Before I talk about GOD$, I should let you know that No Country has launched a Patreon, meaning that Kris and I are doing an extra hour of content each week. The third “FULL EPISODE” drops today at the same time as this blog. We are going into depth with Kris’s idea of the Crystal Radio / Pirate Radio / Ghost Radio. The overall idea posits Culture as a field, a kind of cosmic force that infects humans, rather than the typically understood model of humans generating culture. Along the way we’re creating a model of eccentric inquisitive amateurism, of learning how things work and what words mean, as language is the medium through which Culture communicates. The Pirate Radio aspect deals with the communal aspect, of using the tools of modernity to broadcast and interact, and finally, the Ghost Radio refers to the signal itself, and how to separate it from the noise. It’s a fun, big project, and we’d love to see you come participate!
Speaking of big, fun projects, I have relaunched my internet novel from 2013, God$ Fare No Better. Eight years ago, when I was living in Oklahoma, before my writing output went south, I started posting “chapters” of a vague, cool thing to WordPress. It involved interdimensional assassins and drugs that slowed time…you can download it here.
Here is an overview of the project from its new home at Substack:
God$ Fare No Better is a surrealist pulp science fiction crime novel, with new chapters posted several times a week. Serpent assassins and post-apocalyptic cyborgs clash in a world unmoored from time. Dimensions crash into each other. Plot lines stop and start at random. No end in sight. No oversight. No real editing. Spontaneous chapters and directionless storytelling. Meandering about, discovering itself in real time. The only goal here is to entertain myself and write my way out of a hole. Could be fun.
I technically started this project seven years ago, publishing ten blog chapters and bundling them together under the title The Joy of Killing Coyotes. While I don’t make any promises that the current incarnation of God$ will link up to that volume in any way, I figured I’d make the EPUB/MOBI/PDF available in case anyone is interested in getting a bit more of the vibe of the project.
What it is at its heart is a longform experiment/exercise. This blog has been extremely beneficial in exercising the writing muscles that had laid dormant for a long time. I figured by restarting this project, I could do the same for my creative writing muscles. I’ll still be finishing novels/novellas over the next few years, but GOD$ represents pure creative freedom, where I have no real idea where it’s going, and I can take characters and plotlines wherever I want them.
This blog is not going to be a random collection of pieces of writing, or short stories. I will be making an effort, if a thread is introduced, to tie it back to the larger project. Treating it like a novel, basically. But outside of that, all bets are off. As I mentioned above, plotlines will start and stop randomly, as I feel it out.
This is an attempt to both exercise those muscles and feel out a kind of vibe, in which readers can experience a thing as it’s written, warts and all. It’s an attempt to connect with the field of Creativity and write some badass sentences. It’s a big weirdo schizo soap opera with assassins who swallow their victims whole. It’ll be fun.
I started it off with that bit about the alien spaceship crash that I posted last week, because I think an alien crash and the alien’s subsequent encounter with a desert coyote pack is a great starting point/metaphor for the project itself. The second two chapters follow a man with metal arms as he drags a coffin around what’s left of LA.
Broken River Blog 