An Important Message to You, from the Editor, About the New Amazing!

Please allow me to introduce my large depressed adult son

Hey there . . . 

. . . ah, shit, you know how it is. Might fuck around and put something or other on the blog.

So I’ve called you all together today for a reason, and said reason would be: the announcement of the conclusion of one era of this blog, and perhaps a nod towards the next. 

In the first place, I am overjoyed to announce today that Galaxy of Zeroes is finished. It ended up representing probably about twice as much of my life and the life of this blog as originally conceived. It ended up being not such a bad thing, really, as the circumstances which led to the elongation of the project were the same circumstances that made it almost impossible to imagine doing else regularly in terms of posting. Galaxy of Zeroes was a way to keep the blog at least semi-coherent during an era when I knew regular posting was otherwise going to be a bit of a stretch.

It was also designed for the Patreon, as something that could be compiled as a book and given to subscribers, which is where it is right this moment: for the price of a subscription fee of $1, you can download an ebook of the whole thing, instantly. As in, right now. 

That’s the same price - a scant $1 - that gets you ebooks of Tomorrow Is Always The Best Day Of My Life and Whistling in the Dark: A (Very) Short Book About They Might Be Giants. Which, I mean, maybe seems kind of low, until you remember it adds up to $12 a year, and even if you do nothing else, that’s basically two whole books and another small booklet for $12. You’d pay that in the store!

There’s a lot more you can get for $2 a month, however . . . including fiction. 

Ever new issue of The Hurting Gazette features two chapters of fiction and one nonfiction feature. For the whole of the magazine’s existence - all sixteen issues - the last feature (besides links to my Journal writing) has been Galaxy of Zeroes. Now that that is done I’m not going to nail down the last section as being any one thing. I can tell you that I hope the next issue has a music essay in it. It’s not going to be the first chapter of anything but itself, and it might be like that for the foreseeable future. 

The thing about the Patreon is that even if it updates fitfully, there’s actually a lot behind the paywall, enough so that I know not many people have probably read everything yet. There’s literally like eight or nine books worth of stuff up there in various formulations. 

And this blog post here is meant to announce not just the end of Galaxy of Zeroes - and that book being available in its entirety on my Patreon - but also hopefully the return to something more resembling actual posting. Like I know I’ve been threatening to do but - gosh dang, I really would like to get back to something resembling regular posts. I mean, I spent a couple years building a backlog of stuff for the Patreon, maybe at some point I should write something pithy about old superhero comic books. You know, for purely mercenary reasons.

For a long time my life was in a state of flux, and it made sense to use the blog more for serializing extended works - which, I know, meant people didn’t have to check in that frequently, so they got out of the habit. But now that my life is, if not I more stable in fact, at least more stable in intention, maybe I might just, you know, one of these days talk some shit about Batman, as one does.

But, can I just say, they turned the power off for almost two days up here? PG&E ain’t winning any friends or influencing people in the state of California. 

Isn’t it wonderful?