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Definitions of distinction.

The novelette is, of course, but a narrower version of the novelatelle, and the novelttine is narrower yet; the novelccine is larger and thicker than the novelatelle, but more of a ribbon; the novelucce is wider than both by far. Noveletti, as a rule, are thin rectangles or squares of plot, while the noveleja is an elongated screw. The novelalde, like the novelccine, is a ribbon, but long, with ruffled edges, and the novelaldine is a novelalde cut into bits. The novelgnette, also called the noveliolini, is short and thick; the novelarelli is fluted; the novel alla chitarra is named for the strumming motion made to slice the theme. Novelozzi are similar to shoelaces; noveloline are ridged, but only on one side of the plot; novelerini are slender and photogenic. The noveloccheri is made without tropes, and so is hard to manipulate; the novelardella is thick and wide, similar to a thick novelccine. The novelagliati is irregular in shape and size, formed from the scraps left on the floor by other novel-shapes.

Light.

I wish I had a flashlight, said the nine-year-old, as we walked through what’s yet pre-dawn to the bus stop.

Well, actually, I said (and you must understand, I am speaking quite literally as a father, here: my well, actually is well earned): in this sort of light, this half light, a flashlight would do more harm than good: the light of it’s bright, sure, but only on what you shine it on. Everything else would be harder to see. But if you let your eyes get used to the darkness, you can see much more.

Okay, she said, but dubiously.

I mean, a flashlight would be good for focussing on something specific, I said. But it’d be so much harder to see everything else.

Look! she says. I can see my shoes now! —And she can, we can: green shoes, and blue, subtle shades that mingle in the dim light, but at least we can tell them from the grey concrete of the sidewalk, now.

They could be flashier, I said.

Flashier?

Yeah, I said. With reflective stripes? Or the ones that light up, when you step on them—

Oh, yeah! she said. —But those are no good, she said, for lock-down drills.

—Oh, I said.

—Later, at the bus stop, she climbed the ladder of the playground slide, and saw a flash of green with the sunrise, and called to me to come see it, and it was still there, sort of, mostly, limning the bellies of the clouds. —But then those clouds all lit up in that shade of magenta they say you can’t ever see in a rainbow, and the bus came, and she went off to school, and I headed off to work.

Altogether elsewhere, vast.

So! Um. Hey. You look good, you look good! All things considered. —Oh, you know, screaming a lot, goggling aghast, scrambling to cobble together the paychecks I need to make it from one to the next, that sort of thing. Anyway, I’ve been doing some stuff over at the city. Maybe take a look, next time you’re around?

Ten years of roses.

Pretty much what it says on the label: coming up on ten years ago, in August of 2006, I started posting City of Roses online with “Prolegomenon”; since then, I’ve written what the back of this envelope tells me is about 400,000 words. Two complete volumes, and just about half of a third; twenty-seven novelettes; one decade. —Those certainly are numbers.

One true only.

The occasion ought to be marked in some fashion? I’m thinking of a reading or two, though no concrete steps have been taken yet to set something up—I’ve been head down writing the most recent chapter, you see. But also because I’d like to have a new edition of the paperbacks ready, or at least the first volume, with a tightened cover design, a sleekened interior, with some minor edits here and there to correct a smattering of typos, remove an infelicitous “goddamn” or two, smooth out some inconsistencies of usage, as perhaps the leaping capitalizations of his Grace, His Grace, his grace. Mostly, though, I’d like for these books to have a new distributor, one more salubrious to libraries, and independent bookstores, one freed from Amazon’s narrowing straits. And I don’t yet have a release date firmly pegged for this new edition: the designing, the proofing, the paperwork, each take time, and, well, my head has been down.

—Time, but also money: to buy a block of unentailed ISBNs, to set things up with a new print-on-demand shop, to secure test prints and ship review copies—more numbers.

Some possible covers for volume four.

Thus, Patreon. —Patreon is my choice of crowd-funding sites to help support this independent publishing endeavor, as have chosen so many other writers and cartoonists and filmmakers and historians and pornographers and musicians and suchlike. Mine’s set up so that amounts can be pledged on a monthly basis, and I make sure to post something for patrons at least once a month—cover reveals, raw images of possible covers under consideration (like the above), deleted scenes and alternate takes, and of course copies of each novelette, before they’re available anywhere else. And it’s been of incalculable assistance already, whether it’s covering a last-minute webhosting bill, or domain registration, or groceries for a week when other checks are late—more, and far more important, than beer money, and I’m endlessly grateful to each and every patron who’s already pitching in.

You might note that I’m only a few dollars short of the current goal, which is intended to support precisely the sort of nuts-and-bolts redesign I’d like to accomplish for this anniversary. What I’d ask is maybe consider a moment helping me reach it, and reach past it, and while I don’t have much beyond the listed rewards to support this particular pledge-drive, anyone who signs up in July or August at a level to receive paper copies of the ’zines and books will receive all five volume three ’zines thus far. (And also stammering gratitude, abashed blushes, toe-lines dragged in dust, etc. etc. —I really need to do something about my marketing department.)

Now: back to the various grindstones I’ve set before my nose! Further bulletins as events warrant.

Vol. 3, In the Reign of Good Queen Dick, nos. 23 – 33.

Madeleine nabobs.

I’m told that professionals, when recording on the road, in a hotel room, away from the studio, will climb into bed and pull a blanket up over themselves, to cut down on ambient noise, I suppose; but I didn’t hear that until after, which is maybe why the audio’s not so great on my end—well, that, and my habit of speakingquiterapidlytillthemomentIsuddenly, uh—

—pause. And the swerve. —But! Jonah Sutton-Morse, proprietor of Cabbages & Kings, invited me over (in part, I believe, based on this old post) to talk about reading, and genre, and reading genre to our kids, and it was a blast: he’s a gracious and a generous host, and he keeps it moving in his finished pieces, and somehow even focussed—despite the material I gave him to work with!

So go, have a listen. —Jonah assembled a slideshow of book covers, a partial list of the titles we discussed, and it skews young, which is to be expected given our focus and purpose, but there’s another skew I wanted to note, here, at least: it’s rather almost entirely pale. —And that’s understandable, I suppose, given our purpose and our focus, and who I was and what I read when I was young, but the very fact I’m saying it’s understandable is telling enough, isn’t it? Or the itch I feel to soothingly point out that it’s a list of things I have read, not a list of recommendations to read, though I don’t not recommend them, or not all of them, anyway, and it is what it was, which is awkward, which it should be, which is useless, which leaves me, what?

(There are moves I could make. Other lists to itemize. But.)

—A footnote, though: one of the last books we talk about was one of the first that ever made an impression on me, in the way that books can, even though I only ever saw a school library copy, and then not ever again for years afterward, forgetting the title, the author, the illustrator, the names of the characters, most of the plot, but not—that thing? Whatever it is, that’s useful to us in a story, when all the rest is worn away? —Once Taran was old enough, I took those bones of a memory and went looking for the book, which it turns out is something the internet’s pretty good at.

Something Queer is Going On.

Something Queer is Going On. How (further) disappointed I am in myself, that I might’ve forgotten a title like that! —There was something of a disorienting madeleine-moment, opening the envelope, seeing a lost memory restored and reified with one rather swell foop of that vanilla-ish old-book smell, but more dizzying was opening up those worn boards (the front cover has since fallen off, and been taped) and reading it aloud, feeling the ghosts of the word-memories under what I was hearing my mouth speak, but above all having the two main characters restored: Jill, whose mother is “O.K.”, and Gwen, with her habit of tapping her braces when she’s thinking, and their friendship, which—and there’s nothing that revolutionary about it, it’s not like this was the only or first time it’d ever been done, but still: how shiveringly odd to hold in my hands the first time I’d ever so long ago met the archetypes I’d later lean on, when I started to write about Ysabel, and Jo.

What I did in the year just past.

—Well, there’s a couple days left. But! One of those hard-hitting exposés of self-publishing get-rich-quick schemes; an argument that shot itself in the foot, for which it was most assuredly aiming; I went and read some words aloud, that I had written; I entered into a (very) limited exclusivity deal with a titan of e-commerce (and cloud computing, so-called); and, of course, there were four novelettes, kicking off the third volume of City of Roses: “ – the thin ice – ”, “ – vilissima & infima – ”, “ – two sweetest passions – ”, and “ – only borders lie – ”. —What’s next? Well! The fourth novelette’s queued up to appear for free in a couple of weeks, and I think I know what body-part I’ll shoot at next. —But otherwise, I mean, it’s a leap-year, 2016. One whole extra day. Anything is possible.

Rising to fall,
or, Something-or-other.

I’ve more been working on the thing-that-argues, and not so much the argument, and you should understand whenever I make a pronouncement like that it’s with an air of selfish mockery: how could what I do ever have any regard for how I say it’s done? —As if such a thing could ever be just what I’ve thought it ought. —Anyway, thus the (relative) silence. I’d point you to some recent quotes mined hither and thither; I’d also (coyly) note that patrons have already received a rough cut off what will be no. 26, and are about to be slipped a mix of a scene that will subsequently never appear—a might-a-been, and you know how I feel about those. —You could avail yourselves, if you like. —And also, on a whim, I decided to try to scare up more readers by dangling some Kindle-bait: thus far, I’m told, four whole Kindle Edition Normalized Pages have been read! —Slowly, surely.

Welcome to the City of Roses.

Like a good neighbor…

We generally speak of the doings and goings-on among the local f--ries as we walk to the bus stop, Taran and I. It’s quite a vibrant little neighborhood, with elderly elm mansions, a great apartment complex in a towering hedge of arborvitæ, and a holly bush bank. (All holly bushes are f--ry banks, I’m told.) (One afternoon, on the way home from the bus stop, we knocked on the doors of f--ry houses and ran away, quickly; they like pranks, I was assured. We both woke up the next morning exhausted and foully tempered from restless dreams.) —Today, she was pointing out the various berries and berry-like fruit growing from this tree or that shrub: they are f--ry pumpkins, a fresh crop grown to get ready for Hallowe’en. (Strawberries, it turns out, are really perfectly sweet little f--ry pumpkins for f--ry pumpkin pies.)

We passed a holly tree, and the berries on it turning from green to red. “See?” said Taran. “More f--ry pumpkins.”

“No,” I said, “those are holly berries. You don’t want to upset the Holly King by calling his berries pumpkins.”

“No, they’re f--ry pumpkins,” said Taran. —She’s heard stories of the Holly King before, and the Oak King. They don’t impress her.

“But he is a f--ry,” I said. (I’m fudging things a bit here, granted, but one does tend to do so when one is in a hurry to catch the bus.)

“No he isn’t,” she said.

“Yes, he is,” I said. (One must be firm once one’s flag is set, you see.)

“Papa,” she said, and she held up her hand. “Look at this text I just got from the f--ries. It says he isn’t. He’s just a legend. Okay?”

Our neighbors.

A bricoleur’s dam’.

Reading the Attebery’s been interesting, and good, most especially the chapters on structure and (most especially) character, but I’m coming up on the last chapter, the one I got into it for, “Recapturing the Modern World for the Imagination,” all so I could start to get at what he had in mind when he coined “indigenous fantasy” which, I mean, well. We’ll see. —I mean, I’ve peeked; of course I peeked: the opening of the second paragraph alone:

Of all the subgenres to emerge within fantasy in recent years, the one that promises to reshape the genre most significantly is as yet unnamed, or rather no name for it has proved adequate.

Written in 1992, five years after I’d already got lost; by 1992, I’d already read Ægypt (The Solitudes, anyway) cover to cover and back again, and oh God Folk of the Air. And since then, but since then, that promise—the promise embodied by this swirling mess of indigenous fantasy (soi disant), this low fantasy, contemporary, postly modernist, magically realist, paranormally romantic, this syncretistic mulch of pulped megatexts, superheroic, supermagical, superscientifictional, these fantasies that “describe settings that seem to be real, familiar, present-day places, except that they contain the magical characters and impossible events of” say it with me now, URBAN FANTASY—what happened? What became of it? Of us? —I mean, we ate the damn world, or what we could find of it, and what good did any of it do?

But in all this, welling up out of all of this, there’s a specific refusal? rejection? repudiation? that I struggle to apprehend, much less articulate, when I turn from this model I’m building to argue with, yell at, kick against, to take up the thing that kicks, that yells, that argues? sermonizes? —There’s an abjunct, between that all-of-this, and the very specific feeling of tuning a sentence just so, of overdubbing detail, of rigging or tripping over structural rhymes, the very peculiar shiver that can obtain with just the simple repetition of a cocked and loaded phrase—map and territory, theory and praxis, forest and trees, I know, I know, but still: I’m either wrong there, or wrong here, and I know where I’d rather not be right.

—Anyway, permit me some links: just about a quarter of the next volume of praxis has appeared since June; I’m hoping the larger cycles have begun to hove into view, and you can see the shape I think it makes, might yet end up making, and that I can keep this discordant bolus soaring, not crashing in a mutter of nothing-or-other:

No. 23: the thin ice

no. 24: vilissima et infima

no. 25: two sweetest passions

Download kip manley or read online here in PDF or EPUB.

Oh, e-Books Downloads dot net, you irrepressible publishing disruptor, you! I’m chuffed at the numbers you’ve already racked up—858 downloads for The Dazzle of Day? 570 for “Wake up…”? 85 people so far have read the omnibus edition? (And how do you count the reads, anyway?) —It’s adorable, how the copyright complaint form on your website actually bothers to tell me that it fails every time I hit send; it’s hilarious that I can’t point and laugh at this over on Twitter, since apparently they think your whole domain is spammy, for some reason. (I’m highly recommending to my readers that they clear cookies and caches if they do click any of your links, by the way.) —But hey! Thanks for spreading the word!

Tune-up.

So there’s about a week left in the Future Fire‘s Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for another ten years; go, look, pledge. —I mention this not only because it’s a great little ’zine, but also because they bought a story of mine: “The Tuner,” published some little time ago. —So there’s that.

“Jagged bits of plastic spattered to the floor. Again, and again, until it broke open in a spray of colored wires and thin green beaded cards.”

Done did read.

I figured it out on the way there, the intro, which I had to mostly scrap because when I timed out what I was going to read it took eight minutes when I’d thought it was only going to be five and we only had ten, each. But if I just jumped right into it, which I did, when I first moved to Portland, twenty years ago, the first article I read in the Sunday Oregonian was a Randy Gragg column about the Moonday T-Hows, does anyone remember the Moonday T-Hows? And it’s a young crowd, so I don’t have much hope, though it is a ’zine crowd, so maybe, and there, at the back, a nod, a yes, okay. —This amazing space, built out of scrap lumber and windfall and like eighty-five dollars’ worth of supplies [ed. note: it was $65] that hosted parties and get-togethers and just hanging out being in a place stuff, community stuff, that came together and tore itself apart all in one summer and was gone before I even got here. It, seized my imagination, and when I started to write City of Roses, it couldn’t help but work its way into a story about magic in Portland, this fantasy

And I’d like to blame it on a certain blogospheric kerfluffle, I would, the deprecating shove I gave that word, “fantasy,” the irony with which I larded it, but that would be wholly unfair; I would’ve done it anyway. It’s a ’zine crowd, and of all the worlds I flit about, gadfly-fashion, comics and genre, fandom and criticism, politics and self-publishing, it’s the ’zinesters where I feel the least at home? —For all that I, y’know, make ’zines, pretty much the only necessary and sufficient condition for being considered as such—certainly far more than I do comics or fandom or criticism or anything else. —Oh but there’s more to it than that; there’s all the myriad unspoken ways and means, and beyond the staples and the xeroxing, well. —I always feel off-kilter, doggedly serious where light-fingered irony is called for; digging for sarcasm when the mood’s gone earnest, and off-kilter makes me defensive. I lard. I shove.

—this fantasy, I said—

And the thing was, this was the transition in the introduction, shifting deftly from the personal history of the thing to how it’s situated in the story, the excerpt I was going to read, which is about Luke, and Jessie, and the ghost of a memory of a teahouse, but leaning on that word, defending what it might leave open, betraying it to reach out to the audience, hey, we both know what’s what, right?

This would be why preparation and ritual are essential to any proper working, and also why you don’t whip up a bit of untested oratory half an hour before you go on.

—I botched the transition, is the thing. Got tangled up in Luke and Lake, Thursdays and Mondays, continuity hobgoblins, what-happened-last-week-on, losing the feel of it in the handful of all the facts, and tripping over my feet, as it were, in my haste to get on with it. —The reading itself went well enough; it’s got some swing to it, the excerpt I read, builds a head of steam under an adolescent tantrum, and I do all right with something like that. But I’d lost them, with the shove, and the stumble. The applause was polite.

Off the pier.

Yeah, that work I ought to be doing, the ostensible fruit of my thinking-through. —Are you up on the latest chapters? —I’ll be reading at Reading Frenzy on Thursday, from no. 25, which doesn’t go live until Sept. 14th, so there’s that. —And there’s the Patreon. I’m sure I don’t mention the Patreon often enough. Did you know there was a Patreon? —There, that should cover the next middlin’ while.

Cross-platform synergistic foofooraw.

Merely noting a recent development elsewhere, and also pointing out the fact that patrons have already received their copies.

Numbers.

So I didn’t get into this to make books, per se? The whole point is that it’s a serial, it’s episodic, I like the zines, it was always about those, you know? But you should do an ebook, people said, you can sell it on Amazon, people said, so I did, because why not? —Having already formatted the text for the web, it turned out to be pretty easy to set it up as an ebook, and with a little more work what I’d already done to format the text for the zines made it relatively easy to set it up for a paperback. So in 2011 I took the eleven chapters done so far and published them as a book, and last year I took the next eleven chapters and published them as a book, and over the three and a half years of this career I’ve backed into, as a publisher of books, I’ve sold—

175 copies! —141 of the first book, 24 of the second, and 10 of an omnibus ebook of both.

—Maybe I’ll sell a book a day, I said to myself, when I was putting the finishing touches on the first one. On average. —That’s not too much to ask, is it?

Kindle Author Rank!

It’s not like I’m going to quit. It’s not like it’s even a failure. It’s a number. Numbers require context; “I don’t have any whiskey,” may be a fact, as the man says, but it is not a truth, and the context, the truth of the matter, is that it costs me nothing to keep these books out there, nothing at all to make a new copy to fill any order that does come in, so why not leave them be? Two books exist where before there weren’t any, and more to come, and they’re mostly doing what I want them to do, in terms of words and sentences and people-shapes moving through story-spaces—and there’s more coming? —So what’s a bottom line, compared to that?

It costs me nothing, except what it’s already cost: three or four days of taking the HTML and flowing it into EPUB, and then a MOBI; four or five days of taking the files I’ve already made for running off the zines and flowing them into a single document for the paperback, and oh but also the day or so originally spent on each chapter, making those files in the first place (I have templates, I have systems, there’s also the time I spent devising and refining those systems, and the false starts, like the whole first edition of the first paperback, which came out a little too small, and had to be redone)—oh, and the covers, a couple days fiddling in Photoshop for each, and you’ll notice I’m being a bit vague, airy even, with the figures, these aren’t actual days, you know, but time snatched here and there, a couple of hours in the mornings, before anyone else but the cats and Twitter is awake, a couple-three hours after the bedtime story, and an old TV show being ignored on the other monitor, and of course the weekends, so it’s hard to quantify, and how do I even begin to tot up the time needed to snap the photos in the first place? The time spent walking and driving and looking about—having already seen the pink blossomfalls in spring, say, it wasn’t all that hard to put myself on a sidewalk by a fire hydrant with a camera in my pocket, but for the second book, see—there’s this thing that happens, when the fog’s burning off the river, tatters of it still clinging here and there about the buildings downtown, on the west bank, and if you’re standing on the east bank, down on the esplanade, mid-morning, the sun shining bright behind you, and you’re looking at the US Bancorp Tower, ol’ Big Pink, you’ll see hints of a ghost building beside it, the light reflecting off that amber glass, reflecting again off the shreds of fog. It’s eerie, and it’s rare, and I’d see it but not have a camera, or I’d go for a walk on likely days with a camera, and never see it, and then that one bitter day I happened to be working in an office building downtown, a couple blocks away from Big Pink, eleven floors up, and looked out to see the sunlight splintering the icy sky like that, and hey, I had the camera in my pocket—how do I account for that, on a timesheet?

Oh and of course the time spent writing it all down in the first place. Two hundred words a day, four hundred, twelve hundred, fifteen to sixteen thousand words a chapter, thirty to forty days for a draft, not necessarily in a row, a couple-three weeks to revise and rewrite, twenty-two chapters in now, the first eleven from oh let’s say 2006 until 2011, and the second eleven from 2011 to 2014, and oh but there’s also all the time spent noodling, dreaming, poking, prodding, idly testing this bit of plot during a dull meeting, muttering possible lines of dialogue when I-5 northbound’s a goddamn parking lot again, settling down to sleep only to leap up and scuttle back out to the keyboard to jot down the thunderbolt that just assembled itself from God-knows-what, and also all the time spent before 2006, running at this possible approach or that, coming to some grips with whatever-it-is I’m trying to approach anyway, figuring out what the voice ought to be trying to do and how it would sound, I mean, can I tell you, the original draft was a screenplay? —Does it show? —So tell me, how does all this get accounted for, on the P&L?

But! We are assured by economists that sunk costs are a fallacy. They do not exist! Pay them no heed. It costs me nothing, now, to keep these books out there. And it’s not like I’m going to quit. Or fire myself. Cancel the contract. Shut it down.

So.

I suppose in part this was inspired by a recent rash of posts about writing and money and sales—like Kameron Hurley’s characteristically blunt “What I Get Paid for my Novels; or, Why I’m not Quitting my Day Job,” which mostly made me feel a little less conflicted about the contract I signed for the one work-for-hire job I did that then got cancelled; Ann Bauer’s Salon piece on being “sponsored” by her husband; Shaun Duke’s musings on the Author Earnings January report; Jenny Trout’s “realistic” response to the Stacey Jay Kickstarter kerfluffle, which mostly has me muttering “Easy money at the ketchup factory” at inopportune moments, and then cackling bitterly, and refusing to explain the joke. —And I look up, and look around at my current situation, to compare and contrast, and I suppose the Spouse and I sponsor each other? —We both have day jobs; she has two, essentially, with her freelance coloring work, and I do a lot of the day-to-day housekeeping, the cooking and the laundry and the shopping and the chauffeuring, and while it’s not so much the case that one of us carries the other, it is true that taking care of three people at once is easier and less time-consuming than three people each taking care of themselves, and so with that bit of magic to hand we can carve out for ourselves a bit of time and a room of our own, and work to keep each other’s as sacrosanct as possible, and though it’s not enough, no, not even close to enough, still—the work gets done? —And I realize this isn’t data, per se, it isn’t hard numbers or facts, it’s overheated puffery, vague gesticulations at truth, but it’s as close as we’re gonna get for the moment. We live paycheck-to-paycheck, like so many others, and though there’s that background radiation of anxiety we’ve all learned to live with and don’t bother talking about, still we beat on, month by month, against the current. —Eyes steeped in ketchup-logic might look over what numbers we have and roll away, insisting as stentoriously as eyes might that a responsible business decision really ought to be made—but we don’t live in balance sheets and annual reports, where all cows are spherical, can openers might be assumed, and every human is a rational actor; where anything that can’t be quantified and commodified is blithely dismissed. —Maybe we tell the ketchup magnates that this work we do is, essentially, our 401(k)—accounts in which we store what excess value we might generate in the hopes that one day yet to come these elaborate, lovingly detailed lottery tickets might pay out?

But then we start thinking in numbers again. —A hundred and seventy-five copies! Seventy-nine last year! That isn’t even a rounding error.

Sales by book, 2014.

It isn’t even enough of a sample size to use for constructive generalizin’. —Oh, you can look at the peaks in last year’s numbers and say, okay, January was the Bookslut review, so there’s those numbers explained, and February and March was when volume two was released—

(Wait, a sale just rang in—now we’re up to 176! And one whole sale for 2015! So far!)

—sorry, yes, where was I: June! Two of June’s sales I’m cheekily certain can be attributed to Fangs for the Fantasy’s review, and July I was at Readercon; the lessons to be drawn, then, would be: release books (trying), get talked about (okay), and go places and badger people until they buy your book (well).

So there’s the Kip Manley plan for success in self-publishing. —Should I have charged you for reading this? Would that’ve helped?

I’ve glossed over a couple of things, of course. (When you look at something, you can’t help but look away from something else: thus, the secret of eyes.) —The first being the zines—remember the zines? What I got into all this in the first place for? —I do sell zines, after all, and have been since long before the books were even a line item on an earnings projection. But the books are easier to report on, is basically it. Zines are almost entirely sold by hand, or given away, and inventory’s printed whenever I’m running low (I’m almost out of nos. 4, 14, and 16, say) and while I make a stab at quantifying the number each year for taxes, I’m not digging through nine years of returns for a blog post that’s already too long. Suffice to say I’ve sold somewhere between three hundred and four hundred? I think? Total? Maybe? So somewhere between nine hundred and twelve hundred dollars, since 2006. I think. Maybe. —Not even beer money, really.

The other thing glossed is the fact, of course, that I give it away for free, too. —This isn’t the time or the place for to-ing and fro-ing the pros and cons of monetizing the gift economy or whatever the fucking hell; I give it away, that’s been part of the plan from the beginning, it isn’t likely to change, and if it did it wouldn’t make much of a difference. So I can say to myself it doesn’t so much matter, the low numbers over here, if there’s other numbers there that—

Web traffic, 2006 – 2014.

—but, I mean, numbers. Pfeh! The hell do they know.

(There’s been other things I’ve been reading, of course; things people say about the writing of people I admire; things that people whose writing I admire have said about what they’re doing, or trying to do. The sorts of things I’m always reading. And when I read these things I tend to look down, and think about what I’m doing, which doesn’t do anything like what those things are doing, and I feel this pang, this ache, this sense of loss, like I’m disappointing—I don’t know. Them? Words, or maybe language? Myself? —Takes me some little time, sometimes, to remember I’m doing other things, things those other words aren’t doing, and yes but wait are these things worth it? —Is that a question I can even ask, much less answer? —Look, for good or ill, we’re committed. This is what we got behind. Our flag is planted; our costs sunk straight to hell. —Steam on.)

—Oh, hey! A December sale though Apple that Smashwords just reported! We’re up to 177! —Though they haven’t updated the balance yet. —Where was I? Opening statement, numbers numbers data, ketchup-logic, doubts—oh! Reassurances, right. Steam on. —Volume three’s well underway, two episodes done, a third being heartily procrastinated as we speak by writing long blog posts about numbers and doubts and reassurances and suchlike. —I’m not quitting; far from it. I’m not even really shaking things up all that much, just looking to where I can double down on what’s already being done.

—But if I’m still feeling this itch to make a change, to do something to alter the situation, I could, I dunno. Maybe fire my marketing department?

First thing we do, let’s make sure the Author is dead.

“[P]ink…” he says, “You have a lot of pink!” —And of course the first impulse is to point to all the (rational, ineluctable, situational, explicit, plot-derived and -dependent) reasons why there’s so much pink—the emblems, the nickname, the false dawns of sodium-vapor streetlights, or sunsets too, the hair, but: all these now crowd out any other meaning that might be made from all that pink. Might have been made. By other readers. —Don’t kill your darlings. Kill that which insists these things, or those, must be darling.

Sighting; Thickening; Revel and Aftermath.

I was going to, I don’t know; I’ve been reading Cyclonopedia and also old Frank Herbert, which proves something or other about the shortcomings of holistic systems that admit there are inevitably shortcomings to holistic systems? —The ()hole system is, of course, a system that demonstrates systems can’t possibly demonstrate anything about the world because of all the, you know, holes, that systems and worlds can’t help but have, or, as Lewis Orne might’ve put it, had he existed—

Part of our problem centers on the effort to introduce external control for a system-of-systems that should be maintained by internal balancing forces. We are not attempting to recognize and refrain from inhibiting those self-regulating systems in our species upon which species survival depends. We are ignoring our own feedback functions.

—which passage prompts any of a number of gobsmacked retorts, foremost of which might be, who died and made you God? (—The Author, but we digress.) —So the Herbert (from which that’s snipped) is not what I would call all that good, per se; I first read it years ago, and didn’t much get it then, and mostly have it now for the cover, and re-reading it was struck by how the first draft of the Bene Gesserit is a small mean ugly thing indeed, this ethnically and genderly essentialist conspiracy of the country club’s women’s auxiliary, and if the moment when Lewis Orne winks slowly and deliberately at the two men isn’t the first time I wanted to punch this ersatz kwisatz hard in the snoot, it’s definitely when I wanted to punch him the hardest. —But: the broader context: the system-of-these-symptoms: the Golden Age trope of the fallen empire, slowly rebuilding itself, the Lost Colonies drifted from the glorious Galactic Mean, the labor of bringing them back to the fold being the four-short-stories’ traffic of our fixup: it only just occurred to me, this patronizingly pat justification for benignly cultural imperialism must’ve been drawn from various collective experiences with implementing the Marshall Plan, and the Allied Occupation(s).

All of which, of course, must fail:

The polytics of the ()holey complex defies existing models of the harvesting of power correlated to the logic of the ground and the politics of whole. For the world order, inconsistent events around the world are failures or setbacks for the dominant political models. According to the politics of poromechanical earth, however, inconsistencies and regional disparities across the globe constitute the body of polytics. The emergence of two entities (political formation, military, economic, etc.) from two different locations on the ground is inconsistent, but according to the logic of ()hole complex, they are terminally interconnected and consistent. In terms of emergence, consistency or connectivity should not be measured by the ground or the body of solid as a whole but according to a degenerate model of wholeness and a poromechanics of the event.

Which together with what went before mostly goes to show how much better Herbert got when he added some Spice to his model.

Petro states aren’t like other states for several reasons, says Karl.

For starters, their dependence on oil profits breaks the necessary link between taxation and representation. Instead of extracting state funds from citizens, wealth magically comes from the ground. This makes governments unaccountable; it means that people don’t demand to see how money is spent.

And oil governments, in turn, tend to treat their citizens like subjects, either paying them off or, when necessary, repressing them. Wedded to boom and bust cycles, oil-dependent regimes are either overspending to keep themselves in power or accruing debt to mask problems with seemingly no ability for fiscal reform.

Oil and highly centralized rule go together. Oil wealth permits governments to dismantle accountability mechanisms, weaken bureaucracies and undermine the rule of law.

Karl further found that although petro states appear strong, and some governments last for long periods of time, these oil infused regimes are highly vulnerable. When they collapse, they fall apart very quickly. Neither autocracies nor democracies are immune.

But now I’m just sticking things to the wall pretty much at random; I might as well point to the future of Rome, or idylls and dynamos; instead, I’ll just ponder the irony of finally having upgraded my CMS to fix the behind-the-scenes PHP errors only to discover it’s borked some of my lovingly hand-crafted title effects. —You fix one damn thing, three others break…