It was maybe a few months ago where Empirical announced they were making and releasing DORITOS HOOCH, which is to say, alcoholic Dorito juice. I said at the time, this is the booze of bad decisions. Nobody’s out there drinking the Dorito Juice and feeding orphans. Nobody drinks the Dorito Liquor and rescues a puppy from a river. Doritos Hooch isn’t saving your marriage. No, you drink this stuff, you end up under an overpass, underwear on your face, your body burned from the heap of Hot Pockets you orgied upon last night with the other Dorito Juice drinkers, all of whom now probably communicate via a hive-mind telepathy of cackles and screams.
Needless to say, I wanted some.
I wanted some not because I was hoping to have one of those nights where you get drunk and fight a police horse, but rather, because I am weirdly susceptible to foods that maybe shouldn’t taste good. It was just prior to the pandemic when I kinda made the news trying a mac-and-cheese ice cream from one of our local ice cream joints. (This was in February 2020, thus marking February as perhaps a month of culinary disaster foods.) And I recently tried the Kraft mac-and-cheese collab with Van Leeuwen ice cream. (The local stuff was gross, because they froze the noodles in there, and they were hard angry teeth-cracking pasta boulders. But the Van Leeuwen stuff was actually pretty legit if you can find it.)
It’s not that I want the gag gift foods. “Oh, we made Kale chewing gum lol.” That’s there just to fuck with people. I want the stuff that… shouldn’t work, but also might work?
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, I bought the Liquid Doritos.
When it was announced, it was not available for purchase by like, normal humans, and honestly I expected it never would be. But I put my name on the list anyway, and then I received an email that said “psst hey kid, I hear you like making mistakes,” and then gave me a link to buy the Dorito Juice.
I clicked that shit so fast I cracked my trackpad in half.
How could you not? Doritos* is the ultimate snack. It’s like the UR-SNACK, the snack of Ancient Hyperborea, a zesty salt beast from before the advent of time itself, when it was just Triangle Doritos and Circular Oreos floating in the pre-creation void.
So, yeah, I ordered it.
And then I played the waiting game.
Two days ago, Fed-Ex came to my door in a hazmat suit, and deposited a mysteriously trembling package on my front step with very long metal tongs, and in that box was:
My now-blogged thoughts on the DRUNKEN DORITO MILK, then:
It is a clear spirit with no identified provenance. The ingredients, as you’ll see here, say nothing more than BASE SPIRIT, which for all I know, means the box it came in is a ghost trap, and they trapped a ghost in there and force-fed it Dorito powder until it pissed zesty ectoplasm into a bottle.
(I also like that the front of the bottle just says the word UNCATEGORIZED, which actually feels pretty accurate to how you would describe this to anyone in any direction.)
That said, the closest spirit I get from it is tequila.
I don’t think it is tequila.
But it kinda vibes tequila.
In the parlance of the youth, it is giving tequila.
It smells that way. Like tequila and corn chips. On the nose there’s no Doritos zest. It’s just corn chips. Like you took a waterproof duffel bag full of tequila, emptied a bag of tortilla chips into it, and let that all come together for a week or three before filtering the tequila — now redolent with corn chip miasma — through. It’s not unpleasant. It is, however, distinct.
Drinking it, I honestly expected a very bad experience. I first assumed that the sip would be like battery acid and that it would hurt my face and throat and very possibly some part of my soul, perhaps even irrevocably, the damage so complete that no afterlife would have me. It just has that sense about it. Like, if you told me “Taco Bell makes wine,” I would assume that wine would taste like the inside of a vigorously-used prison toilet, and here, I figured Dorito booze would be a real rough rider, a spicy mix of vinegar, kerosene, cigarettes, and infinite regret.
But that initial taste, and subsequent tastes, were mild — pleasantly mild but with flavor, not just liquid cardboard. And boy does it bring the Doritoness.
This is liquid Doritos.
Boozy liquid Doritos.
It is very, very savory.
Not salty savory.
But umami savory.
Doritos have MSG. This juice has to have MSG. I use MSG in my cooking when called for, and the taste is absolutely present here. It’s that, plus all the zesty Dorito flavor — the nacho business, the spirit of the snack chips distilled into a, well, a spirit. It’s almost magic.
And the aftertaste, as I note in the video, is long. It grips your mouth like the hug of a once-lost child. It lives upon the tongue, on your gums. It puts up shelves, it hangs up pictures of its family, it pays a year’s rent in advance. You are the landlord of the taste after just one sip.
So, the thing is, this all sounds weird and maybe horrible but I gotta tell you, it… isn’t? It’s actually… not bad? Again, I bought this bottle, nobody gave it to me, this is not coerced via some sponsor deal or at gunpoint. I have the bottle and I am sure I will drink it all. (Er, not in one go. I still think this might be a bottle of Liquid Mistakes if you do it right. Right, meaning, wrong.) Given the tequila whiff, I figured —
Hey, margarita.
So I made one.
I give you, the Doritorita.
Or, umm, the margorito? The margadorita? The dormagaritota?
I dunno. Shut up.
It is:
1.5 oz DORITO JUICE
1 oz Combier orange liqueur
juice of half a lime
half oz simple syrup
glass rimmed with a mix of: chili powder, salt, coconut sugar, and MSG.
It was pretty legit.
I figure, if you need a good way to break your DRY JANUARY, why not with a margarita formed of Dorito Juice?
One must only hope they do not make a Cool Ranch Juice. I mean, I’ll buy it but there’s no way that doesn’t end me up in some special singular Hell. Or at least the hospital. Probably the hospital.
Anyway.
Cheers.
Drink your Distilled Dorito Broth responsibly.
Buy my books so I can afford more dubious food collabs.
* I note here, for the sake of completeness, that at the very fore of the pandemic I did an, um, deep dive on the history of Doritos that began with the phrase, “Buckle up, butterdicks, it’s time to talk about Doritos.” It has since been assumed I, a cringe-fed goon, actually talk like this in my daily life, as if I show up to Home Depot and find a worker there and say “Hey, chucklefucker, where’re your wall anchors at, you herky-jerky cheese dick?” but it was supposed to be a riff on the whole “buckle up let’s talk about Triscuits” thing. Anyway it was a fucking joke about Satanic snack chips and some people take shit way too seriously here on Al Gore’s Internet.
So, Stephen Blackmoore is a friend, a good dude, and further, a damn fine author who writes the Eric Carter urban fantasy series, which are books you really wanna get and read because they’re great. (Don’t yell at me, I’m behind on catching up, because though this picture depicts four books, there’s actually nine.) But, despite being a good dude who has written nine successful books, he, like many authors, needs some help, and so I’m asking if you’ll take a look at this Gofundme and, should you have coin to spare, spare it in his direction. And then, I’m also saying, if you have additional coin, you should pick up his books, starting with Dead Things. It’s real, real good.
Aaaaand, let me add, Blackmoore also writes all kinds of cool game stuff like for pen and paper games and video games and also probably murder games that take place in a maze where Stephen Blackmoore hunts you through the twists and turns with his trusty pet hatchet.
So, what I’m saying is, he’s also a guy you can hire to write cool shit.
I went in for a physical the other day. Now, I was sick at that time — not real sick, not COVID, probably RSV since that was going around, and since also the transmission timeline tracks. I was in the middle of it and honestly, still have a really irritating cough (though, be advised, nothing serious, just annoying). I went in with a mask on.
Nobody at the doctor’s office was wearing a mask. Lady at the front desk: “Oh, you don’t have to wear that!” That said, while pointing at my mask. I say, I’ve got a cold, she lets it go. I then fill out the paperwork that talks about my current situation: what meds I’m taking, have I been in surgery, etc.
Then, the nurse lady comes and gets me. First thing she says, pointing at my mask: “You don’t need to wear that in here.” She says it like it’s a favor to me, like, oh, honey, we’re not going to be mean and make you wear that big ol’ horrible ugly mask around your beautiful breathing hole and your luxurious food-catcher of a beard, why don’t you just pop that thing off and suck in a lungful of America.
You don’t need to wear that in here?
Well, I fucking do, SANDRA, because as it turns out, the doctor’s office is where the sick people go. It’s like going to the pharmacy. You mask anywhere, do it in the pharmacy. Everybody in there is horking up lung beef. The respiratory illness is so thick in the air you can catch it on your tongue like snowflakes. I go there, or the doctor’s office, sick people are going to be present. That’s the deal, obviously, wtf. I don’t want what they have, and nobody present should want what I have, what the fuck.
I say, again, I’m sick. I’ll keep the mask on, thanks.
Then she measures me and all that shit, and says, somewhat aggressively, “You are not 5’8″.”
“What?”
“You have it down that you’re five feet eight inches.”
“Okay.”
“You’re only five feet seven and three-quarters.”
“…okay. S… sorry?”
It was such a weird ding, I still don’t know what to make of it? Like, “Hah, gotcha, you were pretending to be a NORMAL HUMAN with a NORMAL HUMAN HEIGHT, but I have discovered a GNOME AMONGST US.”
So then Nurse Sandra, not her name, asks what medications I’m taking and if I’ve had surgery and all those same health questions, making me think that I filled that shit out in the waiting room and then they immediately took the form and threw it in the trash. “Fuck this piece of paper,” they say, with vigor and spite. Fine. Whatever. Then we go throughs some new questions, the fun ones about, “So, who in your family is dead now, and what did they die from?” And that’s a fun little litany to recite.
Nurse takes my blood pressure. It’s high. Not like, blood is about to squirt out of my eyes high, but like mid-high, and that’s odd, because my blood pressure is never high. So, that’s noted.
She leaves. Doctor comes in.
Now, my doctor has the bedside manner of a lamp. Some may find this comforting but you can’t joke with him, you’ll learn nothing about him, he knows nothing about you — he is simply present, like if one of those grocery store robots were a doctor.
Oh, also, you also get like, one question. If you go in for WEIRD ELBOW, you talk to him about WEIRD ELBOW and you get the fuck out. Do not ask him about the ODD EAR GURGLE. He does not want to talk about that. You’re signed up for a WEIRD ELBOW session. You got EAR GURGLE, that’s a different appointment, and this train is a-rollin’, pal.
So, he sits down.
And he says
wait for it
wait for it
waaaaaaait for it
“You don’t have to wear that.”
That, meaning, presumably, my mask.
(Better that than, say, my pants. “You don’t have to wear those dungarees,” he says, a coy twinkle in his once-dead eyes.)
I sigh, and explain, well, there’s a lot of sickness going around, and also, I am presently sick.
When I say this, he visibly flinches and asks, with serious panic:
“Do you have COVID?”
And I need you to understand here that in that exact moment I proved undeniably that I have a superpower, and that superpower is unshakeable willpower. Because I really, really wanted to take my mask off and then answer, confidently, “Oh, yeah, it’s COVID.” Just before coughing.
I did not do this, thus confirming I am a good person.
But I mean, what the fuck, they don’t ask before I get there if I had COVID. They don’t supply tests. They just gleefully tell me to take off my mask. I absolutely could’ve had COVID. And given how glibly the entire office treated the situation, I’d think they actually don’t care very much about COVID — or any other illness! — at all.
(Which is why I mask there!)
So, he then asks, and once again, please wait for it, wait for it —
“What medications are you taking?” And then, you know, have I had surgery, who in my family is alive and how did the dead ones die.
At this point I’m fairly convinced that I’m being punked, like this is some kind of joke, right? They all tell me, ha ha, no masks, also, please give us the same information you just gave to the last three people. Is anybody writing this down? Two of the people seem to be tapping it into a fucking iPad, but at this point I’m pretty sure they’re just playing Wordle. There is literally no continuity of information. I sigh, and I tell him the information AGAIN.
So, he says, “You’re still on the lansoprazole.”
Meaning, my heartburn meds. Proton pump inhibitors.
OTC, yes, yep, I take it every day.
Last year, he asked me this question, and I said yes, and he said, “OTC? I’ll give you a prescription for the prescription dose,” which is twice as powerful, I guess, but I said I didn’t need it, and he gave me the prescription anyway. I asked him then, “Well, I hear there are some risks with the PPIs, so I dunno if I should get a bigger dose when arguably I should wean off this one maybe?” And he said those studies aren’t really great, don’t worry, get the prescription, you dolt. So me, the dolt, said fine. (I did get the prescription. I did not take any. I still have the bottle.)
This year, he says, “You should probably try to get off that.”
That, meaning, the thing he wanted me to be on last year at a higher dose.
He says to just take a lesser heartburn med, I say those work but not like the PPIs work, and we’ve had this conversation before, and he’s like, “Well maybe we oughta get you scoped to see what’s going on.” I also explain last year he didn’t seem that concerned and wanted me on a higher dose.
The doc shrugs that off. Like, so what.
Okayyyy. I’m not opposed to changed thinking. Changed thinking is good! But this isn’t presented as changed thinking, it’s just, wild spasms from one direction to the next.
Then: time to address blood pressure. It’s high. I don’t know why it’s high. It’s been low all my life, except when I’m sick. And, during this appointment (and even now, a little), I’m sick, so maybe that? Also… I had COVID over the summer. And COVID seems to be consistent with a risk of triggering a rise in blood pressure after the fact. Doctor waves this off. Says it’s because I’m basically a fat piece of shit. Not his words, precisely, but he said blah blah blah, high BMI, blah blah blah, I could stand to lose 50 (!) lbs. Which, I mean, feels like a big suggestion? “Hey, you should lose 22% of yourself.” I have not been that thin since *checks notes* high school.
“We need to whittle you down to your teenage weight” does not seem like a healthy, or even doable, suggestion.
And then he’s on about cholesterol. “Your cholesterol is high.” I haven’t even tested this year, but it was high last year, and it has been my entire life. Not one test has ever come back without it. It’s familiar. I dunno. We’re Eastern European. Pork fat is in our blood, literally. My grandmother had it, but okay, she cooked everything in lard. My mother had it, but she was thin as a bird and ate very little. Father, yep, sister, yep, cholesterol. We’re just made of the shit. We’re like animated wax figures, except, fatty blood goop. And to be clear, not one of these people ever had a cardiac event. Cancer was what killed them, not cholesterol. But he’s like, “Well, it’s bad and you need to be on a statin.” I tell him everybody I know who went on one did pretty poorly, from mood changes to muscle pains to headaches to diabetes to depression/fatigue — obviously, this is artisanal data (aka anecdotes), but if you Google statins and side effects, holy crap, it’s a lot. A lot of people with a lot of problems. And he’s like, nah that’s fine, it’s rare, you need to be on a statin. It’s familial, I need to be taking the pills. I don’t want to be taking the pills, but no other alternative is on the table, from his view. Okayyyyy.
“You need to get a colonoscopy,” he says.
I tell him, yeah, I know, I’m scheduled for one in a few weeks. “Because you have to get one at this age,” he insists, and here is another dose of irony, because at age 45, 46, and 47, I told him, “They changed the guidelines, I can get a colonoscopy now,” and he said, “no they didn’t, not until 50, sorry,” every fucking time. Now, now he’s like, “WELL YOU BETTER DO IT, WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN WAITING FOR.”
The appointment is over, then, and I say, with great reluctance, “I think you have to check my prostate.” Which means, y’know, the ol’ wiggly finger test. One of our least most dignified tests during a physical, for either of us. Last year he did it. This year he said, “You’re not at risk until 50.”
And I’m like, motherfucker, you JUST ASKED ME five minutes ago about all the deaths in my family, and I said, as I have said every time, my FATHER died from *does jazz hands* PROSTATE CANCER. Which is why I get the prostate checked. It’s not because I enjoy the experience! It isn’t a treat for me! There’s no romance! No Lindt truffle gently pressed into my mouth! It’s unpleasant for both of us. (Though I note, no joke, I had a doctor many years ago compliment me during the process saying, and I quote, my sphincter had “good snap.” As if it were a bratwurst he was biting into instead of a butthole his finger was plundering. I guess he meant my nether-ring returned to form easily, like a rubber-band? Better that than a blown-out pair of elastic underpants, one supposes.)
Well, no such compliment from this current doctor. I remind him that, hey, hello, my father died not from cholesterol but from eating a big ol’ bowl of Oops, All Prostate Cancer, and he says, crestfallen, “Oh.” Then he thinks about it and you can see the war on his face where he’s deciding if he’s going to glove-up and do the deed. The slot machine in his eyes stops spinning and it lands on, mmm, not today, Satan.
Instead he just says, “We’ll just have the blood test check your PSA numbers, no digital test necessary.”
And so endeth the appointment. Now, I get it, this is far from the worst anyone has experienced — and certainly women get a lot more handily dismissed than I do. (God only knows what trans people have to deal with at the average American doctor; I imagine it is, how you say, unideal.) When I had COVID this past go-round, they gave me Paxlovid fast. My wife got COVID and they told her to eat rocks. I had to call and kick over a bunch of bee-hives telling them they were being sexist by denying her the same medication I was getting, and they finally relented and gave her the drug, too. So, even there, a disparity from the same doctor.
I bring this up because, you know, I find when you have a lack of trust in one doctor, it kind of cascades outward — the doubt, the distrust, it reverberates. It means I’m less interested in going to him for problems, for care, because either I can only bring up the one thing that’s bothering me, or worse, he’s just gonna say “BMI cholesterol” loudly at my broken ankle or my pulsating neck tumor. When I get inconsistent, incomplete, or outright wrong information from a health provider, it dents and dings my overall feelings about healthcare in general — and my feelings about healthcare in general, as a capitalist endeavor driven by money as much as (if not more than) actual health, ain’t great as-is.
It’s not just that they’re wrong sometimes. Science is wrong often! Then we adapt, we course correct, we learn and grow. But healthcare providers seem extra resistant to that growth, to any new thinking, and are still just as happy throwing antibiotics at a clearly viral infection even though it… doesn’t do anything, like teachers who give an excess of homework just because parents demand it, not because it actually improves anything at all. And once you start to doubt the doctor, once you start to doubt why they want to just throw medication at a thing instead of trying to root out a cause or find deeper adjustments, that doubt swells and blooms.
And it becomes much easier to end up in the place where you’re questioning good advice, where you’re doubting settled science, because your doctor — your representative in this strange world! — isn’t someone you trust as easily as you’d like. It’s like holes in rotten wood — spores are going to get in there and grow, and those spores could be stuff like anti-vaxxer nonsense bullshit. Right? We have to be our own advocates in medical spaces, but being our own advocates means… trying to know ourselves but also trying to know more than our own doctors know. Which leads us to potentially harmful sources of information and, of course, as information fidelity online is getting worse and worse (search engine enshittification!), the fidelity of good medical information is worse, too. Made worse, by exploitative actors and by unregulated unfettered capitalism.
Not everyone is well-versed in critically-thinking every problem, and it’s easy to be like, “Well, yeah, my doctor was wrong here, so when they tell me to get vaccinated, I’m like, hey, maybe I should question that a little bit. And then I found one of the Kennedy’s saying that nature is good and vaccines are bad and I agree with the first part and my doctor is a dickhead soooo…”
What I’m suggesting here is that your doctor is your first line of defense against all the bullshit, and all too often, they’re a very, very weak defense. I know friends who had doctors tell them stuff like, “Whoa, don’t get that COVID vaccine, it changes your dang DNA.” Like, no it fucking does not. But there they are. Medical personnel. Saying it. Telling you that, or not to wear a mask, or take these antibiotics for a non-bacterial problem, or, or, or.
It just kinda sucks.
I have no solution here, I have no deeper thoughts, I just want to yell and sigh and grump a bit here. But also I wanted to point out that bad experiences with doctors has a knock-on ripple effect. (And no, I am not an anti-vaxxer, give me the shots, get a mask on my face when needed, and I try to take my health seriously, erm, maybe sometimes too seriously, given that I have hypochondriac obsessiveness at times.)
Again, tl;dr I don’t like my doctor, and I need to find a new one.
Which is a sucky journey, even suckier than like, buying a mattress. And buying a mattress is a journey into Hell.
INTO HELL.
Anyway.
Have a nice day.
Buy my books or I explode, like the bus from Speed.
Here are some good things! Er, to be clear, these are of the selfish self-promotional variety, not the “nice things going on in the world” kind. I apologize, but we writers are locked in an eternal battle against obscurity, and once in a while, I must fire my weapon.
First up: hey, holy crap, Black River Orchard is on the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards. Which is to say, it is not yet on the final ballot and therefore is not yet a nominee, but it could still jump there if enough people in the HWA love it enough and want it to saunter over to the next round. No matter what happens, it is presently in some most wonderful company; you can see the list here. Congrats to all who are on the preliminary ballot, and further, if you readers out there looking to fill out your reading list, then checking out those candidates will bring you terror-fueled delight. And thank you to whoever helped put this book on the early ballot.
Then: RUSA, the Reference and User Services Association (a division of the American Library Association), put Black River Orchard on the short list for RUSA’s best-of reading list for the year, alongside Grady Hendrix (How to Sell a Haunted House, so good), Tananarive Due (The Reformatory, truly excellent, holy crap), Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming (I have it but haven’t read it yet don’t hate me), and the top of the list was Carissa Orlando’s September House (also have not read though I hear it’s delightful). Thank you to RUSA! And, as always, fuck yeah, libraries.
Next: New Demons, a horror anthology edited by Joe and Keith Lansdale and Patrick McDonough, is coming soon to Kickstarter — I’m in it, with a dizzying array of excellent writers like Joe Hill, Robin Hobb, SA Cosby, Owen King, Chuck Palahniuk, and more. I’ll pop the link here when it’s live.
Finally: The End of the World as We Know It, a King-approved anthology of stories set in the universe of The Stand. I’m writing a story for it now, and needless to say, it’s fucking awesome. Er, being included. Not the story. Er, hopefully the story! I hope the story is fucking awesome but I don’t feel like I’m the best judge of that I should stop talking now. ANYWAY I’M IN IT. And I’m super fucking excited for it.
As a sidenote, I’ll remind people that if you checked out my books and you liked them, please leave a review somewhere! Carve it into the internet! Scream your book joy at the world with an appropriate star rating! Appease the algorithm! EVERY REVIEW YOU LEAVE ME GRANTS ME ONE MORE DAY OF LIFE probably, or something. Seriously, thank you. Heart eyes.
Also, it snowed, which is great! And I am sick, which is less great! But here is a proof of life photo, plus a couple dogs who look like they’re trying to murder each other but actually they’re having a blast.
So, I’m not what you’d call “new” to publishing. Since putting out my first novel in 2009, I’ve published 39 book-length works, from novellas to novels to collections of novellas and short stories. And I learn something from every single one of them, whether it’s not to save the world in the first book of a long-running series (because how do you build from that) to something as simple as the fact that when IngramSpark tells you that your book can be 1,050 pages in hardcover, they really mean 1,048, because they’re going to add a page for a bar code in the very back and that counts toward your page count (and yes, it meant I reformatted one entire omnibus to cut another two pages).
But I’ve never Kickstarted a novel before now. And I didn’t set out to fund the production of this book when I wrote it. I honestly didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. I own a small press, so it’s not like I’m in danger of getting a rejection letter from everyone I send the book to. I am my own safety school, as it were. But The Seven: Unforgiven was a different type of book than I usually write. It’s a high fantasy, rather than the urban fantasy where I’ve made most of my sales and (limited) reputation. It’s less comedic and snarky than most of what I do, although there’s a fair bit of snark anyway. And it’s not immediately built for a series, although if sales are strong enough, I could certainly have a good time writing these characters again. So I thought I might shop it around to agents, try to get published by a bigger house, and do the whole “New York publishing thing.”
Except I’ve done it my way for 31 of my 39 published works, so listening to other people isn’t my strong suit. And getting a Big 5 (4?) contract is hard, even with a track record of selling decent numbers. Getting an agent is hard, even when there’s a dozen or so who are predisposed to answer your emails because you already publish clients of theirs. The book has to be the right fit for the agent, then the right fit for the editor, then the right fit for the season they’re looking to publish in, then the right fit for the distributor, then you get to try to sell the book to a human being. And I’m notoriously impatient, so I didn’t feel like waiting two to three years to see the book in print. It had already taken longer for me to write than any other book I’ve ever worked on, because it was written in the pandemic, and I’m not Brandon Sanderson, who whipped out four big chonky books in lockdown.
So when my buddy Darin Kennedy (Fugue & Fable) reached out to me about being part of a Kickstarter to fund not just the creation of my new book, but the first three books of his new nine-book series, I was intrigued. I’ve worked on Kickstarter projects before, all anthologies, and I knew that the more people you have boosting the signal, the better off you are. So when we both realized that our friend Patrick Dugan (The Darkest Storm) had a new book that he wasn’t sure what to do with, we looped him into the fold and started our New Year, New Books Kickstarter, which is running until February 1, and will fund five books from the three of us. But there were certainly some lessons learned along the way.
Lesson #1 – More stuff equals more stuff
Sounds like one of those stupidly obvious statements, right? Like “it is what it is.” Except there’s more to it than that. For each book there are a lot of options available, and all of them have to be listed. Do you want the ebook? Do you want the paperback? Do you want the hardcover? Do you want to pick up any of our backlist? Do you want a special reward, like a Tuckerization (when you pay extra to have your name used as one of the characters in the book)? All of these things have to be listed in the Rewards section, and the more books you have, the more crowded your rewards section is going to be. Right now, there are a BUNCH of possible rewards to choose from, ranging from a crisp high five and a thank you all the way up to having one of the books dedicated to you or someone else. And that means that people have to scroll a lot to find the reward they want. I think we have great rewards, and some of them are a great value (I’m offering up a full manuscript critique as a substantial discount from my normal editorial rates, for example). But there’s a lot, and it took Darin a lot of time to build all that into the project.
Lesson #2 – Beware the spam and the offers of help
Even before a Kickstarter is launched, the deluge of offers to help start. And these aren’t sincere offers from cool friends, like Chuck letting me hijack his blog or Jonathan Maberry giving us a shoutout on his social media. No, these are the professional “helpers,” the people who come out of the woodwork emailing you about your project offering to help you get more backers for the low, low price of (insert price here). We’ve gotten spam offers to buy social media posts, sell us newsletter placements, manage the project completely for us, or just to give us access to all their insider tips and tricks. While I’m sure there are some folks that do a good job shepherding crowdfunding campaigns to the finish line, I seriously doubt those folks need to email every shmuck who starts a Kickstarter. Just like I’m not selling my house to the goofball who calls me on the phone randomly (unless you want to pay my asking price, which is double whatever Zillow says the place is worth), I’m not buying a Kickstarter assistant from a spam email.
Lesson #3 – You can’t let your foot off the gas.
We started strong. We hit 1/3 of our $15,000 funding goal in the first couple days. That’s $5,000 dollars in maybe 48-72 hours. Pretty good for a trio of midlisters with mostly small press publication histories. But then the slowdown hit. The vast majority of Kickstarter money is pledged in the first two days, and the last two days. That leaves the other twenty-six days feeling like late Act II of your debut novel – it’s a little saggy in the middle. Add to that Darin and I attending a con right in the middle of the project, and we weren’t on social media promoting for several days (five for me, because there was some extra travel involved in my trip, then a plumbing thing because home ownership suuuuuucks). That doesn’t help. So we’re making a big push in the last half of the campaign to grab the last 40% of our funding.
Lesson #4 – People actually watch the videos!
I back a lot of Kickstarters. I have an unhealthy addiction to limited edition hardcovers and snazzy tabletop RPGs, so I end up with a bunch of Kickstarters in my life. I never, ever watch the videos that go with the projects I back, although the all have them (you kinda have to have one). But apparently a lot of people do watch them, based on the number of comments and messages I’ve gotten about my cats, both of whom make cameos in the video for our project. Now you’re all going to go watch the video. And you should, because my cats are friggin’ adorable. Also, because I want you to back the Kickstarter. But my cats are the cutest.
Lesson #5 – Joe Cocker was right
You really do get by with a little help from your friends. And I know The Beatles sang it first, but I love Joe Cocker. We have gotten so much love and support from our friends in the industry by sharing the posts, tweeting about the campaign (or whatever you do on social media apps that aren’t the bird thing), and giving us opportunities to share our projects with their audiences. Our friends understand, just like Patrick, Darin, and I do, that the writing business isn’t a competition, and a rising tide lifts all boats. If the three of us have a successful Kickstarter, then maybe other groups of authors can band together and produce awesome work on their own, and you’ll have more killer stories to tell. I know I’ll be happy to back more projects by more writers in the future (I just plunked down my money for the limited edition V.E. Schwab hardcover that Wraithmarked is kickstarting right now. I mentioned I have an addiction to limited editions, right?), and the more cross-promotion we all do, the better the landscape is for all of us. So in this time when budgets suck, editorial staffs are thinning, and it seems harder and harder to sell a book, finding the level of support that we’ve gotten from our friends in the industry has been incredible.
Those are a few of the things I’ve learned while working on this Kickstarter, and I’m sure there will be more to come, especially as I have to learn exactly what size boxes are best for shipping hardcovers. But please go give a look at the New Year, New Books campaign we’ve got running, and hit me up if you have questions about any of the books or the process of getting them out to you all!
In case you missed it, some (generous-air-quotes here) “comedians,” Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen, buried George Carlin in the ol’ Pet Sematary, where Carlin arose from death as a Paper-Jam Dipper version of himself, and the aforementioned “comedians” Weekend-at-Bernies’d him into “performing” a “comedy special,” all of which is proof we live in Hell.
That story, and Kelly Carlin’s response, can be found here.
This sucks. Obviously, this sucks. It absolutely sucks in a lot of directions. It is bad, and I hate it, and if you’re a person who does not suck, then you think this sucks, too.
I really loved George Carlin growing up. Carlin cemented my love of standup comedy but not just that — he was so fucking clever, and so very profane, and righteously angry, and perhaps best of all, he really, really loved language. His books put this well on display, how much he loved tinkering with words and the rhythm of the spoken word and how our language was not just interesting because of its construction but because of how it changed and how it exposed the inadequacies and contradictions in society. He was exceptional at dissection. He could rip us down to the struts with one sentence, and make us cry laughing doing it.
He was singular.
So, it was itself a singular desecration to see a couple of Internet jamokes have his memory vacuumed up into the belly of Generative AI, where it then digested him and sprayed the mucky bilious chunks onto the internet in the form of a brand new, and again I must emphasize the sarcastic quotation marks here, “””comedy special.”””
This comedian, this genius, who loved the art of language and the incisiveness of it to both make people laugh and make people think, gets run through the shit-grinder, and the art barf robot barfs out something whose language is graceless, whose wit is as incisive as instant pudding.
Again, this sucks, I hate it, you hate it too, because you’re a good person.
But I also think, this is a very good example of why generative AI sucks. And not just in one way, oh no. In this way, the Carlin special is a fruitful field with considerable yield — it is a manifold example that offers, with almost alarming clarity, the answer to the question of why we should be deeply resentful and distrustful toward generative AI. It reminds us bold-facedly why we should sneer at it, and spit at those who made it, and make sour faces at anyone who tries to use it.
Let’s go through it why this nicely exemplifies how gen-AI is hot garbage:
a) First, the special is bad. I don’t mean this as a moral judgment (though it fails that test, too) — I mean the special is just fucking bad. It is not funny. It does not sound like Carlin in literal voice or metaphorical voice. It isn’t even mid. The best it can aspire to is “fits of pure mediocrity.”
You ever taste something, a soda or a candy or whatever, that’s supposed to taste like another thing (strawberry, let’s say), and you eat it and it’s terrible but somewhere in there you can vibe that someone once maybe thought of a strawberry while they were making this? Like, there’s the ghost of an abducted, murdered strawberry in there? But mostly it’s just gross? This is that. It’s a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the ghost of an idea of a dream of a old cursed VHS tape. And it’s bad.
I don’t know why we want this. Who is the market for this? “Remember that thing that was really good? Well, I took that good thing and then 3-D printed it with sewage, and now here it is again, just considerably shittier.” Who wants that? Who wants more of the same, just whittled down to splinters? Is that what we want from the human experience? “I really like David Bowie, but he’s dead, so now give me David Bowie again, just awful this time. By the way, my kink is ruining good things.”
It’s not just his poorly-replicated voice, or the shitty material. All the AI-generated imagery that serves as a backdrop, too: mediocre, weird, bad.
b) It can only steal. This exists only because George Carlin made comedy. It cannot exist without George Carlin. It stole his face. It stole his voice. It stole his material. Then ruined all three. The end.
c) To put a finer point on it, ChatGPT cost, what, $100 million to train? They’ve admitted that they could not have done that if they had to pay for rights from what they fed to the machine. If they had to pay for the rights to access and replicate Carlin’s material, that alone would have been a pretty penny. A hundred million is chump change — they would’ve paid billions in licensing fees to feed material to the machine. (And again, consider the active agency here: we speak of AI like it’s out there, roaming the countryside, wolfing down copyrighted works on its own. But there is an active human hand in this. There is human agency. Rich people want to get richer by stealing work. It’s cheap as free to them. They kidnapped all this material, then built the copy-paste button and hope you’ll push it.)
d) This one-hundred-percent confirms the fears that generative AI is not only stealing material, but will grave-rob your shit for eternity. Actually funny (and no-air-quotes-required) comedian Josh Gondelman points out in that article linked above: “There’s the idea of someone’s image being used in perpetuity, including after their death, without consent or appropriate compensation.”
e) The Uncanny Valley just gets deeper and deeper. Hearing this feels like you’re poking some atavistic impulse inside you, a deeply-buried ancestral memory of a time when we were hunted by The Things That Stole Faces. It’s like the men-in-black from Keel’s Mothman book — they show up with semi-human faces and smeared makeup and no eyelids and they’re like, YES HELLO FELLOW MEAT MAN WE ARE FLESH-BOUND HUMAN AGENTS DO NOT TELL PEOPLE OF THE UFOS OR WE WILL DIGEST YOU I MEAN ARREST YOU WHAT DO YOU MEAN I DON’T HAVE EYEBROWS. It’s fucking creepy. It makes me queasy to hear it. It’s like the bad guy from any Doctor Who episode, wearing our skin to steal more of our skin.
f) It’s also a good example of how the media might launder this stuff. Look at the headline here at USA Today when this first hit:
(My understanding is the lede here was added later, in the 1/11 update.)
This definitely vibes like, “Wow, hey, George Carlin has a new comedy special, and his digital ghost has some controversial takes, whoa, crazy!”
The media is very good at laundering negatives as if they’re positives — and it doesn’t help that our media landscape is being gutted left and right, newsrooms bereft of actual humans as waves of layoffs crush our access to news, and why? For what? Well, so AI can come in and just write the articles. It’s AI writing AI for AI from AI and we’re just watching artwork and information turn to muck and mush.
(It’s not a conspiracy if it’s out in the open.)
Listen, I didn’t want to give this oxygen. I still don’t. This is a stunt, and arguably a stunt’s job is to get attention, and I’m giving it attention. At the same time, it’s hard not to deny that this embodies a monstrous effort to… I dunno, reduce us to garbage-eaters and feed us garbage. “Look, we made the Content Recyclers to recycle content into your held-open mouths, so just be quiet and suckle at the Info-Tube. Then don’t forget to shit your entertainment slurry back into the Content Recycler! It’s sustainable content, after all. Like Taco Bell! From the sewer it comes. To the sewer, it returns.”
I think it’s important to talk about this. I think it’s good to point at it and say, “This is shit, I hate it, it’s a problem.” I think it’s good to lacquer all the output from generative AI with a slick sheen of foul-smelling mucus so that nobody wants to touch it. I want us to see that it’s a bad idea. I want corporations to see that it’s a bad idea. That we’re suspicious of it. That we don’t want it. That what we want is for artists and writers and musicians and comedians and creators to be free to create and to be paid for what they do and to not have that work stolen and fed to a machine so that some corporation can photocopy it poorly and sell it to you for money in their pocket.
Yelling about this stuff has some purpose. It ensures that when a company uses AI for a book cover or when a news outlet uses AI to write an article, there’s enough people pissed that they have to walk it back. I like it when companies have to apologize for having used AI. Put a little stink on it. Smear it up. It helps to say, “I won’t buy this if there’s AI involved.” I write books because I’m a person trying to talk to other people. I write stories because I want to grapple with all the goofy scary strange shit that is a part of the human condition. I don’t want an AI to emulate me, to steal my face and chase people down with its too-many-fingers. I don’t want people to want that of me. Why would you? Who really is the audience for this? Are we begging for it, or are corporations begging for us to be begging for it?
I also think there’s value specifically in writers saying that they don’t want to be a part of any of this, and don’t want any of it to be a part of our work. Paul Tremblay, who is an author you should always, always be reading, posted this on his Instagram —
And I think this is absolutely the right way forward. I think it’s good to make it clear that this shit won’t fly. (And in case I have not made it clear, I obviously co-sign what Paul is saying here.) It’s worth going to our agents and publishers and saying, “Yeah, keep all of this out of the AI’s mouth, please. I only want human intervention on my books.”
As an endcap to this, I note the following —
When I posted my last bit about AI (here), someone commented thusly:
And I post it here because it really is, like the Carlin special, an emblem of how bad ChatGPT and these language models are at doing what you want them to do. It is a mediocre answer that fails to understand both the source material and any potential answer to that material. It offers shallow non-answer responses, assumes I’m a visual artist (my “doodles”), insults without meaning or grace, and mostly just says “meh, fuck you, so what if AI sucks” in a variety of ways over and over again. The commenter called it priceless, and it is that, in the sense that it is worth no price, no penny at all.
Anyway. I hope this special earns the two dickheads who made it the very worst kind of attention.
And I hope that Kelly Carlin jams a lawsuit so far up their asses that they can feel American jurisprudence pressing against the backs of their teeth.
