I don’t usually talk about works in progress, but just a quick accountability note here to mention that I finished the first draft of my 18th book. This is more or less a spiritual continuation of The Failure Cascade, and is 20 stories, but almost three times longer. I’m moving past flash fiction and micro-fiction, maybe. I mean, there’s one story that’s roughly half the length of Failure Cascade. I don’t have any distance from the thing to say whether I like it or not, but John read a draft and he did. Completely unmarketable, but I’ll keep going on it after I catch a breath and see when I can publish it. It already has a title and a cover image. ChatGPT can write the book description and marketing crap better than I can. Those three things are always the biggest blockers on getting a book out the door.

I just realized that if I get this book out this year (and I’m not worried if I don’t) it will be four years since my last book. The longest gap before this was about 20 months between Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist. When I really got on the horse and changed around my writing schedule and cadence and work ethic in 2010, I had it in my head that I needed to publish at least a book a year because of the algorithm (or whatever) and I did that from 2010 to 2020, with two years that had two books. Now, whatever. I have been writing more and changed around my schedule to make that happen. But I’m writing for me, not for a calendar or an algorithm. I’d like to get the long list of half-done projects out the door, but I don’t care how they sell.

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I also don’t talk about future travel plans, but it’s time to get out of the country again, and time to renew my passport, while I still can. I was trying to book something this morning and realized this one’s expiring less than six months from when I’m leaving. Pretty much every country has a requirement that you have six months on your passport in case you end up in a coma in a hospital or whatever. Five and a half months left is not close enough according to an airline computer, so it’s time to figure this out.

It’s always oddly bittersweet when I do this. First, this will be the last passport when I have hair. Second, there was a six-year gap from the first stamp to the second. Lots of blank pages I wish I would have filled. This one has stamps from 20 countries, which is way more than the last one. (I think that had four or five.) This one also has three visas, including a work visa, which is new to me.

I honestly don’t know how much I will travel in the future. I think it’s going to become a lot more difficult, impractical, and expensive to travel internationally. And I’m not exactly enthused about spending my tourist dollars in a large chunk of the country. I really should spend more time in California, because there’s a lot of it I haven’t seen. There are nine national parks in California, and I’ve hiked exactly zero of them. Time to look into that.

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I don’t talk about politics here, and it’s hard not to. There’s a lot of dismay and there’s a lot I can’t do about the situation. For my own mental health, I feel a great need to distance myself from it and focus on what I can do. I also don’t talk about work here, but I think the best I can do is to continue to manage and mentor people, try to grow my company and my little corner of Silicon Valley, and continue to support who I can. I grew up working retail and dumb jobs in the middle of the country, and was lucky to find a way out and get a real job and benefits and live in a beautiful place. I’ll stay here while I can. When I can’t, I’ll leave. I’m fortunate enough to have options, but I love it in California.

I think one other thing is I need to take a big step back from the news/terror cycle and redouble my efforts on writing. I’ve already had serious questions about my social media use, and this pretty much sealed the deal for me. I spent far too much time doom-scrolling in Reddit, and I can’t anymore. My last news source was the New York Times, and I cancelled my subscription (even though I get it free through Amex) because of obvious reasons a few months ago. Twitter got nuked a year ago, not that I ever used it.

I’ve given up on Substack. It’s become a political doom and gloom circle-jerk, but more than that, I don’t know what to post there. I feel like any writing I’m not doing for a book or for work should be here. I thought about having some system where I blogged here and mirrored it there, but it was too much work and I don’t really see the benefit. A lot of the writing content on Substack is either of the “look at me” or “make money fast” variety, and I care about neither.

At this point, my two biggest social media vices are Tik-Tok and Tumblr. I don’t do much content creation on Tik-Tok, and I have only two or three friends on there, but it’s fairly easy to push the algorithm away from the bad and just waste time watching people pressure-wash driveways or travel in weird places. I also don’t do much creation and have no friends on Tumblr, but I like it because I don’t even think the people working at Tumblr are aware it’s still operational. Because I don’t create and I don’t use my real name, I don’t chase likes and follows or look at numbers. That’s what’s good for me.

Same goes here. I have no idea how many people read this, and I have no need to “grow” things here. I’ll just keep on keeping on.

A few vague thoughts on blogging and such on a lazy Sunday, which seems to be the only day I can ever pay attention to this thing.

I keep thinking about what I want to do here and how this blog should evolve (or whatever.) I sometimes think the big retirement project should be a grand reunification of all my content everywhere, into a giant meta-site of sorts, where one could see a mass of texts and books and pictures and videos and emails and whatever else, all poured into some giant Project Xanadu-esque thing. This is obviously something well beyond the ability of Wordpress, because it can barely handle what I’ve got going here already.

Anyway, one of the bummers about this blog has been performance. I started using Pair to host this thing last century, and while they’ve always been rock-solid, they’ve also been somewhat dated in their offerings and tools. I mean, when I thought I needed to move from Wordpress to some thing I wrote in Rails or whatever, I basically found it impossible to do anything except PHP unless I moved up a level or two on my package. Lately, I’ve been discouraged by the general performance and the fact that I have no CDN and this thing is hosted in Pittsburgh.

To be fair, it’s hard to tell if my site’s performance is because of my connection, the server I pay for, Wordpress, my configuration of Wordpress, or the sheer size of this thing. I’ve been looking with the P3 Plugin Profiler on the back end, and PageSpeed Insights on the front. I’ve messed around with the plugin config and switched SEO plugins, and that bought me about a half-second on page loads. I have no idea on how any of this works, but the general advice, in order, is to shell out for a good host, shell out for a CDN, look at your image situation, cut down the number of plugins, and cut down as much CSS stuff as you can. I think there are little tricks that could get this working slightly better, like switching themes, moving my archives links to another page, building my WP statically and hosting that in a CDN, or maybe finally giving up on WP and moving to Hugo or Jekyll or something else. I vaguely looked at moving to Ghost or moving to a hosted WP instance in Lightsail. The former was too limiting and the latter didn’t buy me much performance. It’s silly for me to waste time on this with the low amount of traffic this thing sees, but it’s an itch that’s hard to stop scratching.

The other thing I keep thinking of is funnels. How do people read this? How do they find it? Why do they stay? How do they come back? I don’t really market this thing at all, and I don’t fit any niche box that would make this go viral or get regular traffic. This is mostly me screaming into the void and hoping I can come back later and find something.

It makes me think back to the days of things like web rings and having a big list of favorite blogs on a page to find others and whatever else we used to do. This thing has an RSS feed, but it seems like nobody uses RSS anymore. I still use Feedly to read stuff, but everyone except three blogs have abandoned it. Is this because Google Reader is dead and nobody uses it, or is there some other reason like people “steal” content from feeds? No idea.

I think changes in the Google algorithm have made blogging organic content for the sake of organic content a lost cause. Twenty years ago, I could search for people involved in some niche hobby and find actual people, but now I just get travel links and shoe ads. I guess the big funnels are social media, but I don’t know that people leave their respective walled garden to go elsewhere and read content. And I can’t really post this stuff on TikTok or something. I guess if I had really snappy pull quotes, I could take just the text of that and put it over a video of a beach and play five seconds of a Taylor Swift song over it and people might see it. But not only is that work, it’s also stupid. I also keep thinking about how I’ve done mostly nothing with Substack, and maybe I should be pouring this stuff into that so people find it. Or not? I don’t know.

So, funnels. It’s an open question. I don’t know how I find content myself, let alone what others do.

The other big blocker here is I am far too busy with my own writing, and in deep on a project. I’m trying to finish the 18th book, or what I think might be the 18th. This thing originally started as a collection of short stories like The Failure Cascade, but it’s now almost as long as my second-longest book and will probably surpass it very soon. I’m trying to land this one by the end of the year, but every time I wrap up some little missing thing, I leave notes on three others. I think back in August, I thought I’d get this thing wrapped up by the first of September. Now we’re going into the back half of October, and I’m hoping December. Not a big deal if it’s not.

Starting in 2010, I forced myself to release at least a book a year, and got two on many of those years. It was one of those dumb self-publishing rules I thought I had to do, get something out to keep the long tail long, keep myself relevant, whatever. I now see no importance in that. I think I had a deep fear that if I missed a year, I’d miss two years, and then I’d wake up a decade later and wonder what happened.

I feel like I did that after Rumored was released - I did little things here and there, but I feel like the 00s were basically a lost decade for me. And I regret that, but I think the twist is that if I’d been productively writing that whole time, even without releasing anything, I would have been content with my output. And 2021-2023 were a wash for me, but I’ve kept busy this year, and that’s all that matters.

Lazy Sunday and I have not updated in a while. I’d normally do some giant bulleted list, but I’m out of bullets, so I’ll just ramble for a bit.

The main reason I haven’t updated is because I’ve been busy writing. After almost two years of trying to write and failing, I decided to shift my writing hours. Since 2010 when I started working from home on east coast time, I would write religiously from 3 to 5 PM. This started to fall apart when my work started shifting to the west coast office, and eventually, I found myself either working from 6 to 6 every day, or finishing early and being in a complete daze, unable to write. Moving to the hybrid schedule and being in the city half the time also made this schedule impossible. So, I decided on the early shift. I started waking up at 3:45 every morning, and writing until 7. It takes a minute to get my head on straight every morning, and I’m usually blacking out at about 7 or 8 at night. But it’s been very productive with the writing. It’s good to completely block out everything and spend the time in the shower thinking about the writing, then brain dump it all for a few hours, and start the work day relaxed, knowing the writing is done for the day.

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I don’t like to talk too much about works in progress, especially because my hard drive is littered with projects that never did and probably never will see the light of day. But the current one is a book of 20 stories, maybe a sort of successor to The Failure Cascade and Vol. 13. The main difference is that it’s much longer; it’s currently twice as long as Failure Cascade and not done yet. Most of my books were flash fiction, maybe what’s called a short-short story, between a thousand and two thousand words. FC had one story that was 5,000 words. This book has maybe five stories that long; one is three times that long. There’s still a lot of abstraction to the stories and it’s definitely not Raymond Carver or something. I don’t know if this is at all interesting to the reader, but I’ve enjoyed stretching things out a bit. The book has a title and a cover, which is a new one for me; I usually wait until the thing is 90% done (or more) and then freak out about what to do about that. I’d like to wrap this up by the end of the year, but I’m not too worried if that doesn’t happen.

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Something else I’ve been doing is a slight variation on the Richard Feynman method of “favorite problems.” His method was to come up with a list of a dozen big-picture problems he wanted to solve in his lifetime. Then, as he found new lessons, new sources, new information, or new inspiration, he’d take that and see how it applied to these open questions.

I’ve been bouncing around between projects too much, and have too many dead manuscripts and morgue files of pieces and parts lying around. So I started a list. And right now, half of the dozen and a half things I have on my list are dealing with reissues of old books (or not), but roughly eight of them are full-sized book projects. Aside from the aforementioned book, two others are 100,000+ word manuscripts that are past the first draft point, but in heavy disrepair. I still have this idea for “The Big Book” which is vaguely outlined and would be a 400,000-word, four-story novel that covers a few disparate things that all weave together perfectly by the end. I have a nostalgia book about the 90s (although I’m done with nostalgia) and there’s enough travel junk here to make a book or two, but I’m not interested in either.

Anyway, the method has been useful, because when I stall out on something, I go to the next thing on the list that interests me, or I start digging through the few million words I have in these various junk files and see what can be harvested for what.

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Something that’s not on the list is what to do with this and with all my other social media or whatever. I have a professional blog I haven’t touched since I posted about my MBA two years ago. I have the KonStack, which is largely dormant because I can’t figure out what goes there versus what goes here.

There are three basic problems, not to go into a diatribe about this:

1. Each different content pool has a different persona, and trying to focus on what I should be writing in each different place brings out this crippling self-censorship which totally blocks me.
2. The content pools have a certain overlap and I never know what to put where. Like when I take a nifty picture, does it go to Instagram? Do I use it as a heading here? Is it part of a Substack post? Do I need to go back to Flickr?
3. There are various dumb rules and requirements and problems that set exceptions to each pool. For example, this blog is public. I can assume that it’s being read by family members who I don’t want to read my stuff, and I have to limit what I say here. I have a completely locked down Facebook group where I post the most obscene or crazy memes and thoughts, but it only reaches a maximum of 40 people. Nobody looks at Flickr, ever. Certain stuff is only going into books, so I don’t want to burn it on posts and then have someone who buys the book realize they already read 37% of it months ago.

Etc. The real solution is to write what I want and not dictate what I do by what works for the algorithm or what other people expect or want or do. That’s what I’ve been doing, but it obviously means I do a lot less here and on other sites.

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I think travel is about done for the year. I had this wise idea that I was going to leave the country the week of the election, and blocked the time off. Then a couple of weeks ago, I threw my back out in probably the worst episode imaginable, and it completely immobilized me for almost a week. I spent about four days on the couch, unable to even sit up.  My back often goes out after flying halfway around the world, and it’s been getting increasingly worse. In Vietnam, I was completely immobile for the first morning I was in Saigon, and thought I was in serious trouble.

Now I’m starting to doubt my ability to take such long trips anymore. My back is mostly better now, maybe 90%. But I’m in food jail until further notice, so I can get some of this weight off my lower spine. And I’ll do whatever stretches and exercises they give me to do. Flying to Europe or whatever next month is out of the question. We might have some holiday travel, but that sort of depends on what happens next month, and I don’t want to get into that.

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I fired the con artist dentist who did my Invisalign earlier this year. When I got it taken off, he did a half-ass job getting the attachments off, and then started in on me about how I needed four crowns redone immediately, at a cost of five grand each. The last crown I had done was like $1800, and insurance picked up half of it. So, done. I went back to my old dentist, who is in a dead mall just south of where we used to live in South San Francisco. He did a few x-rays and said I needed a hundred-dollar filling at the root line of a back crown, and he polished off one of my front teeth that had the remainder of an attachment button on it, which was driving me nuts. I love this guy, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the mall is imploded and he retires, but I’ll keep going back to him until then.

It’s always weird to be back in the old neighborhood, and it gives me such 2008-2009 flashbacks. But it’s also changing very quickly, and a lot of what used to be car washes and fast-food joints on El Camino have quickly become vast 5-over-1 apartment buildings. Parts of the strip are the same, but others are radically different now. I decided to stop for lunch at an old favorite, which really hit the spot. The weather was perfect, and this was the first I’d left the house since the back incident.

I went to this low-key Mexican bar and grill, an unassuming brick building with a big hand-painted Fifties-looking sign and a horse statue on the roof, and a mural on the brick wall that just said “RESTAURANT - BAR.” Inside, two old guys nursed drinks at the bar, locked into a soccer game on the screen. A Mexican family were just finishing up lunch, but I otherwise had the place to myself. Aside from the TVs and the credit card machine, the inside of that restaurant could have been 1961 or 1979 or 2008. I got an incredibly good chimichanga plate for twenty bucks, a food jail furlough. I need to do that more often, instead of just shame-eating twenty bucks of Crunchwrap in my car. It was incredibly relaxing, as was the walk to my car and back.

Anyway. Time to reset for the week and avoid the Sunday Scaries.

Vol.13 rides again. I’ve revisited and republished my 13th book from 2016.

Let’s cut to the chase with the Amazon link: https://amzn.to/4e81lyi

For those who don’t remember, this was a book of 20 short stories and flash fiction pieces. It included two things that were in other zines, and three stories that were in my own zine, Mandatory Laxative #14.

Let’s ask the KonGPT what it was about:

Vol. 13 by Jon Konrath is an eclectic, absurdist work that blends surreal humor with societal satire. The collection of short stories and essays addresses a wide array of random yet often connected topics, including pop culture, existential musings, and sharp critiques of consumerism and modern life. With chapter titles like “Mariah Carey Is Punk as Fuck” and “The Kansas City Tofu Firebombing,” the content explores bizarre scenarios filled with dark humor. The chaotic narrative jumps from one vignette to the next, portraying a disjointed, almost hallucinogenic journey through a world where everything is skewed to the point of absurdity.

Konrath’s writing style is frenetic, with a voice that mixes cynicism and wit while layering in cultural references ranging from fast food chains to forgotten celebrities. The underlying tone is rebellious, subversive, and at times grotesque, capturing the disillusionment with American culture in the early 21st century. The stories invite the reader to experience a twisted version of reality where logic breaks down, leaving behind a vivid, often unsettling commentary on the absurdities of daily life .

As I did with The Failure Cascade and Book of Dreams, this re-visit involved a quick edit to fix minor typos. If you already own the book, you’re not getting any new content here, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find some questionable use of commas quashed. This publication was mostly a long-tail effort to get old writing back out there.

The original cover was a play on the Black Sabbath album Vol.4. Back in 2016, I labored to get the font and the look of it right. The curse was the use of “The Picture” which seemed like a good idea at the time, the height of that dumb meme. I won’t get into the exact details, but that meme is dead and I’m scrubbing it from everything possible. There was something great about having a piece of branding like that, but it also very firmly painted me in a corner persona-wise, and I’m happy to abandon it. I like the new cover a lot, and it was neat to make. Finding an icon for each story was a fun project. Is it weird to have this book sort of named after the Black Sabbath album and not have the cover? Whatever.

I previously said I like Book of Dreams like 95% and Failure Cascade maybe 75%. I would honestly say I like Vol.13 maybe 80%. There are a few cringe bits here, and I do fall into some of the same Konrath tropes that I repeat far too much. (Me and Fat Mike go to the 7-Eleven; someone babbling about something at a fast-food restaurant; I’m at a Kroger talking to some weirdo; a military strike in everyday life.) There are certain callbacks that I used to make as part of my “brand” that have been driven into the ground that I can’t erase: Mariah Carey, Lunchables, NyQuil, etc. I’m done (or trying to be done) with writing like that, but I can’t erase all of it.

There are some stories in here that I absolutely love. “The Metaphor of Poundcake” is one of my favorite stories ever, and has two threads that weave together perfectly. “#JustKilldozerThings” has some absolutely fabulous lines and exchanges in it. While most of my flash fiction hovers around 1000 words in this era, there are a lot of stories that stretch out for two or three times that. It’s similar to Failure Cascade (and my next book) in that the stories almost get too long to be flash, but still feel like exactly the right balance between punchiness and story.

Anyway, there it is. Now, on to the next one.

Today is an anniversary of sorts. Thirty years ago today, I decided to be a writer, decided to “identify” as a writer, started calling myself a writer. Actually, I probably didn’t put those words together on October 30th, 1993, and I definitely did not put my occupation as a writer on a 1040 form until at least a a few years later. But today was the day this whole thing really started.

I’ve told the story before, in different permutations, different mixes of fact and fiction, enough that I don’t even know what is real anymore, what I would tell someone if I had to. I mean, I’ve always been a writer to some extent, even if I didn’t know it. I had a poem published when I was in grade school; I wrote a lot of short stories and papers and whatnot when I was in high school and college. I’d already published zines by that fall, written stuff in other zines, and put thousands and thousands of words into USENET posts and forums. I’d even published a story in a university newspaper at that point. But I’d never thought of myself as a writer, never considered it as a vocation, a career, or even a hobby. I always thought, “Someday I will write a book” but never put any more thought into it than that.

The actual story of how this started is somewhat trite and stereotypical. I was struggling in a deep depression in the fall of 1993 — that year, really — and had been abandoned by someone I trusted. And sure, it was all my fault, but it was at a key junction in my life when a maelstrom of shit was falling down on me. I’d been kicked out of school and was on probation; I was unable to continue in the computer science department; I’d lost the scholarship that was paying my tuition; I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for a degree anymore. Most of my friends were graduating, getting jobs, getting married, moving away. I was stuck, didn’t know what was next.

The abandonment thing, I won’t get too into that. I was in this relationship that I got far too invested in, and I messed it up, and she left. I’ve blamed myself for it for decades, and then recently, I read a lot about attachment anxiety and adult attachment theory and realized the fix was in decades before I met this person, and my problems go back much further than 1993, and I really can’t get into any of that in the scope of this dumb little story. Short story long, I was very damaged on October 30, 1993, and I desperately needed to find some way out.

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In 1993, I lived at Colonial Crest apartments in Bloomington. (They no longer exist.) I did not have a car. I had a city bus pass, but the bus line was all screwy and didn’t run at night, so I walked, a lot. My apartment was 1.3 miles to the 17th Street office of UCS where I worked a few days a week. It was 2.2 miles to Ballantine Hall, more or less the center of campus. At the very least, I’d walk about two hours a day, every day. I would listen to a tape walkman for all of these walks, plus whenever I was sitting around campus, working on a computer, whatever. And I was spending a lot of time sitting around campus, because I’d have a class, then have 90 minutes of down time until the next class, half an hour in the student union, 20 minutes waiting for a computer, an hour eating Pizza Hut Express, whatever.

The gist of this: I spent a lot of time alone, in my head, beating myself up, in three different ways: long walks, dead time in public places, and of course the hours and hours I spent in front of computers, screwing around on the immediately-pre-web Internet. I needed some way to not do that, or do something productive with that time, and through strange kismet, this sort of fell into place.

Once again, this is horribly cliché, but my friend Ray told me I should check out the spoken word albums of Henry Rollins, who had not yet recorded “Liar” and shown up on Beavis and Butthead, but aside from the post-Black Flag Rollins Band, he was about six albums deep into the spoken word racket, and had published maybe twenty books or chapbooks. So a few days after the 30th, I bought The Boxed Life, a two-tape album of his spoken word and started walking and listening to it, memorizing it.

The whole thing seems stupid now. I think there are various machismo stereotypical male idols that men of my age back then latch onto, be it Charles Hemingway or Charles Bukowski or Joe Rogan or whoever else. In one sense, it almost pains me that I got so wound up with this thing. But I felt like I had nothing, no direction, and there were far worse things to get tangled up with. Even mentioning the male loneliness epidemic pisses about 50% of the population off, but there is a real phenomenon of early twenty-somethings not knowing what to do with their life, and turning to whatever idiot has the biggest mouth. Nobody has fathers; nobody can open up to male friends. So you’re going to have guys who get in that rut who suddenly find a Doors record and lock into Jim Morrison and start wearing leather pants and writing shitty poetry. It happens.

At some point, I thought, “Hey, this Rollins guy just talks about what happens to him and writes it in notebooks. I should get a notebook.” So I got a notebook, and I started writing in it, in those weird little gaps of time in my day, journaling from lunch or at a bus stop or late at night. I also hunted down all the Rollins books. I wasn’t a book collector at that time, and would maybe passively read a non-computer book a few times a year. But I read his stuff, then read everything he referenced: Henry Miller, Bukowski, Fante, Burroughs. That got me into the beats, which got me into postmodern fiction, which got me to experimental, which got me to a room full of books. I started hoarding, reading constantly. I’m embarrassed by my early influences, but they got me to my later influences, so what can you do.

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The little 80-sheet notebook I bought at the campus book store for $1.39 turned into several journals, which turned into short stories, one of which became the start of my first book. I never healed the wound, but I filled the void. That particular relationship did not heal for years, but I now realize that it wasn’t the hole from the missing person, but a hole in my soul that existed since birth. She was just a symptom of the problem.

I wrote. I wrote badly, but it slowly got better. I slowly got better. I mean, I never got “better” like I was somehow cured. It took me years to stop thinking about her every hour of every day, how I was betrayed, how it was all my fault. It is mostly gone, and I can’t even remember what her voice sounds like. But last night I had a nightmare about her, woke up at 3:30 AM with my fight-or-flight fully triggered, didn’t even try to go back to bed and got up and hit the shower to start my day. There have been a half-dozen people who have done far worse to me since, and maybe the dream was about one of them. Anyway, writing was the one constant. It got me past this, until it didn’t.

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The writing continued until 2021, when it stopped. There are a lot of threads to this story that recur: the wound, the loneliness, abandonment, frustration, emptiness, defeat. In 2021, I tried to tell myself I was no longer a writer, because the pain and frustration of my writing “career” caught up to me and I simply could not write anymore. So I quit writing, said I wasn’t a writer. The void remained. Nothing could fill it. Believe me, I tried everything. Nothing worked.

So, I came back. I think. Did I? Am I still a writer? Am I writing now? The void still remains, but maybe I’m making progress.

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Bill James - the baseball statistics guy (you know, moneyball, Brad Pitt, whatever) - had a quote about writing that always stuck with me:

I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.

I always felt that I fell into writing because of that, because of my ability to get lost in words, in absence of being able to get lost in people. My frustration with love and life drove me to a universe of communication in a much deeper format. I don’t know what I’m doing now with writing, or what will come next, or what I need to do. But I know that it all started when I fell into this exactly thirty years ago today.