Non finito

I really enjoyed season two of The White Lotus. The mystery was engaging but what I most appreciated was its quality of a short story: the glimpses of lives. I thought of Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham and Patricia Highsmith. Tales on that scale used to be told in print.

I do find it depressing that viewers apparently need the series' ending explained to them. Have stories become so hard to understand? Good luck with L'Avventura. My first experiences of books and movies were often ones of not understanding, and this was part of the enjoyment. I can accommodate the notion that something may or may not be resolved. Departure Lounge was written like that.

This month I read Veronica by Mary Gaitskill, which is terrific. It made me think a lot about plot. There isn't one, really – the book is a narrative of experience, one sharp thing after another. Keeping the reader going requires a lot of detail. Maybe it's a mood, also. If the writer's comfortable with what they're doing, the reader goes along.

Now playing: All dressed in blue

 

1. 'Black Latex' (Oliver & Surrender! Remix) – Desire 
2. 'Dry County' – The B-52s
3. 'He Will Disappear' – Robodani
4. 'Afternoon Sun' (trams for hire remix) – Desmond Cheese
5. 'Weather Report' – Fishmans

Blue Hotel named in Best Ofs

The New Zealand Listener named Blue Hotel as one of its Best Books of 2022: the "long-awaited return by Taylor is a dark and funny tale set in 1980s Auckland that veers from BDSM dungeons to corporate raider offices and is full of striking characters and sparkling writing."

You can order Blue Hotel here.

New short story out now

Invisible is my 2022 Christmas card. It's about a crypto trader who travels to Paris in the festive season to see an old friend. Out now on digital – Invisible is $0.99 USD from:

• Amazon Kindle
• Apple
• Barnes & Noble
• Gardners
• Google Play
• Kobo
• Odilo
• Scribd
• Smashwords

Not in a book store near you

Southern Cross Crime editor Craig Sisterson reviews Blue Hotel. Blue Hotel can be ordered from Booktopia, or possibly from The Book Depository or Fishpond or Unity Books.

New short story coming Nov 28

Thank you space expert

 

I used to write because it made a difference to my life and now I write because it keeps things the same.

Skinner box

Jaron Lanier on Twitter:

"When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men."

Full article here.

What I've been reading

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle To Get Inside Our Heads, by Tim Wu

An historical analysis that brings the reader right up to where we are now and too abruptly stops. Along the way we are taken through the different industries that rely on using up time in our life that we're never getting back. For younger readers there are footnotes to explain technologies such as a floppy disk or a cord telephone. The lessons from needy media and the novelty of new tech will never get old.

Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating The Deadliest Wave Of The Opioid Epidemic, by Ben Westhoff

As a teen I read an essay in The Economist on the cocaine industry which concluded that the profit margins were so great, nothing could stop it. Update: fentanyl could. Nothing is fun anymore, even the drugs. Fentanyl is Russian roulette with fewer possibilities: a quotidian headfuck with all the atmosphere and cultural richness of a Skinner box. Every generation gets the drugs it deserves. 

Facebook: The Inside Story, by Steven Levy

Levy's book is overlong in places and like Wu's comes up short because the story is not over yet but there is much to enjoy and learn from here. I deleted Facebook years ago and have never looked back. My line was that human beings are natural addicts and if you're going to be addicted to something, social media is better than cigarettes but it turns out social media is demonstrably as harmful as any substance addiction and the toll on greater society is much worse. If you don't believe me read this book, and also ...

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, by Max Fisher

This. Fisher's book is the one that kicked off all this associated reading. His facts are cold and his analysis is hard. A lot of what he talks about overlaps with these other titles, in particular his observation that the US VC startup economy and digital scales of manufacturing set the bar for all other industries now, with harrowing results. One example is:

The Devil's Playbook : Big Tobacco, Jul, And The Addiction Of A New Generation, by Lauren Etter

... our old addiction of smoking. Lauren Etter's account of the clash between Big Tobacco's agrarian establishment and Silicon Valley's vaping culture does a good job of humanising the story, which does take the fun out of it (I am concerned to not align my values with all those Angry Concerned Parents – many characters in my novels smoke up a storm) but her deep detailing of government regulations, lobbying and corporate gamesmanship touches on all the above, weirdly: regulations, startup culture, viral marketing, more social media bullshit.

What I'm listening to, and a new short story

I'm listening to

• Soberish – Liz Phair. This is really good. It's warm and clever. Her lyrics have always been good but something happened musically where she got in with some mainstream producers (Liz Phair, 2003), knocked out a perfect pop album (Somebody's Miracle, 2005), played around with textures (Funstyle, 2010) and then folded back everything she'd learned into her earlier stuff. Soberish is a classic rock album that's way smarter than a classic rock album. (Guess why I like her.)
• Deluxe – Harmonia. Classic (pre?) motorik beat. Excellent walking music. I do a lot of walking now. Too much.
• Indestructible – Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Blakey is so alive – his music always makes you sit up. This is his final Blue Note album, issued 1964 – which was a good year.
• Mercurial World – Magdalena Bay. My favourite new band since Khruangbin and as talented as fuck. 'All you do' is Burt Bacharach with an M83 chorus. My definition of pop is a song you listen to, then listen to again, then again ... They have a Robert Smith durability. Speaking of which:
• 'And Nothing is Forever' – The Cure. A new Cure album is on the way, apparently, and if this is a live preview then I'm all in. Who would have predicted that Robert Smith would age so gracefully? I hear Moonface in it, too. Definitely passes the over and over test. 

I have a new short story out. Dream Machine Winona is about a road trip and Beat poets and art. It's available on all the usual digital platforms for $0.99 USD – links below:

• Apple Books
• Amazon Kindle
• Barnes & Noble
• Rakuten Kobo
• Odilo
• Scribd
• Smashwords

This is Fridays now: upload a short story, code a sell button. I write every day, and then spend an hour fiddling with online stuff. The web is a choke point. Once you get past it, it's all just words. I'm working on a new short story that will be out in time for Christmas.

Fun is central to the creative process

I have a bunch of short stories that will appear over the next few months: a sort of ghost story, a sort of science fiction story, a crime-like story, a picaresque thing. After finishing a novel, writing short fiction cleanses the palate. It's like doing short reps after a workout. I'm having fun with it, and fun is central to the creative process.

There aren't a lot of outlets for short stories now. Some will appear in other publications and others I will publish as standalone ebooks. I should probably promote my digital titles more than I do. My original motivation for e-publishing was to preserve my writing rather than publicise it. Weird, I know.

Since then digital publishing has really taken off. When I started it was speculative; now it's mainstream. I've been pleased and surprised by how many people said they preferred to read Blue Hotel as an ebook. As an author it makes you think a lot about how to keep people reading. I love the idea of the reader swiping through a story late at night, on a bus, on a train.

Recently played

1. Magdalena Bay – ‘All you do’
2. Destroyer – ‘The Raven’
3. Beyoncé – ‘Formation’
4. Glass Candy – ‘Beautiful Object’
5. Sly and The Family Stone – ‘Let Me Have It All’

Written in pain, written in awe

My earlier novels such as Departure Lounge and Shirker were riffs on crime fiction. Labelled neo-noir (I'm cool with that), they took aspects of the genre – including the audience's expectations – and shuffled them like a deck of cards. Departure Lounge was about a victim who was never found, and focused on the characters' conflicting memories of her, Rashomon style. That the mystery was never solved, or at best remained ambiguous and / or mythical, was part of the reading experience. Departure Lounge was about how loss felt.

Shirker was about a protagonist who had cheated death, and who lived off others vampirically. (There's a Wilhemina in it.) His presence in the story ruptured the other characters' view of themselves: a lot of it was about how a person's identity survives.

At least, that's how I remember it. Generally speaking I don't read my books after they're finished. A lot of the fun of writing is solving the puzzle of what the book is, or wants to be. Once that's done you move on. An author's favourite book is always the next one.

Nevertheless as the dust settles on Blue Hotel I can see my previous novels in it: Shirker's masked identities; Departure Lounge's missing girl; the addictions of Electric; the K Road walked in Heaven. The role of painting and art in the story is an idea that was central to The Church of John Coltrane. Finding all those novels to purchase, including Blue Hotel is a mystery for the reader to solve. Consider it another riff on the crime genre: the reader as detective, the printed novel as the beautiful corpse.

Hard to find

Where do you get your books from? In the last year I didn’t purchase from the same retailer twice. I read in paperback, casebound, secondhand, new and two ebook formats. Gone are the days when everything stacked up evenly on the same shelf.

My new noir novel Blue Hotel is out now in paperback. You can look for it in stores in New Zealand and Australia or order it online. If print’s not your thing, the digital edition is available to purchase and download instantly. This is the new world.

Blue Hotel paperback (Brio Books, 2022):

• Unity Books
• Booktopia
• Amazon
• Book Depository
• Fishpond
• Wheelers

Blue Hotel ebook:

• Apple Books
• Amazon Kindle
• Google Play
• Rakuten Kobo

Noir in your pocket

Craig Sisterson in The Listener describes my new noir novel Blue Hotel as 'full of depth, striking characters, sparkling writing, and a rich sense of time and place'. The print edition is out August 25 but you can read the ebook edition right now at the following links:

Amazon Kindle

Apple Books

Booktopia

Google Play

Rakuten Kobo

What I'm consuming

Writing a novel is pushing a boulder up a hill and being published is watching it roll down the other side. It's wonderful but you'll have to push the boulder back up again. Blue Hotel is out in August, COVID shipping times permitting, so in the meantime I am on a sort of holiday. I completed the penultimate draft of the next novel in the Ray Moody trilogy. I am working on some short stories. And I'm reading, watching, listening to, among other things:

• The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo
• The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes
• Capitani Season two
• The Bear
• Labyrinthitis – Destroyer
• Collapse – Jared Diamond
• Range of Light – S. Carey
• Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045 Season two

Lake tide

Ozark ended on exactly the right note. I read a bunch of reviews of the last season just after it came out and the tone was generally negative – 'substance over style' and so on, which always reminds me of the contemporary critics who said the same of Bladerunner and Heat. I am very bored by the interwebs' ranting about character arcs and storylines and beats and acts. The story is the story: shut up and watch and/or read.

Ozark was dark but not as fundamentally dark as Breaking Bad or The Sopranos. It was Ozzie and Harriet do crime; the parents who knew too much – more the Addams Family or the Munsters – so it was perfect that it ended with wickedness. The condensed final seasons, usually a bad sign, added levity by expediting the very grim elements before we got bored or bummed out. This was good craft and black comedy, and (most) of the characters we wanted to get away, did. Filed away to be watched again.

New novel BLUE HOTEL available for pre-order

My new novel Blue Hotel is published August 2022.

Blue Hotel is a noir detective novel set in New Zealand, 1987: brick cell phones; two TV channels; home taping is killing music.

On a Saturday at midnight in a North Island tourist trap a stranger dressed in black leather walks down to the water and is gone.

The stranger, Blanca Nul was a visitor to the small, grey country. There are rumours the tourist modelled in a pornographic magazine. The rumours fly.

Ray Moody chases the story but he's in the drink himself. He crashes at the scene of the crime and is lamed. The reporter kills his career.

Then one year to the day after she first disappeared, the dead tourist reappears — only to die again. The body double is Ray's second chance. Rewriting Blanca's story will be his comeback.

The trail of missing lives draws him deep into the underworld. Ray will find the truth. But his story can never run.

Blue Hotel is published August 2022. Available for pre-order at Brio Books and Booktopia.

Social networks are people

I don't have many regrets but being on Twitter is one of them. I joined out of curiosity and didn't use the account for years; ditto Instagram. I quit Facebook and never looked back but Instagram was pretty and Twitter was silly so I let them hang around and inevitably fell into using both. Now Instagram is homework and Twitter is poisoning minds. 

Because a social network is nothing more than a collection of users, criticising it triggers an implicit emotional blackmail. Hating on it is hating its members, which includes your friends and followers and people you follow. So I can't dump on Twitter entirely. And I have a new novel coming out in August, so now is not the time to go dark.

Do social networks ever change? Murdoch couldn't change MySpace. Zuckerberg can't change Facebook. Tumblr and Blogger haven't self-organised into sentient beings while we've all been away. TikTok and Snapchat are like Instagram used to be: just one dumb idea. Because they're simple they can be used for many things. But to maintain that audience they can never go beyond that one dumb idea.

Screen

The Andy Warhol Diaries never existed as such. They began as a record of business expenses the artist rang in to his assistants, including Brigid Polk; editor Pat Hackett transcribed the artist's calls, apparently giving pages to Warhol to sign off as she went, and published the collection in 1989, after his death. The collection is more analogous to a blog or Twitter feed in the nascent days of the web when readers didn't police those comments either.

Previously Polk and Hackett (along with Bob Colacello and Steven M.L. Aronson) were behind The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), published in 1975, during the artist's lifetime, which is more consciously articulated to support Warhol's image in the (near) prime of his career.

It was the approach of both books to present all the artist's half-ideas and murmurings as being on the same level. The 2022 Netflix documentary The Andy Warhol Diaries amplifies this by recreating Warhol's voice with AI that is universally flat. There's no lightness to this mouthpiece, no camp, no variation in tone – nothing to signal to the less discerning viewer what might be unthinking or earnest, important or irrelevant, colourful or dark.