the forthcoming first novel in the series. I recently realized that that's a lot of shit to keep straight in my head, and I suddenly knew there was no way for me to keep track of it all without some help.

I'll bet Stephen King wished he kept better notes about the gunslinger's world by the time he started writing The Drawing of the Three.

So over the weekend I started writing my bible for the series. If you don't know, a bible is a document that keeps track of everything for TV shows and comic books, etc. Lucky me, I figured out I needed this thing while I'm just one title in. And I still fucked it up because I noticed one inconsistency while rereading ICaM. Whoops. That's not going to happen with the rest of the series.

I hope.

So I've been rereading the finished novel to add to that bible, and it's been a little frustrating because it's eating into writing time. But at the same time it's going to be worth it. I wonder how many authors rely on their fans for this sort of thing instead of putting together a bible. Hopefully that won't be an issue for me.

I think.

Maybe when I'm old and done with the series (not likely, but who knows?) I'll release the bible. It'll be dry reading, probably, but sometimes that's exactly what boosts your starship.

(That's the distant future's version of "whatever floats your boat," something I would have forgotten if I hadn't been putting this bible together. It's already coming in handy.)

COVER REVEAL: IT CHANGES A MAN

 It's Sunday morning. For whatever reason, Sunday mornings are usually really slow on the internet, at least here in America. I suspect it's because those who aren't in church are sleeping in. Whatever the case may be, I thought  I'd stealthily post the cover reveal for my new book, IT CHANGES A MAN. Meaning, I'm not posting any links to social media or my website. If you see it, you get a secret surprise that no one else gets. It's the unofficial part one of my forthcoming splatter SF series. If you're a reader of my Goodnight, Fuckers columns, then you know what I'm talking about.

I think the book will be out this week. Just in time for Christmas! Anyway, take a look at this glorious cover by Luke Spooner, who also did the cover for my book, POOR BASTARDS AND RICH FUCKS, as well as the forthcoming TRAIL OF BLOOD.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #504: SPLATTER WESTERNS

 

Look at that! The cover of my next (probably) book!

Many of you may have been wondering where that splatter western I was talking about a while back went to. I swear, it's finished and almost ready. Even if I die tomorrow, it will still be published at some point, as it is waiting in the folder I have called IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH. And goddam! That's a beautiful cover from Luke Spooner! But oddly enough, that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

For a very brief period of time the splatter western was all the rage, and as I suspected, it ran out of gas pretty quickly. That's what happens with a lot of sub-sub-sub genre stuff. I thought the phrase was pretty laughable, and I still do. This is actually a book I originally wrote in 2003 and was doing a huge overhaul on, but I knew there was no way it would be out in time to cash in on the Great New Thing, which wasn't all that new, anyway. I much preferred it when it was called the Weird Western Tale.

Regardless, my topic for tonight is my disdain for publishing labels. Or any marketing labels, really. I think it diminishes the work because humanity just absolutely cannot stop themselves from classifying everything. I understand it when it comes to science, but when it comes to art? No thanks.

You may also recall me talking about my splatter SF book, and I'm here to assure you it was very much tongue in cheek. Who the hell writes a splatter SF book, anyway? You might mention the movie, Event Horizon, which would qualify if I didn't despise labels so much. But when you think of SF, you mostly think of hard SF or social SF, and even those labels are too much for me. To quote Heinlein, "Specialization is for insects."

I get the need for some categories. Horror, SF, mystery, fantasy, so on. But when you start splitting those up into sub-categories, that's where you lose me. Must we turn every single fucking thing on this planet into a marketing scheme? I guess the answer is yes, but very few see it as cheapening art, which it is doing.

I remember when I first heard of Korpiklaani, which I simply consider to be metal. But because everyone loves labels, I started going around calling them Finnish folk metal, just to see if anyone would bite. Imagine my surprise when, a couple of albums back, they had a sticker on their CD cover proclaiming them to be Finnish folk metal. I doubt they got that from me. I hope they didn't. But if I started something, I really need to stop talking about splatter SF before some fool takes up that banner and waves it like a lunatic.

Maybe I'm just being ye olde stick in the mud. Perhaps I am. But this situation is almost as bad as people calling art "content." I fucking hate that. If art really is content, maybe I should give up writing and become a YouTube star. To quote Jello Biafra, "Is my cock big enough? Is my brain small enough? For you to make me a star?"