Plague of Euphoria 1.x

From the desk of the Editor-in-chief.

Welcome, Readers, to the 551st monthly installment of the ongoing saga known as ACTUAL magazine. We thank you for reading and for making us the foremost publication in the world of fashion. The issue you are holding in your hand right now has been a long time in the making and we’re very glad to have you be a part of it. It’s the beginning of a new chapter in our story. A shift in tone. A changing of the guard to the next generation.

We’ve settled in to our new headquarters in the Media district of lower Blackheath. The city of Essex is fast becoming the world’s premier fashion destination and in order to best keep our finger on the pulse, we had to move on from our cherished beginnings on the golden coast and head to the jewel of the eastern seaboard. Much of our family could not make it with us. Some of them made a choice to leave us. But most, in the interest of full disclosure, had to be let go due to creative differences. We wish them luck.

The halls of our new east coast offices are filled with fresh faces. We have a new creative core of our team comprised of young, remarkably talented geniuses who will lead fashion into the next era with what they show us within the pages of this publication. Photographers, writers, experts, designers, artists of all stripes. Out with the old, in with the new. The whole world is watching. All eyes are on ACTUAL. And we are ready.

Project Update (Plague)

After thee years spent on this trainwreck of a novel, I’ve decided to get back to basics. Re-familiarize myself with the fundamentals. And by that I mean trying to figure out what this book is supposed to be ABOUT and what exactly I’m trying to SAY with it.

Here’s everything that came to mind about Plague of Euphoria. Just free writing. Putting down whatever comes to mind in hopes of discovering my main point:

Mid-Twenties malaise. The pursuit of your own unique creative voice. Artifice. Disillusion. Death. Emotional/psychological abuse. What it means to ‘rise to the occasion’.

Inspiration. Obsession. Detachment. Disossiation. Beauty. The pursuit of an ill-defined, impossible ideal. Idolatry. Disappointment. Bitterness. Resentment. Fear.

Feminism. Academia. Intellectualism.. Romance as hollow affectation. Courtship as pantomime. Moral absolutes. Commitment as simply resignation to permanence.

Inevitabilities are resented on principle. And love is one of them. No one likes to see forever and no one rushes gleefully into the inevitable. You wait. And you bargain. Until you give in.

Indoctrination. Re-education. Living in perdition. Experiencing eternity. Recovering from spiritual ruin. Monsters. Violence. Curses. Blind faith. Devotion. Family. Need. Maturity.

Missed connections. Close but not quite. Consistent failure to communicate. Secrecy. Conspiracy. Paranoia.

Art. The community of creativity. Personal fulfillment in life and the cure for loneliness. Stagnation. Insecurity drives all actions. Irresponsibility and sick thrill.

Unhealthy, sometimes fatal things feel good to do. “Going in to the light” is simply a chemical euphoria your body is giving you so you don’t fight it. So you’re not afraid.

Euphoria thus is an omen of death, whether it be physical, emotional or psychological. Euphoria is anesthetic for something killing you. Pride goeth before the fall.

But not going into the light means willfully staying in the dark, viewing regression and progress. Eventually you forget how to express positive feelings if you’re even able to recognize them at all.

Excess. Indulgence. Pathology. Diligence. Determination. All positivity and everything good become interchangeable. It becomes a plague. You never know what it is you’re doing right or how to make a fleeting sense of happiness or joy into something distinct and real.

Getting too cerebral. Losing your sense of self and your humanity. Aimless ambition. Panicking under the pressure of your own potential. Overflowing with passion and desire and motivation but no tangible goal and nothing to do with it. But it all has to go somewhere. And it’s rarely a helpful place.

Vicious cycles. Self-negation. Redefining weaknesses as strengths. Not ignoring the underlying problem but actively making it worse and doing it in the name of progress.

Not allowing yourself to be happy. Going OUT OF YOUR WAY to sabotage yourself and allow your life to plateau. Settling for good enough when you know it’s not good enough. Because good things lead to habits lead to routine leads to permanence leads to death.

It’s just a fear of what’s next that comes with a whole host of unhealthy, even psychotic or dangerous coping mechanisms. My first two books were about recovering from past trauma. This one is about growing up and moving into the future. Getting out of your own way.

It’s a love story. It’s just a tale of two star-crossed lovers and the cast of dangerous, unhinged psychopaths ruining their lives. It won’t be a beach read. It won’t be fun. It’ll be dense and experimental and weird and off-putting more often than not. But still. It’s a lovely, lovely love story. With a pretty pink cover.

Soundtrack (AP)

I’m not sure if this is going to work for anyone or not, but I put together a playlist/soundtrack last night mostly due to boredom.  It was a lot of fun to make and I feel like these songs are perfect for the scenes with which they correspond. Choosing the punk songs for Meredith’s tattoo scene (3.3) and the club songs for Phoebe’s cocaine chapter (4.14) were especially enjoyable.

So here’s hoping this enhances the reading experience for you somewhat.

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST:  AP

Part 1 Closed Reduction

1.2 :: Radiohead – I Might Be Wrong
1.9 :: jj – Angels (CS)
1.11 :: Massive Attack – Atlas Air
1.11 :: Banks – Before I Ever Met You
1.15 :: Moloko – Day For Night
1.16 :: Earth, Wind & Fire – September
1.19 :: Squarehead – Elegante
1.20 :: Crass – Banned From the Roxy
1.22 :: EMA – Anteroom
1.22 :: The Dagons – Sugarine

Project Update (Plague)

New cover art for the upcoming Plague of Euphoria, courtesy of Aaron Null at Vervor.

 

Project Update (Plague)

The plan was to jump off the Golden Gate bridge.

It was the Ides of August. The first week of the month where I traditionally feel especially suicidal (it would take too long to fully explain the history of that). A lot of things kind of came together at once. I quit my job suddenly.

Project Update (No Night and No Day)

New cover art for No Night and No Day, courtesy of Aaron Null at Vervor.

Plague of Euphoria 1.1

Snow fell in a blanketing white out of freezing ashes from the black abyss that wrapped itself around the world that night. Black and white were the only options down to the details, leaving no room for nuance or complexity. Only blunt questions that came with answers too bleak, detached and chilling to think about asking another. The blue lights marking emergency phones, the green of a traffic light in the distance, the red brake lights of cars, the paranoid yellow of the lights lining the walkway. Black and white. Everything only black and white. And nothing else.

The campus of Stapleton University was deserted. It was a weeknight. Getting late. Midterms were going on. The main quad, referred to by students as the Front Lawn, seemed to sprawl outward from the main library, especially that night, forever. The iconic library building, on the cover of all Stapleton brochures, quickly faded into nothing in the immediate past. And walkways of the vast Front Lawn offered no attainable future.

Valerie Bristol was walking home that evening in a black and white present with no resolution.

Project Update (Plague)

Now that I’ve looked into it a little more thoroughly, my suspicions have been confirmed and I’m now faced with the undeniable fact that the manner in which I launched my two novels was all wrong. All. Wrong. So I’m doing what I can to play catch up and do what I can with them. Worst case scenario, they become entries in the all-important backlog. I’ll try to launch Plague in a more professional, knowledgeable way and hopefully I’ll have a little more success with it. Due date, by the way, is tentatively set for January 2012.

So yeah, I’ve been trying to blog a little here. By the way, BIG big thanks to my production assistant Chloe (just one word, like Madonna) for all of his (that’s right, his) help in conducting the character interviews. I hear he’s got some good ones coming up. Understandably, though, there’s only so much he can do for me and I’m still coming to terms with the idea that I’ll have to start really, seriously using Twitter (@eucaine) as a primary means of getting a little bit of attention. Soon I’m going to try to get some reviews for No Night and AP, though I don’t know if I’ll get many because they’ve already been released and reviewers don’t tend to like that. I’m really going to have to do some serious digging and poking around the online literary community to find people who seem like-minded; people who would be receptive to my work and the way I think.  It’ll be made all the more difficult due to my extremely antisocial, insular, SHY demeanor that makes it very difficult to approach people I don’t know and to think of interesting things to tweet about on a consistent basis.

Here’s the thing that’s really impeding my progress: I don’t really have a target audience.

Literary agents who read No Night all seemed to say in their rejection letters that I had basically invented a genre – too mature for YA, too teenager oriented for the adult literary crowd. And when you’re a complete unknown, that’s not a good thing. They didn’t even TRY to make it sound like a good thing. It’s not salable. As for AP, which was the book I was immeasurably confident about, nobody requested reading that one. I guess the premise seemed too unpleasant or silly or both.

The point is, though, I don’t write with “target audiences” in mind. I kind of intended No Night for around the 17-25 age range, and AP for people in their 20s and 30s, but really any adult or adult-minded person could read my stuff. I explore a lot of general themes and there’s usually something for everyone to identify with on some level. But there’s a whole lot of cursing. And illicit drug use. And sex. And of course, graphic violence. There’s NO sentimentalism, very little comic relief, and almost never a happy ending. At the same time, though, my books are always thoughtfully written. I pour everything I have into them and if I’ve done anything right, I’ve hopefully come up with some memorable scenes, well-drawn characters, poignant moments and stories that will stick with you long after you’ve read them. Basically everything you’d look for in a good work of literary fiction, only wrapped in a package of highly stylized transgressive surrealism that can’t accurately be compared to anything else.

It’s not a good pitch.

Project Update (Plague)

I know this doesn’t mean anything to anyone, but I just had to mention this on the blog. After months of stagnation with this project and coming very, extremely close to either putting it on hold or ditching it completely, I think I’ve finally figured this thing out. I totally re-structured and re-outlined Plague of Euphoria in a way I had never thought of before today and I, uh…wow, gosh…I think I finally figured out how to write this thing. Sorry, I’m a little emotional. There’s just no other feeling quite like resolving really, scary bad months long writer’s block.

Now Available (Agents Provocateurs)

 

OVERVIEW:
By the time City Hall spokesman Sean Delancy discovers that his new girlfriend is the serial killer responsible for the mounting death toll terrifying citizens and keeping him stammering during press conferences, he is already falling in love with her and may be in too deep to do anything but see the relationship to its natural end; regardless of what that entails.

SYNOPSIS:
At 30 years old, Sean is the new Press Secretary for the mayor of a major metropolitan city. He is a meek, boyish former seminary student who lacks gravitas and doesn’t command a lot of respect with his staff. In the absence of the increasingly reclusive and eccentric Mayor Keeth, Sean is thrown into the spotlight, suddenly becoming the face of the administration during an election year. A wave of brutal murders is sweeping the city and baffling police while Sean knows exactly who they are looking for: a 19 year old girl named Morgan Bishop who has been missing from her suburban hometown for weeks, presumed to be dead.

While Sean struggles to ignore what he hears about Morgan’s horrifying actions and tries to convince himself that their love is real, he routinely issues the same basic statement on behalf of City Hall whenever another dead body is found:

No new information.

Agents Provocateurs is a story richly textured in paranoia, tension and surrealism. This second installment of Jeremy Hurd’s Cry For Help series is a post-modern study of maturity, virtue, and romance. Under extreme self-imposed pressure that continually tests the limits of his meager capabilities, Sean is forced to hastily work through all of his private, shameful issues while very much in the public eye.