Took the week off last week and headed down to LA. This was a make-up trip off for a botched trip to Bosnia in August, just a bit of a placeholder visit. Sarah had a work trip and I decided to tag along. Her company flew her, but I decided to drive down, since I haven’t taken the new Prius on a trip much longer than the 25 or so miles from my house to the dealership. It ended up being the worst possible weekend in history gas price-wise, but I get about 55 MPG on the highway, so it wasn’t a huge hit.

It’s always weird for me to take a trip in my own car, since I seldom do. I never pack until the last possible second, and this time I did with absolutely no thought on weights or limitations, simply throwing stuff in bags the night before I left. I packed far too much film, plus two film cameras, my Canon R10, and too many lenses. Almost brought a tripod too, but I knew I’d never drag that thing around all day.

The drive down was typical, uneventful. I’d done this same trip in 2021 albeit with the 2014 Prius C. The 2024 Prius LTD is a much nicer highway machine, because I can put it on cruise and the adaptive lane guidance stuff takes over and I can pretty much just zone out and take in the scenery. Not much scenery on I-5, though: lots of farms, the crops pretty much gone for the season, and the occasional windmill.

We stayed at the westdrift, which is a Marriott Autograph Collection thing, on a 9-hole golf course, right off Rosecrans in Manhattan Beach. The Marriott Residence Inn from 2021 is exactly one mile north of this hotel in El Segundo, and it’s about five miles south of my 2008 apartment in Playa del Rey. So, I’m familiar with the area, or I thought I was. What’s amazing is how much it’s changed, even since 2021. There are wide swaths of upscale strip malls and big-box stores and outdoor shopping centers that magically appeared out of nowhere, plus hotels and apartments everywhere. Every car wash or Citgo station from 2008 is now a Shake Shack or Goop Kitchen. This is astounding to me, because in every other part of the country retail is dying, but it feels like it’s growing exponentially there.

I had zero plans for the trip, except I wanted to go to March AFB in Riverside and see the SR-71 there. The drive out took about 90 minutes, and I feel like the temp rose maybe twenty degrees when I headed inland. There were over 100 planes there, mostly outside. Inside, they had the 61-7975 SR-71, and it’s in great condition, all sleek matte black paint and lots of extras on display, like the starting cart and camera pods and such. Other oddities include the YA-9, Northrop’s failed bid for what was one by the A-10; a half-dozen MiG jets; and a Top Gun TA-4J “MiG”. They also had multiples of several aircraft, like three different F-4s and three variants of the F-86. They also had many large aircraft, like a B-52, a B-47, a KC-135, and the first KC-10 I’ve seen up close. (The KC-10 is weird to me because I think of it as “new,” having been introduced in 1981. It was retired and stopped flying about two years ago.) Anyway, good collection, but the heat was unbearable, and I was dragging around two cameras, so I only hung in for an hour or so.

Me and Sarah took a day off to explore a bit, mostly driving through the old neighborhood to remember what was and what is now gone. We also went to Santa Monica for lunch. The promenade was largely abandoned, which was a bummer. The ocean view and that little turn you take to get down to the PCH was stupendous as always. We went downtown to check out The Last Bookstore and I bought a few rolls of film from a small stall on the second floor, a cool place with vintage cameras and typewriters and stuff.

There were a few dinners with coworkers of Sarah’s, but I mostly just lolled around and did little, walking and driving and looking at things. Made the mistake of looking at Zillow and seeing how much the houses by the golf course cost. Also made the mistake of checking in on work and getting pulled into a few phone calls. But otherwise, I mostly did nothing, which was fine.

Drive back was pretty easy on Thursday, made it back in just under six hours with just one stop outside Bakersfield. I probably took my favorite picture there, which my iPhone, negating the effort of hauling all that equipment in my car. I guess that happens sometimes.

OK, so I’m back on Substack.

TL;DR: jkonrath.substack.com. Like and subscribe.

I briefly tried this before and got a bit locked up for a few reasons, the biggest being a lack of time. I still have no time, but I’m between projects, so I’ll give it an honest go and see what I can get started.

The main motive is to get a different set of eyeballs on stuff. I have no idea how the algorithm works there, and I’m not really trying to chase virality or expect magic. But there’s absolutely no chance of cross-pollination in publishing out in the open web anymore, and Google searches are largely useless. I personally want to find things to read and all social media is largely the same garbage amplified for the election season. It would be nice to find other writers and writing.

One of the challenges here is I don’t know what I will blog here at Rumored versus what goes to the Substack. I have over a million words of stuff here, and some of it could be worthy of republishing to a new audience. I’ll look into that. A feel slightly bad about recycling content, that long-time readers will see new posts and realize they already read it in like 2014. But some of it might be worth revisiting anyway.

I do want to focus on new material, though. The real question there is what new material and what type of material. I think any time a new bucket appears for me to throw stuff into, I worry far too much about persona and what kind of writer I need to be to fit things into that bucket. This is particularly worrisome to me with Substack because there are very specific types of writing there. It’s very newsletter-oriented, and the most popular stacks are journalists writing articles, or facsimiles thereof. That makes me want to write some Chuck Klosterman-like things, critical analysis essays or nostalgia pieces, and that’s not the kind of writing I necessarily want to focus on.

This reminds me of when blogs became a big thing in about 2002 or so. I’d already been blogging for years, although I didn’t call it that, and I didn’t have an overall theme. It was more of a personal journal that was live to the internet. Sometimes I would write articles, but not on a specific, specialized theme. And the people who were blowing up and getting book deals and millions of views were writing highly specialized things. Of course I was jealous of that and it irked me. But it also reminded me of when zines were a big deal in the 90s, and then everyone saw them as a gateway not to true DIY craftwork, but as a stepping stone to commercial publishing. I loved stapling my own zines and mailing them to people, creating things, having a connection with people. But the people in the alt.zines Usenet group were arguing about bar codes and distribution in chain book stores, and it all got stupid.

I see the same thing with Substack, the people Producing Content to Build their Brand. I have no interest in that, and don’t even know how it works. I haven’t turned on the paid subscriptions, and I’m not sure I will. I do want to find new people out there, but I’m not terribly interested in writing SEO-tuned Content.

And as always, there’s a very high chance in a month, I’ll say all of this was stupid and stop doing it. But we’ll see. Anyway, jkonrath.substack.com.

Ninja weapon shortage. College football shoe scandal. Record humidity — supersaturation — dew point of complete absurdity. A group is claiming they have the legal constitutional right to storm the cockpit of any commercial flight and take over the controls of the jet because Jesus said you can in the new American edition edible picture Bible. On some Sunday morning talk show, an old man in a Punisher muscle shirt pointed at the fine print on the back of a yellowed Hooters Air ticket, interspersed with the same commercial for a meat gun filled with liquid bacon the station played every 90 seconds. A few days from now, seventeen flights would get emergency diverted, two shot down by F-22 interceptors. A thousand deaths, eight million dollars of AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles in action, who knows how many insurance settlements for families of the deceased. People don’t know when to say when anymore.

Atmospheres 2 is out now in print and on Kindle. There’s not much more than the back cover description out there, so I thought I’d talk a bit more about the book.

Atmospheres 2 is an experimental novel that’s about living in an apocalyptic world where reality is no longer real, or it’s impossible to separate reality from several chaotic monetized alternate realities that people think are real. Sound familiar? It’s not a conventional high-concept sci-fi thriller with a solid plot device to carry you through a precise three-act arc where the anti-hero saves the day. It’s a full-on barrage of absurdity, a collage that covers several distinct themes throughout the book.

When I say experimental, what I mean is there isn’t a conventional narrative, but instead a series of loosely interconnected stories with recurring characters and motifs that follow a through line through the book. It’s 100 segments, arranged in three acts, each segment a thousand-word world of its own. Half of them are third-person and half of them are first-person, following an unnamed Trusty Narrator through the chaos. At one level, it’s like flipping through a hundred random channels of cable TV, tuning in to a specific story or scene, then changing the channel. But sometimes an idea appears, vanishes, and comes up later in an altered form, consistently poking at the question, “What is reality?”

The book takes place in a near-future reality, a shifting landscape of corrupt corporate America, dead malls, abandoned cities, desolate highways, anonymous hotels, and the debris of a failed society that’s been pumped full of stimulants and electrons of every format. Aside from the interleaving pieces jumping between the Narrator and reality, the book shifts from conversation to road journal to cable news to corporate press release to cultural criticism to disaster reporting.

There are three distinct acts in the book, and they help define the different themes that run through the entire novel:

• Act 1 - Atmospheres focuses on the alteration of perception by technology. Social media, fake news, corporate prestidigitation, and manufactured celebrity are all explored. I know this can be trite and overplayed these days, and everyone’s writing about enshittification and why kids need to get off their damn phones. I think like the other themes in the book, I don’t lean in too hard on one side of the issue, but just show the absurdity and madness. This questions whether reality is real or just an unstable simulation built from brands, sound bites, manufactured media, and algorithms.

  I write a lot about the hellscape of unchecked corporate consolidation. It’s a world 99% owned and operated by the Fortune 5, where the same hedge fund that owns Arby’s, NASA, and Comcast also has control of the Air Force Global Strike Command and 2/3s of the American nuclear triad. Amtrak is now owned by Chuck E. Cheese, which is owned by Fairchild Aircraft, which is a division of Amazon. Pfizer bought Jack in the Box so they could sell their own customers heart medication. Boeing (which is a divsion of McDonald’s) had their sister company Northrop Grumman buy Proximo Spirits to distill fuel for their space program’s rockets. It’s all unregulated. It’s all for sale. It’s all completely absurd, but at least three times in the last two years of writing this book, I had to completely change a major plot line because something actually happened in real life. (Pizza Hut really got bought by a private equity firm that sells coffins? Yep.)

• Act 2 - Nightmares is about how this altered reality surfaces as violence and chaos. The main theme in this part of the book is “the cruelty is the point.” Corporations monetize suffering; authority turns to brutality to feel powerful; politics becomes completely corporate, only existing to turn resentment and loathing into common identity. The spectators of this reality watch on the sidelines until the sidelines collapse into disasters, plagues, and a catalog of horrors.

  The Narrator experiences what I feel every day: how do you navigate this when you don’t feel like either side? When nothing is real anymore, what is your reality? When the corporate ladder collapses leaving nothing to climb, what do you do in life? Does this hyper-reality of artificial identity mean you’re locked into the identity you formed with your social media, online purchases, and corporate history? Or does everyone’s obsession with this chaos and your lack of importance in the world mean you have total freedom?

• Act 3 - Visions is where the book turns much more surreal and dreamlike, where time loosens and reality completely collapses on itself. No spoilers here, but as the outside world turns to a complete apocalypse, the Narrator’s inner world drifts into a place where memory, fantasy, and experience completely melt into each other.

Oh, and it’s a comedy. Many LOLs ensue, trust me.

This book is probably more political than any of my other ones, but I don’t lean heavily into hack political satire. It’s also, despite everything that happens on the surface, probably one of my most deeply personal books. It’s about aging, regret, resentment, depression, and mortality. It’s about attempting to escape, be it with work, travel, addiction, food, or nostalgia, and how none of those provides a real exit.

Like I said previously, it took me almost 12 years to write this book. It constantly mutated as I changed and the world changed. I don’t feel I could ever really finish it, so I’m happy I was eventually able to reach a stopping point and present this to you. I hope you get a chance to read it.

I’m happy to announce that my twentieth book, Atmospheres 2, is now available on on Rumored Books.

TL;DR:

• Kindle
• Print
• Book page

Atmospheres 2 is an experimental novel about living in the chaos of a world where reality has become impossible to separate from the machinery that creates it. It’s a panorama of anxiety and existential dread set in a chaotic place where corporations and politics have become intertwined to the point of absurdity. The three acts of the book follow an unnamed character simply called Your Trusty Narrator, as he stumbles through an alienated life of corporate underemployment and altered reality. He struggles on a Sisyphean journey to find meaning in an existence that is quickly collapsing on itself, wondering if he’s the only person who notices.

This book is a sequel to my 2014 book Atmospheres, although it’s not a direct sequel with the same cast of characters, continuing the last book like a Spider-Man movie. It’s the same world, some of the same settings, the same general tone and philosophy. It’s also made of 100 segments arranged in three acts, alternating between first-person and third-person. But it’s more than twice as long (544 pages versus the original’s 242 pages), and I think the writing is a bit more dense, so there’s a lot going on. I think many readers will think the book is entirely plotless, but in some ways, it has a stronger underlying plot than most everything else I’ve written.

I’d like to think I write fiction, but I don’t even know at this point. It’s hard to be an absurdist when the actual news is far more ludicrous than anything I could write. This book is more political than anything I’ve done before, but it’s not a politics book. It captures a lot of the Kafkaesque inanity and dread about having politics devolve into a fully corporate swindle. But I think the main theme here is dancing around the larger question of identity a world where attention, self-identity, and reality has been completely strip-mined for monetization.

I started this book in 2014, and struggled for years to land it. It’s very much a “kitchen sink” book like Atmospheres and Rumored to Exist are, but I think it’s a distinctly different thing. It’s always a challenge to throw tons of everything into a manuscript and then try to arrange it with a through line, make everything jam with everything else. Coming up with the strategy of the whole thing and sticking to it was the hardest part to turn around, but like its predecessor, a lot of this is focused on the tactical level of having each segment be its own thing. I think a lot of people didn’t read Atmospheres straight through, but would open it to a random page and read one or two segments and enjoy them. I’m doing the same thing here, but it’s also something that someone invested in the book could read from 0 to 100 as a novel.

No, I did not use AI to write the book. I think I got a full manuscript done maybe five years before GPT-2 was even announced. I have a lot more to say about this, but I’ll save it for another post.

This is the longest I’ve ever worked on a single manuscript. It was interrupted by a lot of things: a pandemic, two graduate degrees, nine other books, two broken arms, and everything else in life. I keep a journal of notes in each book I write, and the one in this book is absolute madness. 24 hours of writing in Singapore, thousands of words of notes taken at the Ho Chi Minh airport, a bunch of editorial changes done while in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. There’s a lot more to say about the general history of this book and how it radically changed over the years. Something else to write about later.

Anyway, the book’s out. Hope you get a chance to check it out.

Been busy writing. I think I mentioned this when I re-released Atmospheres, but I’ve been mad at work trying to finish Atmospheres 2. It’s close. I thought I’d be done by the end of the month, but I have been saying that for a year now, and this book has been going since 2014.

This is always the hardest part of a book for me. Every book is different, but there are about three distinct phrases in a book project, and it goes something like this:

First, there’s the initial struggle of getting something going. Maybe there’s a spark of an idea. Maybe there’s a rough outline or game plan. Maybe there’s just a bunch of junk left over from another project or from journals and freewrites. I seldom start with a title and a pitch and work downhill from there, but that’s happened too. But the first third of the book is basically going from nothing to crawling to just about walking. And it’s a huge struggle, because I really have to shut off any outside influence and not get distracted and don’t watch some dumb movie that gets in my craw and makes me think, “Hey, maybe this book should be set in 17th-century Russia” or whatever the hell would immediately derail the work and basically knock me back to zero. I don’t like this part of the project because it’s where I have the most self-doubt as a writer, and it’s where I’m most easily distracted.

The middle part of the journey is either when I have a manuscript-sized corpus going and need to knock it into a flowing outlined book, or I have a great outline of a book and I have to build out the corpus until it’s manuscript-sized. My books are generally 50/50 between the two. For example, Statue of Limitations was a “collection” book, where I started throwing pieces in a manuscript, leftovers and zine articles and whatever else, and the (brief) middle part of the cycle was getting to 30 items and getting each item up to full length. But a book like Decision Paralysis had a full manuscript of almost 100,000 words maybe eight months before it was published; it just had no solid outline or through line that made a book a book.

There will often be a sustained period during the middle part of the book when I am On. That means there’s enough of the book going that I am thinking about it when I’m not working on it. The structure is self-sustaining and I don’t have to worry about foundation or plumbing or scope. I can just write. I’m not worried about getting started and I’m not thinking about how I’ll sell it or finish it. I’m just writing. Things will click and I will have more ideas than time. It’s not just that I reach flow state in a writing session; it’s that day after day, I am working on this book. It’s a mission. That is the best part of the book. And it can be months or years before anyone even sees the book, which is possibly the most frustrating part of being a writer. But, if I had immediate feedback, it may be too much of a distraction for me to keep going.

At a certain point, the manuscript is at full length, and I’m close to or at the point when it’s “feature complete” and the blank parts no longer say ”>> TODO” and the book is almost a book. And that’s part three. And it’s the most frustrating part, because that’s when all the work that isn’t writing has to happen. And I absolutely hate all of this.

One thing: because of how I write and what I write, and because of my propensity to do these collection things, I can sometimes get deep into part three and not have a title yet. I’ve actually had books like Thunderbird that literally did not have a name until a week before publication. That also presents a problem with cover art, as well as the fact that I often write very abstract books. If I did a murder mystery where Colonel Mustard was holding a candlestick as a weapon, that’s easy enough to give to an artist and make a cover. But I’m not doing that. So there’s a great deal of panic from that.

Book descriptions are also an issue. When I wrote The Memory Hunter, I actually started with a description. A book like Atmospheres - well it’s pretty difficult to explain. I’m not a marketer, and I don’t write to sell books. I write because I have to. So the whole selling and pimping and making the rounds and talking about what key demographic is targeted by my product, I do not care about any of that. And if I think about it too much, I stop writing. It’s self-defeating. The only way I can finish a book is to shut that down completely.

And that’s where I am now. I started this book in 2014. It’s been very on and off since then. I’ll get into the start of part two of the journey, and suddenly think the book needs a redemption plot or a vaporwave angle or a bunch of nostalgic bits or… whatever. I get way too into my head, and start pitching myself ideas that aren’t applicable, and it’s like throwing a pipe wrench into a spinning jet engine.

This book is huge, and it’s very dense. It will be my second-longest book, probably 50% longer than my last big book. (And yeah, writing a book this size when the world has zero attention span and can’t pay attention through a six-second video clip is another problem.) I think since early last summer, I thought the book was about a month away from completion. Now that it’s August, I still do. I finished a draft and a copyedit a few weeks ago, started the layout, and realized it needed another last pass. It’s hard to edit a book this size, because it’s impossible to keep it all in your head at once. And even if I decided to just really quickly read like 20 pages a day, well that’s a month of work. But I have to get it right.

(And I know a publisher is supposed to help do all of this. And I know AI could simplify this. If you’re suggesting either, you must be new here.)

Anyway, stay tuned.