It's Kill Brian Keene In Your Blog Day
What's the point? Why write books? I saw Jack Haringa this weekend, for real, and he didn't even seem happy to be alive. We keep typing and typing and nobody cares. I'm glad you blurbed Phantom though. That was a really nice thing to do before environmental devastation or nuclear annihilation or the abject poverty grind of writing take us out.
Do you have carpal tunnel yet? We go bald and get fat and don't even fit into our 80s hair band T-shirts and we keep writing dumber and dumber books for fewer and fewer readers. You extrapolate this out, Brian, and we're all going to be going door-to-door with a big sack of remainders at best. Do people even buy those limited hardcover editions of your blog anymore?
It would be so awesome if we had taken up real jobs like cooking or cabinet-making. Something that people actually wanted and could use rather than something that most people think is a stupid waste of time done by people who live in their parents' basements. Writing is one of the few things on Earth that is so intentionally sad and lonely. Most things that you practice by yourself in private are better suited for showing off in a social setting, even on a webcam in some cases. Instead, we do this scrivener thing. You put your heart into that book about the redneck guy with cancer and robbing banks or whatever it was and nobody noticed. I can't even remember the name and I thought that book was your best one. We're just cranking out product and even if we somehow wrestle away the means of production, we'll never quite nail down the means of distribution because of the economy of scale issues.
I'd say how you're so much more established because you're the "zombie guy," but it's pretty clear that you actually crested a little too soon on that one and now you're not even one of the top zombie guys anymore because you forgot to add Jane Austen or have a world war in the title. That must suck. You have to flip through the encyclopedias of myths and the undead and come up with something else that people might actually care about for more than a few seconds. Unicorns? Maybe you can hang on for a few more massmarket paperbacks before you tumble back into small presses that no one's ever heard of if you go big on unicorns. I mean, wow, man, Bruce Springsteen stole your title and no one even noticed.
I remember a blog entry or something you wrote about how you cared about Robert Howard's books more than a girlfriend and she called you on it and you realized she was right and that set you more firmly on this doomed path of typing for a living and you ditched her. You probably still had the mullet then. Almost any girlfriend is better than books. Part of the problem is that we came of age at the exact wrong time when writing horror looked cool and like something a person could do and actually make a living without having to wear a tie or go door-to-door selling beat up paperbacks like they were new-fangled vacuum cleaners. But one of the things you and I have in common is that we know that almost all of those people who "made it big" are now living in tiny apartments with gigantic piles of books that are worth less than two dollars a pop on eBay. If we're lucky, we'll keep from starving a little while longer, but it's never going to get any better than right now. Health insurance or a mortgage is a bad move when all you have to offer the world are pages and pages of the letters of the alphabet in different patterns.
Our idols are struggling and there's not much left of any worth to anyone that we can provide with our worthless stories. I keep hoping that videogames will want actual writers but it's pretty clear that nothing's going to pan out. Eventually we'll be living in homeless shelters scribbling into notebooks that no one will ever read because we'll have sold our computers to buy one last paperback at a thrift store.
Unless we just give up writing. Maybe that's the one thing that will make life better, but I doubt it. I think we're so stuck with the typing and the scribbling that we're just trapped in a downward spiral. Oh, a noose? Good call, man. I'll use it in a couple minutes, once you're done. Thanks!
Geoffrey H. Goodwin
This is a bit of a fundraiser for the amazing and impressive Shirley Jackson Awards, so please consider donating if you're not a writer and therefore have money.
http://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/sja_support.php