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.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve re-released my 2014 book Atmospheres on Rumored Books.

TL;DR:

• Print: Amazon.com
• Kindle: Amazon.com

This was an interesting one. I am approaching the end of writing Atmospheres 2 and figured I should probably have the original one in print too. I dusted off the old Scrivener file from twelve years ago and gave it a quick editing pass. (I didn’t change content, and mostly fixed dumb comma usage and a few typos.) I also finally ditched that stupid CreateSpace-generated cover.

In doing this, I dug around for old drafts and tried to research the genesis of this book. The original was published on March 2, 2014. Because I write in Scrivener and constantly refine a single document, I don’t really generate discrete versions or drafts. I knew I did have working drafts I sent to someone in PDF format from October 2013 and January 2014. But when looking through old email, I was astonished to find a May 2013 draft I sent to Ray Miller, when the book had just been named and was only 5,000 words long. It amazes me to read those early snippets, really just bursts of ideas with absolutely no structure or routine.

I combed through the six drafts I found, and wrote a bit about the development of the book, my process, and how the drafts mutated into what I ended up publishing. I’ve also included some never-seen-before outtakes from the early drafts, including a bunch of that email to Ray, plus a few segments that were dropped from the first edition. It’s about 40 pages of new material.

Atmospheres is one of my favorite books, along with Rumored to Exist. I think it’s one of my most “Konrath” books, and I can still turn to a random page, read a few lines, and find something hilarious I completely forgot about. I’m glad to have it back in print on Rumored Books. And I can’t wait to finish the sequel.

If you’re new here, maybe I should back up and explain this. Here’s the post I originally made back in 2014.

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About a year ago, I started writing this experiment, which was a collection of almost ambient scenes, brief snippets of no story, just outbursts of emotion or scene. I wanted to eventually link them together in some way, but it became more important to simply generate the pieces each day. When I worked on finishing Thunderbird and doing all of the steps of publishing it, I needed to continue writing something, and that’s where the beginning of Atmospheres started.

I’ve always had a minor obsession with Jim Jarmusch, and I often listen to the soundtrack to Broken Flowers when I’m writing.  One of the songs on there is an edited clip of the Sleep song “Dopesmoker.” I’d been vaguely familiar with them from a million years ago when I used to write about death metal, but wasn’t fully aware of that particular album. I’d read an interview with Jarmusch where he talked about being preoccupied with that song, so I got a copy, and then I became locked into it.

If you haven’t heard it, the album is one song, a 63-minute stoner metal number that’s essentially a single heavy riff played over and over, while talking about a caravan of weed-priests crossing the desert to Jerusalem with their magical hashish. The lyrics are corny, but the song itself is an hour of pure hypnotic sludge, and puts you in a trance mode. And while I did not imbibe in the titular substance discussed in the song, I made it part of my process. I’d sit down every day, put the song on repeat, and completely lose myself in it, writing about whatever escaped from my subconscious thought onto the page.

Within a few months, this brought out an incredible pile of 500 word chunks, some perfect stories, some absolute junk.  But it amazingly brought out some common threads through the manuscript when I pushed them all together.  There’s a scene in the Naked Lunch movie where Ginsberg and Kerouac (or facsimiles thereof) go to Interzone to visit Bill, and  find an apartment filled with scattered random notes (and heroin), and that’s what the book read like before I started editing.

This is by far the most challenging read of any of my books.  It has a story arc in three acts, but it doesn’t have a conventional plot, which will throw a lot of people.  But it contains a lot of brutally honest writing that cuts deep, and it was a lot of fun to write. If I had to compare it to anything I’ve done, it’s a lot like Rumored to Exist in ways, but I think the pieces are darker with a lot more thickness to them.

This is my tenth book, which is a strange milestone to reach.  And every time I finish one of these, I fall into a deep depression and a brief panic, first as I wade through all of the production steps of releasing one of these things, and then as I try to start the next project.  And I have no idea how to sell this book or what’s next, so I’m not prepared for this. But, I need to keep working, so I will.

Anyway, check out the book, and let me know what you think.

I went to show someone my web site yesterday, and the SSL certificate expired a month ago. (And every modern web broswer freaks out about that, and prints warnings and blocks everything and acts like I’m scraping credit cars and stealing identities, even though there’s nothing here that could do anything involving any PII whatsoever.) That shows how on top of things I have been here. I haven’t even thought about the blog in months. I mean, it’s mid-March and I don’t even think it’s 2026 yet. I’ve completely lost the thread on time. Anyway.

First big news is that we adopted two cats last month: Diego and Zuzu. They are brother and sister, from the same litter. But Diego is like twice as big. He’s all muscle, incredibly strong and fast, constantly moving. Zuzu is tiny, all fluff, and absolutely beautiful. Diego was pretty outgoing from the start, and has bonded more to Sarah, sleeping on the bed every night and following her around. Zuzu has been extremely skittish, hiding in the closet and always running away, but she’s slowly made progress. Diego is very protective of her, and they play well together, despite the size difference. It’s been great to have companions again, even if they’re tearing the house apart at 2am every night.

I have to admit there is a slight bittersweet feeling if comparing them to Squeak and Loca. They were both very cuddly, especially in their old age. And Loca was my soul cat, and would spend all day and night with me. I can’t even pick up Zuzu right now, and Diego is not a cuddler. Maybe that will change as they get older, but thinking about the years with Loca and the reality that she’s gone is still painful.

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Speaking of pain, I had to renew that SSL certificate, and a two-second job turned into like five hours of hurt. There’s this big schism between bncert and certbot and I think I started with bncert last year, then tried to get certbot going, and it completely screwed my site. Lots of panic, tons of floundering, and I could not get it to work. I eventually got the HTTPS stuff going and the permalinks were screwed up. Any configuration of the .htaccess made it worse. I don’t know what I did, but I eventually beat it enough to get it back to operational. But I will forget all of this, and in six months when the cert expires and the auto-renew script fails, I will screw it up again. (Note to self if you find this in August: don’t start chasing certbot; you used bncert.)

Anyway, if you find broken anything here, let me know.

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Nothing else. Giant release at work, which I won’t talk about here, but that was 100% of my bandwidth for a while. Trip booked for first week and a half of April, but I still need to flesh out what I’m doing. It’s not to any current war zone, but who knows how much that will change in the next month.

I’m currently heads down with Atmospheres 2. Every month since like a year ago, I said I would wrap it up in a month. I think I’m close to that, or at least I want to get a feature-complete draft by the time I leave on April 2. It’s getting there, but it’s over 500 pages now, so it’s a slow process. I think I started this book in 2014, so I really need to end it. Also, I have published 19 books, and I don’t want the 20th to be some dumb compilation zine thing, so I really need to keep on this until it’s done.

Nothing else. Everything else. I’ll try to remember I have a blog before the summer is over or whatever.