My brain is mush this week. Too many tired days. Sleep filled with uncanny dreams. Hay fever problems. Epstein horror stories. An overall sense of malaise in the air.
I did happen to write fiction, which I haven’t done in a very long time. Not since Van Life. I’ve been in editing and proofing mode for the last year—a kind of purgatory I’m still not done with. But I started writing Book 4 of Synth Noir a couple of nights ago. Another act that has been bouncing around in my head for the last ten years. I was on the fence about it initially since I had always pictured what I had already written (books 1-3) as one book, and my prior plan was to leave it at that. But now it’s a series—which means it needs one more book to be complete. And I’d kind of like to knock it out. I don’t want all twenty of my readers to hate me like George R. R. Martin, after all.
It’s been fun to get back into fiction mode, although I have like five books in my head that I want to write now. Besides finishing Synth Noir, there is the novel inspired by my mid-life crisis that seems pertinent. I feel like if I can write that, maybe my mid-life crisis will end… somehow. Because at the moment, it seems like it never will.
There’s the “problematic” satire in the realm of horror about the 2020s, which also seems timely. This one will probably get me canceled, but I feel compelled to write it. People will be offended, I know that for sure. My uber-liberal girlfriends, what’s left of them, and the new ones I’ve made, will think I’m nuts. Maybe I am. But I’m also a writer, a satirist, and need to make sense of this strange new world we’ve been living in. That’s my job.
There’s also the soap opera serial that takes place in the beach town from Synth Noir and Van Life, Arkadia-by-the-Sea, where we go back to the heydays of Simon De La Cruz’s playboy, real-estate mogul father who doesn’t have a name yet. This will start in the late ‘70s, and go into the ‘80s, and will be pure fun and trash. Something I can’t wait to dig into, but is probably last on my list at the moment if I’m honest.
What I would like is to write all of these now. I should move into a one-room cabin in the woods with no distractions. Nothing to clean. No one to get dressed for. Just me and my computer and my robe, knocking each novel out quickly, crazily. Of course, this will never happen. I’m much too vain for that. And I have the cats, of course.
Writing these will take time. And now that I’m actually publishing my work, I also have to take time to market my books. Make TikTok videos that no one likes, remember to tweet, and post on Insta. And shit, Facebook, which I always forget about. Find my audience, wherever the hell they are. Learn Amazon ads. Self-promote, which is not my strong suit.
Establish the type of fiction I write… which is what exactly?
This is the biggest pain in the ass regarding marketing and finding your “audience.” Commercial vs literary? Genre vs upmarket? I didn’t even know what upmarket was until like a day ago. Am I literary? Always thought I was since I’m not genre, but now I’m not sure. Now I think I might be upmarket? A mix of literary and commercial? I mean, my novels are deep dives into characters, nuance, and themes, and are not dependent on tropes, but they’re also fast reads with cliffhangers. I’m not precious about performative prose. I’m not really into pages and pages of describing things. I’m heavy on dialogue. And my writing is certainly nowhere near A Little Life (and I’m sorry, but that book bored the fuck out of me).
I’ve been beginning to think, is Phoenix Ryder pulp?
Maybe… I mean, I did first publish Synth Noir as a serial.
In doing my research to try to figure out what exactly pulp is in 2025, I came across this paragraph describing an opinion on modern pulp by Alex Hormann.
“Pulp can mean rapidly fixed together narratives. It can mean lurid shocks, and a reliance on unsubtle storytelling. But to me pulp means something else. It means direct storytelling, with no unnecessary frills. It means bold characters and vivid worlds. It means an efficiency of prose that is unheard of these days. It means telling a story in short sections, rather than dragging it over eight hundred pages. Pulp’s short fiction roots often reflect a punchy writing style. Short chapters, lots of cliffhangers.”
Hmm, yes, I don’t write westerns or sci-fi, but this sounds an awful lot like my style.
Still, as a writer, it’s hard to fit into any category if you’re not explicitly trying to—which I never have. That’s not how I write. I just write what I want… yet I’ve always, until recently, been hell-bent on calling my work literary like the writers that I admire the most: Bret Easton Ellis and the more obscure Alicia Erian (highly recommend Towelhead by Alicia).
But in no way am I as talented at prose as Ellis or Erian. That’s just the truth. I’m okay with that. I’ve found my voice and style over the years and now my ultimate goal is to write what I feel compelled to while entertaining my readers. That’s it. Not to satisfy my ego as a “literary” writer. Those days are gone.
The more I write, the less I care about the literary title. The more I read contemporary literary fiction, the less I’m convinced that’s where I should be. I’ve been hanging out in indie lit on X, but most of the time feel like an outsider because I haven’t been published in a lit mag, and honestly don’t care if I ever am. Most indie-lit writers seem to look down on self-publishing; instead, they’ll seemingly spend years trying to get published by a small press. And I’ll be honest, a lot of acclaimed fiction I find boring. Sorry.
And yet I’ll pick up an old mass market commercial novel and be swept away.
I mean, my God, I watched fourteen seasons of the nighttime soap, Knots Landing—as you well know because I’ve mentioned it about a million times—within a year and a couple months. I was obsessed. Absolutely mesmerized. It’s become apparent to me that I obviously don’t care about high-brow. My ultimate goal is to be immersed in the story. As both the reader and the writer.
But people will want to define you and to that I say, maybe I’m literary pulp. I don’t know.
Also, does it even matter?
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I mean ... I don't think it matters? But then I'm not considered very successful, so.