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.

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.

---

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’m very happy to announce my 18th book, Decision Paralysis, is out now.

TL;DR: Amazon print and Amazon kindle links.

I did not think I was ever going to write another book. I quit writing completely in 2021, and spent at least a year 100% away from it, not even calling myself a writer, not sure what to do with my life except work, eat, and sleep. But I’ll always be a writer. I could not quit. And I needed to tell myself that I had to write the next book, even if nobody read it, even if the market had completely vanished and would be replaced with dumb AI-generated murder mysteries that end on a cliffhanger with a link to buy the next of 29 books in the series. The algorithm has killed everything, but it has not killed me.

I spent the first few months of 2024 knocking around a few other projects before I got to this. On 5/27/24, I started this book in earnest, with only a title and about 8,000 words of scraps. By the end of July, I had the idea that this book would be the spiritual successor to The Failure Cascade, which I’d re-released a few months prior. I wanted longer stories, more bleak, more introspective, and with a thickness and depth I wasn’t getting in the short micro-fiction or flash I’d been doing in the last decade.

Aside from telling myself “just write,” the biggest change in my work habits was moving my writing time to mornings. Waking up at 3:45 and sitting in my office in darkness for a few hours listening to weird ambient music put me in a different headspace and made the words start to add up. I think in early August, I crossed the 50,000 word mark, and that was the original intention. I’d originally had these short flash interstitials between stories, and at some point, I pulled all of them out and focused just on the stories. I also started footnoting things, which may be devisive, but I had fun with it.

A bit of an easter egg and a change is that the titles of each story are latitute/longitude coordinates. They have meaning; that’s all I’ll say. I’ve had a very specific format for titles that I think were funny, but as I am battling this persona problem, I think I got backed in a corner with them. I found that the people who thought the goofy titles were haw-haw funny were also the ones who basically didn’t get what I’m trying to do with my writing. So, clean break from that.

It’s also always bugged me when my stuff was too short, or perceived as such. I mean, some of the books are; The Failure Cascade is 37,565 words. Any time someone told me, “It was so great because I could sit down and read it in one sitting” it was a bit of an insult, especially when that was basically my annual output of 2020. So I purposely went maximalist on some of the stories here. The best/worst example is the titular story of the book, which is 16,000 words. For comparison, 2017’s Help Me Find My Car Keys And We Can Drive Out! — the entire book — is 30 stories that total 15,848 words. That story is like “The Aristocrats” in that it was long and essentially useless (at it’s core, it’s about someone trying to buy lunch who can’t find anything to eat) and at like 3,000 words, I thought it was getting excessive; at about 5,000 I thought “I should just make the whole book this story” and it quickly shot up to 10,000 words. It took another 6,000 to finish the thing, and it’s about everything but ordering food now.

This book was therapeutic to me. I think I was able to explore a lot about why I’m here and what I’m doing. I’ve struggled a lot in recent years with the big dillema of what I am and how I’m supposed to finish the rest of my years. I have no children and no legacy, and there’s honestly no hope that any of this writing exists beyond me. I could write a lot more about this, but the TL;DR is that I covered some of it here, and I probably need to do more.

Final tally: 20 stories; 412 pages; 101,834 words; 249 footnotes.

The description from the back cover:

Euthanasia drug MLMs. Deep-fried lard rumored to have mystical healing properties sold at pirate-themed restaurants. Existential crises about dollar-menu tacos and light therapy. Is this your average terror nightmare, or just another Thursday where mind-reading dolphins are dialing 1-900 numbers to spill secrets about how DARPA taught them to master Minesweeper?

Decision Paralysis by Jon Konrath is a surreal and darkly comedic exploration of absurdity and modern disconnection. The book plunges into a fragmented narrative where dystopian satire meets introspective nihilism. Inside, you’ll find twenty deranged tales of John Denver Illuminati theories, Taco Bell stealth tanks, Cambodian pizza chains that secretly sell time machines, and bitter online arguments about whether Norwegian timber tariffs of the 1800s ruined Chicago deep dish forever. The chaotic tales, blending dystopia and the grotesque, offer sharp humor and biting commentary, leaving readers grappling with questions of meaning, choice, and the absurdity of existence.

A biting critique of consumer culture, decision fatigue, and the search for identity in a fractured world, Decision Paralysis is both a satire and a deep dive into the human psyche. Fans of sardonic humor, speculative fiction, and offbeat storytelling will find much to enjoy in Konrath’s latest offering, which deftly combines outrageous comedy with an undercurrent of raw, philosophical truth. This is a book that will leave readers laughing, thinking, and questioning their own paths through the maze of modern existence.

The cover: it’s from Van Damme Beach just south of Mendocino. Failure Cascade’s cover was shot on the same 2017 trip, about three miles north. It was a color image that was filtered down to black and white; this image is color, but looks almost monochromatic. I love when a photo ends up like that.

Anyway, that’s that. I hope you check it out. I am not sure what’s next, but I have a list of stuff to do, and two big books past the first draft stage, so we’ll see what 2025 brings.

I have to admit, I have not done any reading for pleasure since I quit writing in 2021. I have completely lost the plot, so to speak. I have been reading, but it’s either books for work, school, or self-help stuff, none of which I would want to review here. (TL;DR read Measure What Matters, High Output Management, and Radical Candor for the first one.) And when I am on a trip, I usually grab the latest copy of The Economist and read it cover to cover, which might not be your cup of tea.)

Ignoring those books, here’s a rough list of what I did manage to read since the fall of 2021. This doesn’t include re-reads, of which there were a dozen or so. (A bunch were mine, and I re-read Small Town Punk every other year or so.)

Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession by Ander Monson

I read Monson’s book Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir back in 2020, and it was the kind of book I loved because it was such a great reading experience and hated because I wish I would have thought of the idea first, and now feared I would subconsciously copy when trying to write something out. It could be classified as perfiction ala Raymond Federman, but the voice of it was nothing like Federman and was more contemporary, yet still a bit weird. Predator, which is a memoir this time, is a strange combination of a film studies book and a memoir, in a different style than the previous, but still weaving between the two, and also something I wish I would have thought of first.

The bullet is that Monson was obsessed with the movie Predator as a kid, and watched it constantly, until it bled into the fabric of his early life. I did the same thing with a few movies, most notably RoboCop, so I get it. But Monson also had a traumatic childhood, losing his mother at an early age, bopping around as a borderline truant in the upper peninsula of Michigan with friends who would later join militias, then getting in trouble for computer hacking. I think that Midwestern not-the-cool-kid thing resonates with me, which is what drew me in to this obsession.

He claimed to have watched the movie 146 times, and practically dissects it frame-by-frame. While he covers the surface themes quickly, like the general zeitgeist of 80s action movies with tough guys (who might or might not be gay) he stumbles upon several interesting angles. One is that the quickie novelization of the book was written by Paul Monette, who is better known for winning the National Book Award for his nonfiction memoir about growing up in the closet. Monette died of AIDS in 1995, and published Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir the year after the Predator novelization. The book details his own experience and the loss of his long-time partner, who passed from the disease in 1986. Most people would posit that these muscle action movies were secretly homoerotic, which juxtaposes oddly with the fact that the book was written by a gay man. That’s one of about 17 different tangents that Monson goes off on as he goes through the film, and all of them are equally as interesting.

The book is simply amazing in how it weaves these contrasting narratives together, each which is interesting, but all together made it even more engrossing. This is by far the best book I’ve read in a while.

The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman is another author who writes these things with incredible resonation with me, and make me upset I didn’t write the same damn thing first. I think I’ve had a 90s book sitting on my hard drive for years and can’t pull it together, but Klosterman did, so. There are a lot of rants in here that I’ve similarly covered here in the blog or on my old podcast, and I think one of the common threads is that GenX is largely forgotten because the generations before and after us won’t shut up, and we didn’t live up to our catchphrase slogan as “slackers” because we actually got jobs and did stuff.

There were a few things he undersold or theories I found to be off. Like he largely dismisses Y2K as a big nothingburger, but as a person in tech who probably sat through a cumulative year of meetings about it starting in like 1993, it was a big thing to some of us. (Aside: I think I tried explaining Y2K to one of my teachers in the late 70s and they wanted to put me in therapy.) I think one of the most frustrating things about Klosterman’s books is I always wish they were a conversation and I could add more to it. I could blog about them here, but then it would look like I’m ripping him off.

Good book, though. It does peter out towards the end, but so did the Nineties.

LaserWriter II: A Novel by Tamara Shopsin

Multiple people told me I had to read this. I did, but it didn’t click for me. As a person who lived in New York in the late 90s and spent a big chunk of time unjamming LaserWriters for a living, it seems like it should. I barely remember this book, so let’s move on.

Lago by Ron Jude

This is an incredible photo book where Jude goes back to his childhood home of the Salton Sea area in the desert of Southern California to try to do the detective work to find out who he is. The photos are absolutely mesmerizing, a contrast of tack-sharp focus and minimalist detail, wandering a palette of browns from the sand and desert vegetation. The landscape is familiar to me, but the composition and grouping resonates in amazing way. It’s like his lens for looking at the scrub brush of Salton City is captured in such a way that I can imagine looking at my own childhood landscape in the same way. This wasn’t a cheap book, but I come back to it constantly, and it was worth it.

Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places: The Complete Works by Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore was a New Yorker who had never seen the country, and decided to drive across it with a large-format camera in tow, and find beauty in the obscure and forgotten areas between the two shores. He absolutely preserved the history of this time not by taking pictures of events or famous architecture or the usual landscapes, but by wandering roadside motels and tiny towns and gas stations. In some ways, the subject matter at first glance might be the kind of thing you’d quickly shoot with your phone and forget: a plate of pancakes, a parking lot, the back side of a brick warehouse. But when you look closely, the composition is absolutely perfect, the way your eye wanders through the pieces of the puzzle. The more you examine each picture, the more details you see, the more things captured. The faded tones and the sepias play wonderfully against the old cars and wood-panel hotels. Like Jude’s book, it’s less about the content in the picture and more about the filter in Shore’s brain that put the content there and what it tells us. It’s an absolutely wonderful book, and probably my favorite photo book I come back to constantly.

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

I have to admit that after getting through 1Q84, I was pretty much done with Murakami. But this book is more memoir, and a very inspirational one. He details his road to writing, how he writes, his rituals and how he comes to ideas. This is a series of essays and not so much a how-to book, but there are many good ideas to be gleaned from it. I think he is pretty polarizing about certain things, and it’s definitely not “I can write and after reading my book, so can you!” But it was an interesting read.

I think one of the things he mentioned that rang true to me is that being a career writer is less about writing one or two books, but about having the endurance to keep writing books year after year. And maybe that hit me because I read this after quitting writing, and maybe I need to take his advice.

Strange Circumstances: 34 Stories by Keith Buckley

The weird thing about reading Keith’s stuff is that this is his second book, but I’ve been reading him for thirty-some years in discussion boards and internet posts, so any of his writing immediately has a decades-old familiar voice to me. Full disclosure: I helped him publish his first book, The Orphic Egg Caper, which was a surreal pulp crime novel, of which the biggest crime is that nobody read it and they really should. Strange Circumstances is a collection of shorter stories and flash fiction, ranging from pulp to absurd sci-fi to satire. This is a great introduction to the weirdness to be found in his work. The kicker is I know he’s sitting on thousands of pages of this stuff that needs to get out, and I wish he could get to a bigger audience to put some sense of urgency on him that he needs to keep editing and stop spending all day generating AI images of Cthulhu getting a high colonic and messaging them to me.