The First Stack

It's been wild.

It’s finna drop forty-one degrees over the next couple hours. My son is building skyscrapers of LEGOs, just stacks on stacks of multi-colored bricks going high up as they can before they topple. But if you ask the kid, he’s building robots. And if you ask him what time it is, he’ll say six, even though it’s nine. As if I was looking at the clock upside down when announcing that it’s bedtime.

We’re listening to Hikaru Utada, a nightly ritual, though I don’t know what the song is called or how to type it here. Something in Japanese. I love this song.

My latest novel Mercy is out now. It’s a hillbilly cyberpunk fable of a father and son going toe-to-toe with a bloodthirsty god. Some people been fucking with it already. I usually keep the stories close to home, writing bout Third Coast hoodrat shit—swastika-tatted wiggers with holes in their heads, haunted trailer homes, zombie dog fights sponsored by Monster Energy—but this one’s a bit of a departure with two-headed deer and moon-poisoned water and cyborgs. Lowkey, though, it’s closer to the chest than anything I’ve written before. Even the autobiographical shit. I wrote all about how Mercy came out in a feverish five-night sprint after scrapping the book I thought it was going to be and starting all over. You can read that on the homie Eddy’s page.

I also recently wrote about breaking away from my art hoe tendencies, so maybe the whole transition from surreal ghetto autifiction into bizarre cyberpunk pulp will seem more organic after reading that, I dunno. It’s over on the Bestseller page, aka J. David Osborne’s blog, aka the Broken River joint that the whole crew will soon be posting up at regularly, self included.

I’ll keep this site regulated to link round-ups, mostly. Updates on my Cyberpunk 2077 progress, what I’m listening to or reading or whatever. I’m simultaneously writing the first two books in a cyberpunk series that’ll start dropping next year and probably run til I’m dead. I was hyped on both ideas so decided to write both at the same time. It’s fun.

Agitator been blowing up. If you don’t know, that’s the free-flowing art manifesto by working-class independent novelists J. David Osborne and yours truly. An intimate, no-holds-barred exploration of purpose, craft, and spirituality through the lens of extreme Japanese cinema, anime, and manga. Where Thelemic ponderings and thoughts on the craft of writing are reoccuring themes inside beanbag chair musings on the films of Miike and Tsukamoto, the writings of Murakami and Miura, and the battles of Goku and Vegeta. Too crass for academia and too profound to be ignored. Agitator is the vibe. We’re turning the show into a whole-ass channel of bonus episodes, film commentary, our own short films, and essays expanding on the ideas and practices presented on the show. Don’t sleep on it.

Been making the rounds appearing on some of my favorite podcasts lately. I’ll let some more drop and make that its own post.

Tryna get into The White Lotus and The Peripheral. They’re both good so far. Oh, and Yellowjackets. I really fuck with that one. I’ve seen the first two episodes of each of these shows. I dunno how people watch so much TV, or claim to, at least. 2x speed? That’d be nuts. Steve Zahn talking bout his balls in double-time chipmunk voice. Haha, fuck outta here. I’ll just slowly chip away at these episodes on normal speed. Give me something to entertain myself with while washing dishes.

Aight, kid’s asleep now, I think that’ll do it for the first stack.