The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • Paragraph Line site, reissues

    AITPL8I’ve been slowly working on what to do about the Paragraph Line web site and social media and whatnot, as both me and John have been releasing books and have no idea how to sell them. Anyway, I did a quick reboot of the web site, and it’s live again at http://paragraphline.com/. It’s currently an incredibly rough static site, just so if someone sees the link on a book cover or whatever and clicks it, they get something.

    None of the blog is there, so none of the fiction we published about ten years ago is there. I still have this stuff stashed away, and I’ve thought about republishing it, starting up the slush queue again, and going back to daily blogging, releasing other flash fiction, and that whole thing. Ultimately, that had an incredibly low ROI, and I wasted a lot of time for very little traffic. I got a lot of submissions from people who obviously never looked at the site whatsoever. I also got a lot of traffic from people who had Bizarro-related fiction who couldn’t get it placed at any official Bizarro outlet, so lots of second-rate stuff. There were exceptions, but I did not like spending all my time sifting through the queue, begging people to read the damn thing, and screaming into the void. Faced with that versus actually writing, I chose the latter.

    Aside from the content generation and the general algorithm issues, I struggled with tooling. WordPress is basically a virus vector disguised as a CMS, and the “you can do anything with WordPress” people are all designers charging an obscene amount for development. I tried firing up a Ghost instance in AWS and moving everything there, and it didn’t really work well. I also recently tried pulling it into Hugo, and it was a bit of a disaster. I finally gave up and used a static template, which looks okay, but blogging there is not going to be a thing at all.

    Social media-wise, I have no idea what to use. I’m absolutely not using Twitter. I think all Meta platforms are impossible to get any reach. All the kids are using Bluesky now, so I just created a profile @paragraphline and maybe someday someone will follow it. This all falls firmly into “I have no time for this” and I’m trying to get the next book done, so it won’t happen in the immediate future.

    * * *

    Related: John has re-released three of his books in one volume; check out After the Jump: A Trilogy. And I’ve still got my book from December you should check out, Decision Paralysis.

    * * *

    One of the things that came to mind as I was assembling this books page was the large number of books I have that are now out of print. This was intentional for a few reasons, but I fret over what I should do about this. It’s not as easy as “well just re-list them” because, well, it isn’t.

    I currently have 18 books that were published at one point, and four of them are currently for sale. I think the short answer here is a combination of the fact that I am really proud of the four that are currently out, and four is more than zero, so at least there’s that. But when I think about reissuing the others, there are a few things stopping me.

    First, there are quality issues. I get unending shit about “you need to hire an editor” which always bothers me. In one sense, it’s like telling Iggy Pop he needs to re-record Raw Power with autotune, because some of the notes aren’t hit perfectly. Also, I’m not going to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to an editor on a book that’s going to sell 14 copies with a profit margin of like 29 cents a copy. That said, I find typos in these old books, and if I’m going to reissue them, I at least want to sweep through them and fix things.

    And the problem with pulling that thread at the edge of the sweater is I will quash typos, but along the way I’ll find paragraphs that are uneven or places I wish I’d expanded or stories that didn’t end right or… whatever. There’s an argument for changing things significantly in a new reissue. Like William Burroughs published three very different versions of The Soft Machine in his lifetime (and a fourth posthumously) and he had no problems ripping out half the book, adding back as many new pages, and rearranging the whole thing. Part of me thinks doing that would be fun. Part of me thinks it’s a bit too George Lucas. And either way, this would require a lot of time I don’t have.

    I think there’s also the issue of me having past work I’m not proud of. Sometimes I go back into an old book and find it’s aged well, and parts are still funny or well-written. But there are times I look at some stuff like the trilogy of flash books (Earworm, Sleep, Thunderbird) and I feel like maybe 50% of it is solid, and the rest is plain embarrassing. (The two zine-book things, Help… and Ranch are similar. And I reread He recently and it’s absolutely horrible.) There’s a lot of gonzo writing that’s largely scatological and stupid, and I feel the people who are fans of that aspect of my old writing, that persona I used, will never get what I’m trying to do now. And it’s definitely not stuff I want coworkers or potential employers to read. A lot of it would straight up get me cancelled at this point. I don’t want to write like this anymore, and spending time reintroducing stuff that I’m actually ashamed of now is a fool’s errand. Maybe I could do a “greatest hits” with just some of this stuff picked out. Once again, that’s a lot of time invested that could be used on writing new books.

    There are books that are simply too far off my path to even deal with. Memory Hunter was a fun experiment and I loved doing it. The writing maybe 80% holds up. But nobody got the joke, and those of my fans who did read it all said it was good but not Konrath enough. Summer Rain is tough, because it was my first book and it meant a lot to me. And its fans are into that heavy 90s nostalgia, but I absolutely do not want to work in that genre anymore. Nostalgia is pain, and it doesn’t help that 40% of the country is actively destroying this country trying to go back to a time that never existed because of their delusions about the past. The Necrokonicon falls into that category, too. The Vegas book and the journal book that nobody read were both quickie get-something-out experiments that failed.

    That leaves Rumored and Atmospheres. Spoiler alert: both of those have sequels that are well underway. So there may be a tie-in rerelease of either or both, but there’s a combination of all of the above problems with them. Like I’ve been rereading Atmospheres a lot recently and there are some absolutely solid riffs in there that I love. And then there’s some borderline sexist diatribe or embarrassing scatalogical bit that does nothing for the story and is just “look at me! I’m crazy!” writing. I’ve actually paid an editor to proof both of those books and search out the typos, but I don’t know what to do about questionable content.

    And case in point on all of this: I reissued Vol. 13 last fall. I did a quick editing pass, changed the ebook layout, and redesigned the cover. I don’t know how many hours I spent on the project, but it was not a quick job. Since then it has sold five copies. I make about two bucks a book. So the “you could just pay someone else to do it for you” argument sort of falls flat, as I’d probably sink a few hundred bucks into it and get back ten of it. And I’d be rolling the dice on getting a layout I’d actually like.

    Bottom line: I’m writing a lot right now, and that’s the focus. So, more of that, right?

  • State of the Cameras, 2025 edition

    Canon camerasAs expected, before this Norway trip, I had a big freak-out about what cameras to take, which led to too many discretionary purchases. Let me explain.

    There were two main cameras before the trip. The big one is the Canon EOS 6D mkii. It’s a great camera and ticks a lot of boxes: full-frame, weather sealed, uses the EF lenses and I’ve got a couple of great L lenses for it, runs forever on a single battery, excellent sensor, built-in GPS and it’s a DSLR so it doesn’t have the usual problems a mirrorless has. More than that, it’s got the usual Canon design language and I like the way it feels, the way the controls are laid out, and the way the Canon works. And as much as I like it, it is not light or small. Glue two pounds of glass to the front end of it, and it’s really not great to haul around all day. And I’ve taken some okay photos with it, but it seems like I was almost doing better with a much lighter crop-sensor camera.

    In 2023, I got a Sony Alpha a6400. It’s half the weight of the 6D and much easier to shove in a bag. I’ve taken this camera to India, Singapore, and Spain, and it’s okay, but the ergonomics of it are bugging me. It’s just different, and I can’t explain it. The menu system is complete garbage, but it feels so toy-like and cheap, it’s not enjoyable to use at all. And there’s something off about the color space or the exposure program or something, and I’m constantly blowing shots with it. It’s hard to use in daylight, and isn’t entirely capable at night. And regardless of the time of day, it seriously chews through batteries. I often think that I need better lenses or more practice or more patience with it. And then I go take a hundred shots in an afternoon and look at them and wonder what’s wrong.

    And I struggle to say what “kind” of photographer I am. I’m not like a street photographer or a devoted landscape photographer or specialize in portraiture or whatever. I don’t know if I am even a photographer in the artistic sense of the word. I like to capture things, and I like to go back and look through photos to revisit a mood or relive a trip or write about something that happened in the past. I am more of a “document everything” person, and if I get a great shot out of it, cool. But that lack of a specific genre or focus makes me flail when it comes to buying gear, because that’s really the first question someone asks when you are trying to find out what to get, right?

    I also have been wandering back and forth on photos versus video, and I have no answers there. Since the 90s, I’ve experimented with different cameras, thinking I needed to shoot video to capture a mood or feeling or vacation or whatever. That started with buying a Hi8 camcorder back in like 1996, which was entirely impractical and largely useless to me. I never took that camera with me, because it weighed so much and I was never comfortable walking around with it and taking random video. I absolutely love the videos I did capture (see https://rumored.com/randomlife) but with the impracticality of it, I never used it.

    So, two things. First, I decided to get another Canon mirrorless. I was reluctant to do this because i bought an EOS-M1 about ten years ago and bought into their flop of a mirrorless system. They’ve since moved to a new platform, and it’s stabilized and picked up steam, so I thought I’d give it a try. I also thought maybe going back to crop sensor might help. So I bought a Canon EOS R10. It uses a new type of lens, the RF; I didn’t want to buy into that with all my EF lenses, so I bought the adaptor. This also lets me use some of my old EF-S crop lenses from when I had Rebel cameras, so that’s useful. The R10 is amazingly light, uses the same batteries as my old Rebel T6i, and isn’t horribly bad on battery life, especially compared to the Sony. It’s not weatherproof (which was a problem in Norway, walking in the snow all day every day) and there’s no more GPS. (I don’t know why, but I love having a GPS on my cameras.) It also has incredible autofocus and a great sensor. Not only does it have eye tracking autofocus, but it can eye track on animals, which is useful for someone who takes a thousand pictures of their cats a year.

    More than anything, the R10 feels like a Canon camera. The Program mode works like I’m used to. It feels the same in my hand. I don’t have to think to know where the knobs are. It’s not as full-featured as the 6D, but it feels the same. It feels the same as both of my Rebels, and even my old EOS 620 film camera.

    The other thing, the video thing: I don’t know why, but on a lark, I bought a DJI Osmo Pocket 3. It’s an amazing little gizmo, a gimbal camera in a thing the size of a TV remote, with a screen that flips from portrait to landscape. This was largely a useless purchase, as I’m not going to be full-time vlogging over on TikTok or anything like that. But it does shoot incredible video, and it’s extremely small. I think it’s close to being the perfect “document-everything” camera, and I got a few good shots out of it in Norway.

    So, the Sony’s probably going to go. I’m too lazy and impatient to sell it on eBay, and I know I’ll get nothing for it on KEH. But I think the Sony experiment is over. I am not sure if I’m going to start buying RF lenses, although given the current state of things, probably not a good idea to be dropping more money on gear. And the film thing – I’ve still got a few dozen rolls on ice, but I have lost all passion for shooting film these days. I feel like if I’m going to make a bunch of mistakes with exposure, I shouldn’t do it at a dollar a shot. I was completely unhappy with the film I burned in Iceland in 2023, and haven’t gotten back into it since. Fair enough.

    And all of this is secondary to what I should be doing: writing. That’s the main priority, so I should get back to it.

  • Norway

    NorwayI mentioned on my birthday post that I was on the move for my birthday, and I was. This may seem counterintuitive, but I took a week off and went to Oslo, Norway. In January. Yeah, I didn’t think through this one at all.

    I’ve been struggling to write a quick summary of this trip, mostly because the trip was… well it wasn’t awful, but it was tough. It was an experience, and I do always like to see a new country and just feel what it’s like, see the little differences, look at the buildings and see where things came from, what the history was like, what was torn down and rebuilt and destroyed and grown. The very first time I ever left the country–a quick bus trip up to Canada to see the Shakespeare Festival in high school–I remember holding a metric can of Coke in my hand and feeling how it was different in some weird way, and realizing there were 190-some other places like this on the rock we call Earth, and they all had these little (or big) differences. I always like that.

    But this trip. The lack of sunlight really put the zap on me, as well as the food situation (vegetables this close to the Arctic circle are not really a thing, and I’m not a fan of fish), and the general aloneness of being by myself in a country where everyone knows English, but don’t necessarily speak it. In many ways, I was way out of my element and it all felt very bleak.

    So I didn’t do much. I struggled with time, nutrition, navigation, and weather. I was asleep while everyone was awake and vice verse. The news cycle last week was… not ideal. I had my birthday in another country where I think I said a total of ten words all day, and that included ordering the absolute worst vegan pizza imaginable. (Don’t ask.) And every time I start writing my usual bulleted list about this week, it ends up being this bitch-fest of negative things, and I start thinking, “Why am I doing this?”

    So, let’s not do that. Let’s be as zen as possible about it, and let me write a list of what I did like about this trip.

    • I stayed in the Centrum district, which reminds me a bit of my 2022 stay in Stockholm, dusted with a few memories of the 2023 Iceland trip. It’s a mix of contemporary Scandinavian three or four story urban architecture of muted pastels and light brick, but many appearances of super-modern aesthetics with sharp edges and metal and glass walls. It’s all ultra-designed, efficient and well-built and wonderful to see.
    • Neighborhoods are all incredibly integrated. There’s always a little grocery nearby. Trains go everywhere. There are abundant little shops. I went to dinner at one place that was in a complex of buildings, all built into a hill maybe ten years ago. It was a maze of passages, underground parking, small grocers, barbers, ramen shops, upscale restaurants, gyms, a small music venue, small shops, and apartments for young professionals. In the US, we try to build these fake city center places, and they never work out; they’re all half-abandoned except for a token Subway restaurant and a dry cleaner that’s never open. This was a fully-integrated system, a very cozy arrangement, where I could imagine never having to drive anywhere to meet my basic needs.
    • The weather wasn’t bad, maybe 20-30F all week, and snowing, occasionally turning to slush. But there was something magical about waking up and seeing all the Scandinavian buildings dusted with white. And while I wouldn’t want to do this for the next 100 days, it was nice to walk around and feel the snow in the air and watch the people strolling to work all bundled up in their Arctic jackets and hats.
    • The Edward Munch museum was awesome. Seeing “The Scream” in person was great. But that building and the Opera House across from it, as well as the gigantic public library looked like matte paintings from the background of a Star Trek movie, just super-modern looking architecture. That whole area is absolutely striking with its futuristic buildings are all so perfect well laid-out. They didn’t just slap down square buildings next to each other for the whole block; they’re carefully placed, and then in between them, there’s an ice skating rink or a playground or some botanical garden or something, or it carefully leads up to a set of piers on the waterfront. And of course it’s all punctuated by frequent bus lines and streetcars and a perfectly laid-out subway system. The urban planning is absolutely next-tier there.
    • Driving from the Oslo Gardermoen Airport to Centrum in the middle of the night was sort of amazing. Yes, I’d been awake two days, and yes it was not great weather for the drive. But that E6 highway, the 45 minutes or so of traffic is all carved into hills, surrounded by evergreens, and everything was blanketed in snow. This was only the third time I’d ever driven a car in another country, the first with my new international driving permit. (The other two are Canada and Iceland.) It’s always fascinating to me to see the new signs and minor details, and of course everything in Kilometers.
    • I stayed at the Thon Rozencrantz. They gave me a top-floor suite with a separate living room, and a nice set of windows that overlooked the west part of Centrum, with the Royal Palace on the horizon in the distance. Free breakfast every day, and while there were some oddities (brown cheese?) it was the standard eggs and bacon and whatnot every morning.
    • One night I drove to the Sandvika Storsenter, a large mall about 20 minutes outside the city. It’s interesting to see a place like this with basically no anchors or hypermarts and lots of local shops and brands, softlines and upscale apparel. There weren’t a ton of people out on a Tuesday, but it definitely wasn’t a dead mall at all.
    • I’ve written about my obsession with Surge soda a while ago, and how it was one of the factors in me working on my second book. Anyway, Surge was in Norway, but it was called Urge. I tried a can, even though I can’t drink sugar like that anymore. It tasted like I remembered, though.
    • I ate an absolutely excessive meal at this Michelin star restaurant and every part of the meal was stupendous and way too much and something I’d never eat (lots of fish, not just reindeer, but reindeer heart) and it was awesome, even if it took me 24 hours to recover. It made me realize these places are more like performance art, the way the server explains all the crazy combinations and where they came from. My server would rattle all this off, and it was great, but then I’d see her telling the same story a few minutes later and it made me think this was much more of a theatrical thing, in addition to culinary.
    • This is dumb, but I always think it’s hilarious when I fly halfway around the world, and there’s 7-Eleven. I never thought back in 1988 when me and Ray and Larry were loitering at the now-gone 7-Eleven in Elkhart that I’d be going to one in Ho Chi Minh City or Singapore or Stockhole. The one thing I got in Oslo that I’ve never seen before were dried dates that had various flavors to them. The one I liked the most was sour cola flavored. No idea where I’ll ever see those again, unless I go to Denmark or something.
    • Norway is 100% cashless. I never even got any local money the whole time I was there.
    • I complain about the language and the complexity and the ø and å and æ and such, but I think Norwegian is maybe as complex as German, but in different ways. Some words are very similar, but I think pronunciation is a bit easier and grammar is way more simple. Maybe I need to spend more time on that.
    • As much as I go on and on about the lack of sunlight and the weird angle of the sun during the day, there’s something interesting about seeing it, the odd golden hour that makes you feel like you’re on the surface of an alien planet in a Christopher Nolan movie. It’s not ideal, but it’s a real blast to experience it.
    • I did meet up with a writer I managed back in 2021 who I’d never actually met in person. She was in Bangalore, but moved to Norway three years ago, and it was good to catch up. And I think that was one of the real high points of the trip, not only because she is awesome, but because I’ve been thinking a lot about community and connection, and these dumb trips shouldn’t be about going to see some random museum or record store or largest ball of twine. I should be planning these trips entirely around seeing old friends again, or new friends I’d never met. Why am I not doing that?

    I didn’t get many great pictures, and I only captured a few videos on my phone while I was walking around. But the memories are amazing. I have a very clear view of sitting by the maritime museum in the snow. I’d arrived early, before the big tour busses rolled in, and hiked around the Bygdøy WW II Navy Memorial on the waterfront. The snow was whipping down, and I trundled around maybe four inches of fresh powder on the waterfront. I was entirely unprepared, jeans and New Balance tennis shoes, mid-cuff in this snow, walking around the Bygdøynes ferry terminal, looking at this 19th-century three-mast ship sitting in the water. The Oslo Fjord stretched out in front of me, the island of Hovedøya on the horizon. Everything was so crisp, cold, and quiet, the snow blanketing all sound. This was Norway, in the purest sense. I didn’t care about the food or the jetlag or the loneliness or the cold. This is what I needed.

    And yeah, why am I not seeing anyone anymore? If you’re ever in the Bay Area, the email’s still jkonrath @ this domain. Or pitch me why I need to come see you. Let’s do it.

  • 54

    I am fifty-four today.North Dakota

    It’s funny, but I am writing this in the Helsinki airport in Finland, the day before my birthday. I’m just passing through, but my third flight of three got cancelled and they threw me on a later one. This resulted in me spending about eight hours in this relatively tiny airport. And what’s funny is that the view outside probably looks a lot like the view in North Dakota where I was born. It’s not as cold; maybe hovering around zero celsius. But the sun set at like 3:40 PM and there’s this eternal gray, with mounds of plowed white tucked away in the corners. It’s a very monochromatic landscape, and looks like the same sort of man-made island of aviation technology plopped in a frigid corner of nowhere, just like Grand Forks AFB. Only difference here is that the tundra’s hosting a bunch of Finnair Airbus planes, and not B-52 nuclear bombers.

    54 is a nice, solid, even number. The only mathematical oddity I can think of is that it’s three times eighteen. I very clearly remember when I turned 18; I probably have written about it too many times here. It really throws me to think I’m three times as old as that. When I was 18, I was three times older than I was six. I don’t remember my sixth birthday, but I do remember being that age, and it was lifetimes before I was 18. I sometimes feel like I was an adult when I was 18 and it wasn’t that long ago. But so much has happened in the last 36 years, that obviously isn’t true.

    * * *

    Many people share my birthday, but the one I loved the most was David Lynch. He was exactly 25 years older than me. And I say “was” because he’s now gone. I don’t get that bent up about celebrity deaths, but this is one that really hit me. I’d always hoped to meet him someday to tell him about how we were in the same secret society. I admit I got into Lynch’s work late, and seeing Eraserhead in college was one of the first stars that moved into alignment for me to start writing Rumored to Exist in 1995. And Twin Peaks was required viewing in college, but the lushness of that world didn’t fully impact me until I moved to Washington and saw Mount Si in the fog and the endless evergreens and felt like I’d crossed over into the scene in his mind. Huge loss, but it’s also a weird one in that I feel like he’ll never be gone and he’s off in the black lodge and will mysteriously show up in 25 years.

    * * *

    There is so much loss and sadness going on. Maybe it is always going on and it’s confirmation bias or whatever. But I was in JFK airport last night, scrolling through the end of TikTok, and it was so profoundly sad. I never created there, but had a burner account I used to scroll videos after work to calm down and reset my brain. And there were so many people who found community there, found support or solace, and it all completely ended over what is basically a stupid political stunt. Maybe it will come back, but it has me thinking a lot about community and friendship and support, and in many ways I am completely isolated and need to work on this. But how?

    And the thought on everyone’s mind is how the regime change happening today will cause more great loss. I don’t write about politics, but I don’t think it’s going to go well. There is a reason I left the country yesterday, and it isn’t because I support any part of this. I can’t change minds and I can’t change policy. All I can do is keep working, keep supporting the people who work for me, and hope the economy isn’t completely destroyed by the time I need to stop.

    * * *

    I think last year, I talked about how I was just spinning my wheels in year 52 and needed to spend year 53 writing. Good news is that I did this. I published one book and got two others closer to done. All I want to do in my 54th year is keep doing this, so I will.

  • John Sheppard’s latest, Fire Retardant Strong Man

    Back in the day, Paragraph Line consisted of a bunch of things: semi-frequent flash fiction, weird and strange blogging, books by many great writers, a lit journal, and zines. But it was also created by me and John Sheppard for a specific reason: to publish our books. In 2010, we bought a block of 100 ISBN numbers to use as we churned out our own books.

    Both John and I saw our writing output go fallow about four years ago. This was a combination of The Algorithm and the business of selling books, and life in general getting in the way. But right as I came back and published Decision Paralysis, John also came out with a new one, called Fire Retardant Strong Man, which is now available in print and on Kindle at Amazon.

    I blurbed the book by saying it’s like if Kurt Vonnegut wrote Idiocracy, because it reminds me of the dystopian dumb-apocalypse of Mike Judge’s 2006 comedy (now documentary), but it reads in the style of Vonnegut classics like Slapstick or Cat’s Cradle. It takes place a few decades from now in a world where a group of billionaires called The Broligarch rule the country, which is under strict surveillance and everyone is in forever debt and spends their time endlessly watching The Scroll.

    It follows an Ohioan named William who fish-out-of-water ends up in a small town in Colorado, in hiding and caught in a dangerous scenario trying to frame an evil senator who is the third-wealthiest man in America, and enslaves is new girlfriend Hazel.

    FRSM is a straight-up page turner, a burn through William’s story as he tries to piece together a plan to escape with Hazel and topple Senator Charles Chase. But it’s also a heartfelt tale about an innocent young man finding out about the cruel new world and how he can fight against it.

    This book is a lot of fun, with great humor and a critique of everything from AI to big brother to oligarchy to porn. Spoiler alert: there’s an easter egg that crosses over to the Konrath-iverse, too. And I think the best thing about this is John’s firing on all cylinders and has much more gas in the tank here.

    Check it out over at Amazon. And as for Paragraph Line, we’re getting there. Both of us are busy writing, which is the good news. I need a new web site, and that’s underway. And we’re slowly re-releasing a bunch of our old books that are out of print. Stay tuned.

  • 2024’s top ten pictures

    I did not take many pictures in 2024. 2022 was a year I tried to go whole-hog into photography and I took just over 12,000 pictures. Last year: 3,200. Part of this was less travel; part of it was having two injuries that sidelined me a bit. But also, I didn’t focus on photography as much because I spent a lot more of my energy on writing, which is good.

    Anyway, here’s my top ten.

    So, five from Vietnam, one from Spain, and four from California. Six were taken with the Canon 6D mkii, two were from an iPhone, one was with a Sony a6400, and one was with a DJI Osmo Pocket3. About 1900 of that 3200 were from an iPhone 14 Pro; about 800 were from the 6D, and most of the rest were the Sony. (The DJI is relatively new.)

    I’m not 100% with this WordPress gallery thing, but I’m also not posting giant photo dumps on Flickr or whatever anymore. Does this work? Is it sustainable? Not sure. It seems okay for a small number of photos, though.

    Took 100-some photos at the Alviso salt ponds yesterday, and it was good to get out and do that. I don’t know if this is just New Year/New Me nonsense or if I can build up some inertia, but we’ll see.

     

  • 2024

    The end.Okay, last day of the year, so as I did in 2023 and 2022, time to bang out a summary:

    • Started off the year with my very first case of COVID. I was pissed I made it almost four whole years without catching it, and then the Denver airport Centurion lounge did me in. I was lucky to get on Paxlovid immediately, and spent basically two weeks asleep on an air mattress in my home office, watching the movie Moneyball over and over for some reason. I’d planned to go to Vegas for my birthday, but nope.
    • Thanks to the time stuck in bed, I released my first album, 0. It’s an ambient synth album and pretty much nobody heard it, but it was fun to do. I recorded the whole thing in Logic Pro, mostly by cutting and pasting notes in the editor and using virtual synths.
    • I got Invisalign, which was a huge waste of money and I wish I had not done it. Had to fire a dentist over this.
    • I went to Anaheim for work and stayed at Disneyland. It was almost entirely a work thing, but there were some brief reverberations with previous visits, which I wrote about in the link.
    • I went to Vietnam. This trip was amazing and difficult and shocking and incredible. I think more than any other trip I’ve taken, it’s had the biggest impact in disrupting my preconceptions about a country.
    • I went to Barcelona on a work trip. This was almost entirely work and I only had a brief bit of time to see Spain, but what I saw was interesting.
    • I broke my right arm in a stupid fall. I think this threw me off for about a month. No, I didn’t get painkillers.
    • I was supposed to go to New Orleans in August, but Sarah caught covid right before we left, so I cancelled.
    • In September, I threw out my back in a major way and spent a week on the couch, unable to move.
    • In October, based on the above, I made the decision to enter food jail  and completely locked down my diet. I’ve lost about 30 pounds since then, but probably have another 30 to go.
    • I still walk every day, but thanks to the collapse of FitBit and the stupidity of Apple Health, I have no idea how many steps or miles I walked. It’s probably about the same as last year or a little less.
    • I had both an aunt and an uncle die this year. Both were siblings on my mom’s side. The aunt was my favorite aunt and that affected me, but I did not write about it because the whole thing was non-public and weird.
    • My 2014 Prius C was traded in for a 2024 Prius Limited.
    • I published my 18th book, Decision Paralysis. It’s my second-longest book (100,000 words), and I’m happy I’m finally writing.
    • I re-published Vol. 13.
    • I wrote maybe 100,000 words between another large book and other random stuff.
    • I only published 20 entries here, down from 25 last year, and way down from when I used to post daily. I briefly tried a Substack, but that’s stupid and just another distraction.
    • I spent a lot of time, money, and effort working on my mental health. I won’t get into details, but I feel a lot better now than I did 365 days ago. This is my most important and challenging project, although writing every day is a big help with this.

    I don’t have any resolutions for 2025. Keep writing. Get everything else out of the way. That’s enough.

  • My new book Decision Paralysis is out now

    Decision Paralysis bookI’m very happy to announce my 18th book, Decision Paralysis, is out now.

    TL;DR: Amazon print and Amazon kindle links.

    I did not think I was ever going to write another book. I quit writing completely in 2021, and spent at least a year 100% away from it, not even calling myself a writer, not sure what to do with my life except work, eat, and sleep. But I’ll always be a writer. I could not quit. And I needed to tell myself that I had to write the next book, even if nobody read it, even if the market had completely vanished and would be replaced with dumb AI-generated murder mysteries that end on a cliffhanger with a link to buy the next of 29 books in the series. The algorithm has killed everything, but it has not killed me.

    I spent the first few months of 2024 knocking around a few other projects before I got to this. On 5/27/24, I started this book in earnest, with only a title and about 8,000 words of scraps. By the end of July, I had the idea that this book would be the spiritual successor to The Failure Cascade, which I’d re-released a few months prior. I wanted longer stories, more bleak, more introspective, and with a thickness and depth I wasn’t getting in the short micro-fiction or flash I’d been doing in the last decade.

    Aside from telling myself “just write,” the biggest change in my work habits was moving my writing time to mornings. Waking up at 3:45 and sitting in my office in darkness for a few hours listening to weird ambient music put me in a different headspace and made the words start to add up. I think in early August, I crossed the 50,000 word mark, and that was the original intention. I’d originally had these short flash interstitials between stories, and at some point, I pulled all of them out and focused just on the stories. I also started footnoting things, which may be devisive, but I had fun with it.

    A bit of an easter egg and a change is that the titles of each story are latitute/longitude coordinates. They have meaning; that’s all I’ll say. I’ve had a very specific format for titles that I think were funny, but as I am battling this persona problem, I think I got backed in a corner with them. I found that the people who thought the goofy titles were haw-haw funny were also the ones who basically didn’t get what I’m trying to do with my writing. So, clean break from that.

    It’s also always bugged me when my stuff was too short, or perceived as such. I mean, some of the books are; The Failure Cascade is 37,565 words. Any time someone told me, “It was so great because I could sit down and read it in one sitting” it was a bit of an insult, especially when that was basically my annual output of 2020. So I purposely went maximalist on some of the stories here. The best/worst example is the titular story of the book, which is 16,000 words. For comparison, 2017’s Help Me Find My Car Keys And We Can Drive Out! — the entire book — is 30 stories that total 15,848 words. That story is like “The Aristocrats” in that it was long and essentially useless (at it’s core, it’s about someone trying to buy lunch who can’t find anything to eat) and at like 3,000 words, I thought it was getting excessive; at about 5,000 I thought “I should just make the whole book this story” and it quickly shot up to 10,000 words. It took another 6,000 to finish the thing, and it’s about everything but ordering food now.

    This book was therapeutic to me. I think I was able to explore a lot about why I’m here and what I’m doing. I’ve struggled a lot in recent years with the big dillema of what I am and how I’m supposed to finish the rest of my years. I have no children and no legacy, and there’s honestly no hope that any of this writing exists beyond me. I could write a lot more about this, but the TL;DR is that I covered some of it here, and I probably need to do more.

    Final tally: 20 stories; 412 pages; 101,834 words; 249 footnotes.

    The description from the back cover:

    Euthanasia drug MLMs. Deep-fried lard rumored to have mystical healing properties sold at pirate-themed restaurants. Existential crises about dollar-menu tacos and light therapy. Is this your average terror nightmare, or just another Thursday where mind-reading dolphins are dialing 1-900 numbers to spill secrets about how DARPA taught them to master Minesweeper?

    Decision Paralysis by Jon Konrath is a surreal and darkly comedic exploration of absurdity and modern disconnection. The book plunges into a fragmented narrative where dystopian satire meets introspective nihilism. Inside, you’ll find twenty deranged tales of John Denver Illuminati theories, Taco Bell stealth tanks, Cambodian pizza chains that secretly sell time machines, and bitter online arguments about whether Norwegian timber tariffs of the 1800s ruined Chicago deep dish forever. The chaotic tales, blending dystopia and the grotesque, offer sharp humor and biting commentary, leaving readers grappling with questions of meaning, choice, and the absurdity of existence.

    A biting critique of consumer culture, decision fatigue, and the search for identity in a fractured world, Decision Paralysis is both a satire and a deep dive into the human psyche. Fans of sardonic humor, speculative fiction, and offbeat storytelling will find much to enjoy in Konrath’s latest offering, which deftly combines outrageous comedy with an undercurrent of raw, philosophical truth. This is a book that will leave readers laughing, thinking, and questioning their own paths through the maze of modern existence.

    The cover: it’s from Van Damme Beach just south of Mendocino. Failure Cascade‘s cover was shot on the same 2017 trip, about three miles north. It was a color image that was filtered down to black and white; this image is color, but looks almost monochromatic. I love when a photo ends up like that.

    Anyway, that’s that. I hope you check it out. I am not sure what’s next, but I have a list of stuff to do, and two big books past the first draft stage, so we’ll see what 2025 brings.

  • Book, passports, stuff, writing

    passportsI don’t usually talk about works in progress, but just a quick accountability note here to mention that I finished the first draft of my 18th book. This is more or less a spiritual continuation of The Failure Cascade, and is 20 stories, but almost three times longer. I’m moving past flash fiction and micro-fiction, maybe. I mean, there’s one story that’s roughly half the length of Failure Cascade. I don’t have any distance from the thing to say whether I like it or not, but John read a draft and he did. Completely unmarketable, but I’ll keep going on it after I catch a breath and see when I can publish it. It already has a title and a cover image. ChatGPT can write the book description and marketing crap better than I can. Those three things are always the biggest blockers on getting a book out the door.

    I just realized that if I get this book out this year (and I’m not worried if I don’t) it will be four years since my last book. The longest gap before this was about 20 months between Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist. When I really got on the horse and changed around my writing schedule and cadence and work ethic in 2010, I had it in my head that I needed to publish at least a book a year because of the algorithm (or whatever) and I did that from 2010 to 2020, with two years that had two books. Now, whatever. I have been writing more and changed around my schedule to make that happen. But I’m writing for me, not for a calendar or an algorithm. I’d like to get the long list of half-done projects out the door, but I don’t care how they sell.

    * * *

    I also don’t talk about future travel plans, but it’s time to get out of the country again, and time to renew my passport, while I still can. I was trying to book something this morning and realized this one’s expiring less than six months from when I’m leaving. Pretty much every country has a requirement that you have six months on your passport in case you end up in a coma in a hospital or whatever. Five and a half months left is not close enough according to an airline computer, so it’s time to figure this out.

    It’s always oddly bittersweet when I do this. First, this will be the last passport when I have hair. Second, there was a six-year gap from the first stamp to the second. Lots of blank pages I wish I would have filled. This one has stamps from 20 countries, which is way more than the last one. (I think that had four or five.) This one also has three visas, including a work visa, which is new to me.

    I honestly don’t know how much I will travel in the future. I think it’s going to become a lot more difficult, impractical, and expensive to travel internationally. And I’m not exactly enthused about spending my tourist dollars in a large chunk of the country. I really should spend more time in California, because there’s a lot of it I haven’t seen. There are nine national parks in California, and I’ve hiked exactly zero of them. Time to look into that.

    * * *

    I don’t talk about politics here, and it’s hard not to. There’s a lot of dismay and there’s a lot I can’t do about the situation. For my own mental health, I feel a great need to distance myself from it and focus on what I can do. I also don’t talk about work here, but I think the best I can do is to continue to manage and mentor people, try to grow my company and my little corner of Silicon Valley, and continue to support who I can. I grew up working retail and dumb jobs in the middle of the country, and was lucky to find a way out and get a real job and benefits and live in a beautiful place. I’ll stay here while I can. When I can’t, I’ll leave. I’m fortunate enough to have options, but I love it in California.

    I think one other thing is I need to take a big step back from the news/terror cycle and redouble my efforts on writing. I’ve already had serious questions about my social media use, and this pretty much sealed the deal for me. I spent far too much time doom-scrolling in Reddit, and I can’t anymore. My last news source was the New York Times, and I cancelled my subscription (even though I get it free through Amex) because of obvious reasons a few months ago. Twitter got nuked a year ago, not that I ever used it.

    I’ve given up on Substack. It’s become a political doom and gloom circle-jerk, but more than that, I don’t know what to post there. I feel like any writing I’m not doing for a book or for work should be here. I thought about having some system where I blogged here and mirrored it there, but it was too much work and I don’t really see the benefit. A lot of the writing content on Substack is either of the “look at me” or “make money fast” variety, and I care about neither.

    At this point, my two biggest social media vices are Tik-Tok and Tumblr. I don’t do much content creation on Tik-Tok, and I have only two or three friends on there, but it’s fairly easy to push the algorithm away from the bad and just waste time watching people pressure-wash driveways or travel in weird places. I also don’t do much creation and have no friends on Tumblr, but I like it because I don’t even think the people working at Tumblr are aware it’s still operational. Because I don’t create and I don’t use my real name, I don’t chase likes and follows or look at numbers. That’s what’s good for me.

    Same goes here. I have no idea how many people read this, and I have no need to “grow” things here. I’ll just keep on keeping on.

  • Speed, funnels, writing

    A few vague thoughts on blogging and such on a lazy Sunday, which seems to be the only day I can ever pay attention to this thing.

    I keep thinking about what I want to do here and how this blog should evolve (or whatever.) I sometimes think the big retirement project should be a grand reunification of all my content everywhere, into a giant meta-site of sorts, where one could see a mass of texts and books and pictures and videos and emails and whatever else, all poured into some giant Project Xanadu-esque thing. This is obviously something well beyond the ability of WordPress, because it can barely handle what I’ve got going here already.

    Anyway, one of the bummers about this blog has been performance. I started using Pair to host this thing last century, and while they’ve always been rock-solid, they’ve also been somewhat dated in their offerings and tools. I mean, when I thought I needed to move from WordPress to some thing I wrote in Rails or whatever, I basically found it impossible to do anything except PHP unless I moved up a level or two on my package. Lately, I’ve been discouraged by the general performance and the fact that I have no CDN and this thing is hosted in Pittsburgh.

    To be fair, it’s hard to tell if my site’s performance is because of my connection, the server I pay for, WordPress, my configuration of WordPress, or the sheer size of this thing. I’ve been looking with the P3 Plugin Profiler on the back end, and PageSpeed Insights on the front. I’ve messed around with the plugin config and switched SEO plugins, and that bought me about a half-second on page loads. I have no idea on how any of this works, but the general advice, in order, is to shell out for a good host, shell out for a CDN, look at your image situation, cut down the number of plugins, and cut down as much CSS stuff as you can. I think there are little tricks that could get this working slightly better, like switching themes, moving my archives links to another page, building my WP statically and hosting that in a CDN, or maybe finally giving up on WP and moving to Hugo or Jekyll or something else. I vaguely looked at moving to Ghost or moving to a hosted WP instance in Lightsail. The former was too limiting and the latter didn’t buy me much performance. It’s silly for me to waste time on this with the low amount of traffic this thing sees, but it’s an itch that’s hard to stop scratching.

    The other thing I keep thinking of is funnels. How do people read this? How do they find it? Why do they stay? How do they come back? I don’t really market this thing at all, and I don’t fit any niche box that would make this go viral or get regular traffic. This is mostly me screaming into the void and hoping I can come back later and find something.

    It makes me think back to the days of things like web rings and having a big list of favorite blogs on a page to find others and whatever else we used to do. This thing has an RSS feed, but it seems like nobody uses RSS anymore. I still use Feedly to read stuff, but everyone except three blogs have abandoned it. Is this because Google Reader is dead and nobody uses it, or is there some other reason like people “steal” content from feeds? No idea.

    I think changes in the Google algorithm have made blogging organic content for the sake of organic content a lost cause. Twenty years ago, I could search for people involved in some niche hobby and find actual people, but now I just get travel links and shoe ads. I guess the big funnels are social media, but I don’t know that people leave their respective walled garden to go elsewhere and read content. And I can’t really post this stuff on TikTok or something. I guess if I had really snappy pull quotes, I could take just the text of that and put it over a video of a beach and play five seconds of a Taylor Swift song over it and people might see it. But not only is that work, it’s also stupid. I also keep thinking about how I’ve done mostly nothing with Substack, and maybe I should be pouring this stuff into that so people find it. Or not? I don’t know.

    So, funnels. It’s an open question. I don’t know how I find content myself, let alone what others do.

    The other big blocker here is I am far too busy with my own writing, and in deep on a project. I’m trying to finish the 18th book, or what I think might be the 18th. This thing originally started as a collection of short stories like The Failure Cascade, but it’s now almost as long as my second-longest book and will probably surpass it very soon. I’m trying to land this one by the end of the year, but every time I wrap up some little missing thing, I leave notes on three others. I think back in August, I thought I’d get this thing wrapped up by the first of September. Now we’re going into the back half of October, and I’m hoping December. Not a big deal if it’s not.

    Starting in 2010, I forced myself to release at least a book a year, and got two on many of those years. It was one of those dumb self-publishing rules I thought I had to do, get something out to keep the long tail long, keep myself relevant, whatever. I now see no importance in that. I think I had a deep fear that if I missed a year, I’d miss two years, and then I’d wake up a decade later and wonder what happened.

    I feel like I did that after Rumored was released – I did little things here and there, but I feel like the 00s were basically a lost decade for me. And I regret that, but I think the twist is that if I’d been productively writing that whole time, even without releasing anything, I would have been content with my output. And 2021-2023 were a wash for me, but I’ve kept busy this year, and that’s all that matters.