Hello.
I have author news this month:
I sold the first book in my Gold Coast Quintet to an Australian/UK publisher. At the moment Book 1 is called All The Promises In The World and it’s slated for early 2024.
On the self-publishing side, this year is all about reissues. The new version of Four Days (2015) is getting close. In the meantime, I’ve recovered the rights to The Student (2017) and it’ll be back in print later in the year.
My latest release What Living & Dying Is Like is doing well. I’m *very* close to being able to sell that book direct — on my website shop — but it’s currently available at Amazon. If you’re in Kindle Unlimited and hope to read it, you’ve got a month to do so because I’m yanking it out at the end of February. I’m going ‘wide’ with my distribution, as they say.
Thus, my motto for 2023 is:
Always wide, never broad.
This is subject to change.
I just made that up, to be honest.
Gods Fare No Better: Dying World by J David Osborne
J David Osborne really found his niche last year. His Patreon stream Agitator (with Kelby Losack) is a glorious mess of Japanese cinema, bro-down book chatter, hustle culture and the harsh noise of raising children.
Bit by bit, Agitator has become its own aesthetic, and what I find most fascinating about it is the synergies it draws between self-publishing and podcasting. These are two cultural frontiers that cannot (currently) be tamed by traditional media, and yet both continue to draw big audiences, occasionally producing outsized profits from supposedly dead or marginal mediums (novels and radio).
Osborne’s latest book is a cyberpunk prose manga, about a range of things (one particularly violent character has body mods to resemble a moose), but the thing I’m most interested in is the vibe. This is a book that asks the question: what if Cyberpunk 2049 is canon — the genre’s future — and Neuromancer is really just the distant DNA? That’s how it reads. And it’s a wild ass approach. Completely on-brand. Agitator and Dying World both seem hell bent on building out extreme counter-positions.
PS: I also read Grant Wamack’s Black Gypsies this month. Wamack is a part of the circle around Agitator, and Black Gypsies — a crime story — hits the mark. In a recent Agitator episode, Obsorne described Warmack as one of the collective’s most assured stylists, and he’s right. There is something relaxed and confident in Black Gypsies. This is a very rare trait in self-publishing. So, I’m super curious to see what Wamack produces during his cyberpunk turn, something forthcoming.
Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott
My approach to fiction is that anything goes. You can write whatever you want, about anything you want, and in this day and age, you can publish it. What you can’t do is be a crybaby about for-profit publishing censoring you (right-wing) or refusing to hear/promote your voice (on the left). Both of those things can be true, mind you, and protesting them might incrementally move things forward, if you’re in an activist state-of-mind. But what novelist actually is trying to change the world?
A: Not many. Most authors I know are low-key scoundrels, hucksters and odd-bods. It’s all loners and in-group dynamics. There’s very few writing communities outside of a craft circle, a book festival or a Twitter swarm. Thus, a novelist ‘speaking truth to power’ almost never lands. That stuff *reads* like a media hook, subsumed into all the other things authors do to promote their work. My advice: leave it to non-fiction writers and academics.
All this is a long prelude to Give Me Your Hand — Megan Abbott’s ninth novel, a psychological thriller — about two female scientists who have a dark history (there’s a secret). As their careers take off and the competition between them intensifies, their shared past comes back to haunt them, leading to dangerous — occasionally bloody — results.
Throughout, all the men are wretched. Central casting sends everyone up: entitled rich boys; casually sexist colleagues; lecherous, old professors; and absent fathers. All the women are strong, be it angry, competitive, or smart, fuelled by trauma or psychosis.
But the thing is, Abbott is one of crime fiction's best stylists, so I just don't care. I still turned the pages with glee. I still found parts of myself in the protagonists and antagonists. And the concluding chapter, set entirely in a beauty salon, felt incredible (joyous, thrilling even). So sure, some of the premise here is cringe, but I never - not for a moment - cared while I was in the book.
That’s everything, I think.
Why aim for less?