First, Tha NEWS.

Gonna slap this baby into the WYSIWYG editor on Buttondown today, simply because I don’t feel like doing the middleman bit with kwrite.

Firstly, work stuff. Not long after the sale of THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT expired, Amazon announced a new feature called “Ask This Book”, which is literally a chatbot stuffed into Kindle, which scrapes the book and will answer questions the reader asks related to it, if, for some reason, the reader does not want to, y’know, read the book. The double-extra catch is that writers that publish through Kindle Direct Publishing (aka KDP) cannot opt out of this system. By publishing on the platform, you give up and cannot revoke consent to have your content scraped for a shitty chatbot for lazy people.

So I pulled my books off Amazon. THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT is currently in the publishing pipeline at draft2digital, and I’ll put confessions from a drainage ditch up there as well after New Year’s. I’ll be making about 30% less in royalties, but a) those royalties have been few and far between, and b) I don’t fucking care anymore. Amazon’s specious bullshit has finally pushed me off their platform.

In writing news, I just want to take a little step behind the curtain for a minute and tell you about the research part of this project. Mostly because I’m doing actual research for this one. I started TFE purely on vibes and it ran that way through most of it except in two places where I needed formal/formatting help to put on the page what I saw in my head. (And it’s amazing, I really gotta say; if you don’t have it yet, you should really pick it up once it’s back on distribution.) This time, though, I’m going into the whole thing with a plan, and that means certain sections need certain influences. This is part of the reason I was talking about note taking in the last newsletter. Anyway, I’d like to propose an idea to you that has some traction around the literary world:

Ernest Hemingway was trans.

There’s actually a fair amount of circumstantial evidence from his relationships that could support this, plus the fact that his mother essentially treated he and his sister as androgynous when they were growing up. But the biggest possible clue was his final posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden. It’s a story he’d worked on for the last 15 years of his life, which is one in which a couple fall in love, engage in numerous instances of gender play and various affairs, and then begin to unravel. Many people consider it to be semi-autobiographical and at least partially about his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, though all of his wives exhibited some degree of gender rejection. But also Ernest himself exhibited many of the behaviors as the male lead in the book—dying his hair to match hers, admissions of (occasional) domestic role swapping, etc.

This is all to say that I may be learning better note writing because of Queer Hemingway.

As for other silly bullshit happening around the apartment, the tale of the Dumpster Mac finally has some new developments. Dumpster Mac is the early model Macintosh Pro computer I pulled out of the dumpster last year. Early this year? I don’t remember. Anyway, the fun thing about this particular Mac is that it’s basically possible to upgrade to about twice its original capabilities by replacing the processors, memory, and so on. So we’re doing that. The processors ought to be arriving [checks email] today. After that we’re doing to play Hand Me Down Video Cards, so it ends up with something to replace the one that’s failing in it.

The plan is to use it as a dedicated audio workstation, as it should run up to Pro Tools 10, which was, honestly, about the peak of PT as far as I’m concerned. (Maybe 11 was better due to being 64-bit, but that’s neither here nor there.) And solid state drives have gotten to the point since then that the biggest bottleneck—drive transfer speed—is basically gone. So it should be a workhorse, since a ton of records were made on the same setup in the 2010s. So that should be a fun project for the weekend.

Second, INTERLUDE.

What the fuck does Gaga know about cameras, anyway?

~ Victor Jones, “We Go to Russia”

Third, CONSUMPTION.

• Y’ALL THE NEW KNIVES OUT IS AMAZING. Superbly done, and Josh Brolin chews almost as much scenery as Daniel Craig.

• Been playing Final Fantasy III and having a much better experience than when I tried to play the 3D remake on Nintendo DS, probably because the Pixel Remaster version that I’m playing is actually presented effectively the same way that the original version was, with clearer menus and more obvious playing patterns. It’s also not artificially hard—but still plenty hard; I die a lot. I think I’m closing in on the end game. (I’m not usually big on spoilers or guides unless I’m well and truly stuck in games, and this has been proper fun and surprising.)

• I have four days to finish be brave to things, to make it my eighth overall book of the year. I know that a lot of people read much more than I do, and I’m way, way down from my height during grad school—and even junior high—but I’m also just… weirdly engaged in my own life. I’m slowly rediscovering old things about myself though. It’s fun. Maybe reading will be something I get to find again. Besides, eight is still way more than average median.

Fourth, HUSTLE.

Note: As mentioned above, my self-published books are currently off the market, I’ll let you know when they’re back up. A Void and Cloudless Sky is still available from Amazon, because I don’t own the print rights, but I still think the print version is superior to the pdf linked below.

If you really want to support me, Patreon is the way to do it, also linked below. No pressure, and you can get everything I put over there for as little as a dollar.

There’s my chapbook, A Void and Cloudless Sky. By being a subscriber to this newsletter, you're also entitled to a free PDF version, which you can get here. If you want a hard copy, it’s available here.

If you're liking this whole project and want to support it directly, here is my Patreon. Poems, essays, behind-the-scenes notes, and various other things that strike my fancy. Much more free-form than this format. Starting at a dollar for everything I post!

Finally, THE OUTRO.

I have remarked, more than once, that I often get by on the kindness of others. My partners most especially, but also my sibling(s, now), my friends, even my peers in the po’ biz. And in this year in particular those people have been very kind to me. From car purchasing and maintenance to music production to Magic the Gathering, so many people have provided me with assistance, gifts, food, love, and support. All of you here have helped in some way to support this weird life of mine, and I’m so grateful for you all. You deserve a rest.

That is, after all, what this time of year is about. Gratitude and rest. Let this weird liminal week be its weird liminal self. Forget what day it is for a few days. Stay in your pajamas if you want. It’s okay. The world will still be around on January 2nd, and besides, it’s cold outside. Stay in and have some hot food. Reflect on the fact that you made it an entire year in one of the toughest in your lifetime.

Next year is your year. We’ll get to it and get through it together.

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PS: I know I mentioned that I’d be doing Bookshop.org links in this one, but we’ll pretend I said next year. The whole Amazon AI bullshit sorta blindsided me and I can only focus on one online task at a time, you know?