I’m happy to announce that my twentieth book, Atmospheres 2, is now available on on Rumored Books.

TL;DR:

• Kindle
• Print
• Book page

Atmospheres 2 is an experimental novel about living in the chaos of a world where reality has become impossible to separate from the machinery that creates it. It’s a panorama of anxiety and existential dread set in a chaotic place where corporations and politics have become intertwined to the point of absurdity. The three acts of the book follow an unnamed character simply called Your Trusty Narrator, as he stumbles through an alienated life of corporate underemployment and altered reality. He struggles on a Sisyphean journey to find meaning in an existence that is quickly collapsing on itself, wondering if he’s the only person who notices.

This book is a sequel to my 2014 book Atmospheres, although it’s not a direct sequel with the same cast of characters, continuing the last book like a Spider-Man movie. It’s the same world, some of the same settings, the same general tone and philosophy. It’s also made of 100 segments arranged in three acts, alternating between first-person and third-person. But it’s more than twice as long (544 pages versus the original’s 242 pages), and I think the writing is a bit more dense, so there’s a lot going on. I think many readers will think the book is entirely plotless, but in some ways, it has a stronger underlying plot than most everything else I’ve written.

I’d like to think I write fiction, but I don’t even know at this point. It’s hard to be an absurdist when the actual news is far more ludicrous than anything I could write. This book is more political than anything I’ve done before, but it’s not a politics book. It captures a lot of the Kafkaesque inanity and dread about having politics devolve into a fully corporate swindle. But I think the main theme here is dancing around the larger question of identity a world where attention, self-identity, and reality has been completely strip-mined for monetization.

I started this book in 2014, and struggled for years to land it. It’s very much a “kitchen sink” book like Atmospheres and Rumored to Exist are, but I think it’s a distinctly different thing. It’s always a challenge to throw tons of everything into a manuscript and then try to arrange it with a through line, make everything jam with everything else. Coming up with the strategy of the whole thing and sticking to it was the hardest part to turn around, but like its predecessor, a lot of this is focused on the tactical level of having each segment be its own thing. I think a lot of people didn’t read Atmospheres straight through, but would open it to a random page and read one or two segments and enjoy them. I’m doing the same thing here, but it’s also something that someone invested in the book could read from 0 to 100 as a novel.

No, I did not use AI to write the book. I think I got a full manuscript done maybe five years before GPT-2 was even announced. I have a lot more to say about this, but I’ll save it for another post.

This is the longest I’ve ever worked on a single manuscript. It was interrupted by a lot of things: a pandemic, two graduate degrees, nine other books, two broken arms, and everything else in life. I keep a journal of notes in each book I write, and the one in this book is absolute madness. 24 hours of writing in Singapore, thousands of words of notes taken at the Ho Chi Minh airport, a bunch of editorial changes done while in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. There’s a lot more to say about the general history of this book and how it radically changed over the years. Something else to write about later.

Anyway, the book’s out. Hope you get a chance to check it out.

Been busy writing. I think I mentioned this when I re-released Atmospheres, but I’ve been mad at work trying to finish Atmospheres 2. It’s close. I thought I’d be done by the end of the month, but I have been saying that for a year now, and this book has been going since 2014.

This is always the hardest part of a book for me. Every book is different, but there are about three distinct phrases in a book project, and it goes something like this:

First, there’s the initial struggle of getting something going. Maybe there’s a spark of an idea. Maybe there’s a rough outline or game plan. Maybe there’s just a bunch of junk left over from another project or from journals and freewrites. I seldom start with a title and a pitch and work downhill from there, but that’s happened too. But the first third of the book is basically going from nothing to crawling to just about walking. And it’s a huge struggle, because I really have to shut off any outside influence and not get distracted and don’t watch some dumb movie that gets in my craw and makes me think, “Hey, maybe this book should be set in 17th-century Russia” or whatever the hell would immediately derail the work and basically knock me back to zero. I don’t like this part of the project because it’s where I have the most self-doubt as a writer, and it’s where I’m most easily distracted.

The middle part of the journey is either when I have a manuscript-sized corpus going and need to knock it into a flowing outlined book, or I have a great outline of a book and I have to build out the corpus until it’s manuscript-sized. My books are generally 50/50 between the two. For example, Statue of Limitations was a “collection” book, where I started throwing pieces in a manuscript, leftovers and zine articles and whatever else, and the (brief) middle part of the cycle was getting to 30 items and getting each item up to full length. But a book like Decision Paralysis had a full manuscript of almost 100,000 words maybe eight months before it was published; it just had no solid outline or through line that made a book a book.

There will often be a sustained period during the middle part of the book when I am On. That means there’s enough of the book going that I am thinking about it when I’m not working on it. The structure is self-sustaining and I don’t have to worry about foundation or plumbing or scope. I can just write. I’m not worried about getting started and I’m not thinking about how I’ll sell it or finish it. I’m just writing. Things will click and I will have more ideas than time. It’s not just that I reach flow state in a writing session; it’s that day after day, I am working on this book. It’s a mission. That is the best part of the book. And it can be months or years before anyone even sees the book, which is possibly the most frustrating part of being a writer. But, if I had immediate feedback, it may be too much of a distraction for me to keep going.

At a certain point, the manuscript is at full length, and I’m close to or at the point when it’s “feature complete” and the blank parts no longer say ”>> TODO” and the book is almost a book. And that’s part three. And it’s the most frustrating part, because that’s when all the work that isn’t writing has to happen. And I absolutely hate all of this.

One thing: because of how I write and what I write, and because of my propensity to do these collection things, I can sometimes get deep into part three and not have a title yet. I’ve actually had books like Thunderbird that literally did not have a name until a week before publication. That also presents a problem with cover art, as well as the fact that I often write very abstract books. If I did a murder mystery where Colonel Mustard was holding a candlestick as a weapon, that’s easy enough to give to an artist and make a cover. But I’m not doing that. So there’s a great deal of panic from that.

Book descriptions are also an issue. When I wrote The Memory Hunter, I actually started with a description. A book like Atmospheres - well it’s pretty difficult to explain. I’m not a marketer, and I don’t write to sell books. I write because I have to. So the whole selling and pimping and making the rounds and talking about what key demographic is targeted by my product, I do not care about any of that. And if I think about it too much, I stop writing. It’s self-defeating. The only way I can finish a book is to shut that down completely.

And that’s where I am now. I started this book in 2014. It’s been very on and off since then. I’ll get into the start of part two of the journey, and suddenly think the book needs a redemption plot or a vaporwave angle or a bunch of nostalgic bits or… whatever. I get way too into my head, and start pitching myself ideas that aren’t applicable, and it’s like throwing a pipe wrench into a spinning jet engine.

This book is huge, and it’s very dense. It will be my second-longest book, probably 50% longer than my last big book. (And yeah, writing a book this size when the world has zero attention span and can’t pay attention through a six-second video clip is another problem.) I think since early last summer, I thought the book was about a month away from completion. Now that it’s August, I still do. I finished a draft and a copyedit a few weeks ago, started the layout, and realized it needed another last pass. It’s hard to edit a book this size, because it’s impossible to keep it all in your head at once. And even if I decided to just really quickly read like 20 pages a day, well that’s a month of work. But I have to get it right.

(And I know a publisher is supposed to help do all of this. And I know AI could simplify this. If you’re suggesting either, you must be new here.)

Anyway, stay tuned.

Had a bit of free time tonight and wanted to catch up on blogging. Then I realized it’s July 4th, and I have this odd proclivity for writing on the 4th of July, usually something dripping with nostalgia. I just tried to fix the tags so you can find them all here although the two best reads (I think) were 2024 and 1997. I also had this entry in 2003 that was later anthologized in a book and at some point I removed it from the blog. I just looked at the book and it’s a slightly stupid entry because half of it was a review of the book Jarhead, and who cares about my throwaway thoughts about a book from 20 years ago. Anyway.

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Here’s one out of left field I haven’t talked about yet, and an explanation of the picture above. It’s 1991. I’m living in Elkhart, towards the end of a year in exile where I lived at home and went to IUSB, but desperately wanted to get back to the main IU campus in Bloomington. Since Memorial Day weekend, I’d been dating someone down in Bloomington. We talked on the computer almost every night, got a few long distance calls in at ten cents a minute, but otherwise kept this new relationship percolating between visits. She didn’t have a car, but I had this $500 diesel VW Rabbit and every other weekend, I’d leave work at midnight, drive four hours south, spend two days back on campus, then leave Monday morning and drive straight to work. I talked about this in my first book, I think. I used to talk about Bloomington a lot.

I know I’ve told this story before, but the 4th of July plan for that summer was going to be epic. I think it was a four-day weekend, and we planned a big trip to Chicago. This involved me driving four-odd hours to Bloomington straight after work, picking her up, turning back north, and driving another four hours to the windy city. We had a hotel booked somewhere near the O’Hare airport, and we planned to bivouac there, then explore the big town.

Trying to find the hotel with no maps and no information, we cruised around Schaumburg in this little rusty silver four-door diesel with the windows rolled down because it was like 90 out and it didn’t have A/C. And I turned off on a road that was all ground down for repaving, but this manhole cover and the concrete tube underneath it stuck up from the ground-down cement like a chimney. I aimed the little car over it, and that protrusion grabbed the exhaust of the VW and ripped it off entirely from the exhaust manifold. That little 48-horsepower four-banger suddenly sounded like a Panzer tank, and this exhaust system dangled behind the car, clanking on the pavement. I pulled over in a parking lot and wiggled the exhaust system back and forth to break it free of the car so I could drive. (See above).

That weekend’s plans completely changed. We racked our brains for any contingency scenario, and she realized she knew some VAX buddies who lived in Schaumburg. We somehow got ahold of them at a pay phone and they said we were welcome to crash with them for the night while we regrouped. This was a couple, Jeff and Pam, and this was at his parents’ house. I vaguely knew them by username, and maybe I’d casually met them in a computer lab or a VAX lunch, so the whole thing was slightly bizarre. We went to a neighborhood fireworks show; it seemed like this was a well-to-do suburb with several other well-to-do suburbs in the vicinity, so there were two or three different pro-grade fireworks shows on the horizon, too.

I wish I had any archaeology to remember the rest of the weekend, but we found a muffler shop somewhere off Golf Road that could do up the exhaust, and walked to a nearby motel where we crashed for the night. There was also a trip on the CTA from O’Hare to the city, where we went to the Marshall Field to look at that giant retail outfit in its prime. And we (for some reason) triangulated through Elkhart on the way back, and stayed a night at my mom’s. Then I brought her home, then left the next morning for work. For those keeping score, that’s Elkhart -> Bloomington -> Chicago -> Elkhart -> Bloomington -> Elkhart, all in a tiny little can of a German car with no A/C in a Midwestern heatwave.

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I was thinking of this recently, and it’s not because I love the 4th or I miss Bloomington. It’s because I found out she’s dead. I’d recently done my biannual-ish High Fidelity let’s-nose-around-and-look-up-exes thing for whatever damn reason. And when I pulled up her facebook page, the first post was from last December from one of her kids, announcing her funeral arrangements. Turns out she had a massive stroke in the spring of 2025, went in a recovery center, and never made it out.

This, of course, blew my fucking mind, on several different levels. I’ve never had an ex-girlfriend die. I have this box of memories of her, and they’re mired through this time distortion field. We probably started talking over email in late 1990 or early 1991, then started dating over Memorial Day. I returned to Bloomington in August. By December, the relationship was effectively over, although she didn’t officially dump me until we returned in January. That split was absolutely ugly, but we somehow started talking again maybe a year later. Bloomington’s a small town, and we had many common friends. We were on and off social until we both left in 1995. On a Boston trip that fall, I met up with her for brunch and an afternoon of wandering around record stores. There may have been a few pings after that, but nothing else.

The last seven months seems like it was a few weeks of time, but that seven months we officially dated seems like it was seven years long. So many things happened in that one semester, in my life, her life, our shared time together. And all of those memories are deeply intertwined with her. When I think about some detail of my computer job or how I was first learning how to program the NeXT or how I spent all my time fighting this 200-level physics class or how I stumbled through a group therapy experience for the first time, every one of those memories is somehow connected to the memories of her.

And to be clear, I’m not pining for her because it was all pleasant and wonderful. I think a hard aspect of this experience is the saying “don’t speak ill of the dead,” because this relationship was, to be as polite as possible about it, very… mercurial. We fought a lot. I’ll avoid details, but it got ugly. And now, I feel like an asshole even thinking about how much we butted heads. To be fair here, I am mentally ill, and I was not in a great place in 1991. But she knew how to push my buttons, and she did.

There was nothing to resolve post-1995, no need for amends or apologies or anything else. But the absolute finality of having someone dead bothers me in such a fundamental way. I always need to apologize, make things right. I’m always trying to think of the thing I can say to fix the situation, keeping arguments ruminating in my head for hours, weeks, months, decades. I frequently have these fantasy conversations with people from my past, thinking of what I’d say to somehow neatly wrap things up in a big bow, or correct the things I left broken years ago. And knowing I absolutely can’t do that now - that’s a new one to me.

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It’s a quiet 4th this year. Sarah went to Davis to help out her dad. I’m just about over a cold I’ve had for a few days. I went for a bit of a drive in Berkeley, and oddly ended up at the same Whole Foods where I was in 2024. I came back home, got out the new bike, and did a big loop, following the shore line down to the Park Street bridge on the east side of Alameda, crossing over, then crossing the island at the Jean Sweeney open space park, where I saw the people picnicking at the park shelter as I zipped past on the bike trail. Up at Alameda Point, I caught a water shuttle, the boat named the Woodstock, and that was my bike’s first water crossing. Lots of headwinds as I made my way west, but it was a good 13.5 mile loop, plus the short water journey.

I woke up horribly depressed for no reason, maybe from being alone on the holiday, or maybe the last residual bits of the head cold putting the zap on me. I hate to be one of those assholes that talks about runner’s high and how exercise helps, but of course riding the bike for 90 minutes did shake things loose. Part of it may have been aerobic exercise or the production of whatever chemical. I think a lot of it has to do with seeing the world at a different speed, looking at the things around me without being confined to a car. I always notice new details I don’t see when I’m driving. I’ve driven from that Park Street bridge over behind the Coast Guard base a million times, and I never noticed the little Hawaiian shack restaurant on Oak and Blanding, or the little Boathouse Tavern, which looks like a bar that’s half Bukowski, half Jimmy Buffett. I saw the sunken boats on the Oakland side of the estuary, and the million-dollar yachts on the Alameda side. It’s great to see the small details, and it’s something I need to do way more in the future.

Anyway, happy 4th.

1. I’ve been kicking tires and shifting things and getting the new Astro installation for this site fully operational. I think it’s pretty close now. I had to fix a million broken links and then knock around a bunch of build stuff, but that works now. I also have a bunch of static pages for books and stuff that are in the process of being moved, so stuff like Atmospheres mostly works now. If you find broken things, let me know, but I’m not investing a ton of time in chasing down broken external links from 2002.

2. Atmospheres rerelease: already posted about that, but check it out if you haven’t already.

3. I talk about the book cover a bit in the Editor’s Notes, but that text got locked down before I actually finished the cover. I’d started the layout with the same graphic from the 2014 edition, which is some clouds and smoke from Maui in 2013. When I started messing with the cover, the art looked way too noisy and weird, and hitting that fictional enhance button in Photoshop wasn’t doing anything. I swapped out a different picture, but totally forgot to mention that in the text. So, addendum to the addendum.

4. The new picture is from my 2022 trip to Denver. I was on a walk before dinner in the abandoned industrial park area of Centennial, and the sky suddenly filled with dark, intricate clouds, the precursor to a massive thunderstorm. I turned around and headed back, but shot away with my Canon 5DS and the 24–70 f/2.8L I’d bought that very day. I only had that 5DS for two trips (this and Sweden), and I was fighting it constantly to get okay shots. So, I’m glad I got a book cover (spoiler alert: or two) out of it.

5. I’m back on editing Atmospheres 2, and I’m maybe 25% through what might be the last draft. I’ve been struggling to get this book out basically since 2014, and I really need to get it done. Going through it right after editing the first one is pretty interesting. I think it has the same feel or spirit to it, but it’s much longer (140,000 words versus 60,000), and probably has more of a structured plot, although it’s still not plotted like a murder mystery or a Pixar movie. Hoping to land this thing by the end of summer.

6. Still riding my bike every day. I also just finished some work on my Cannondale Topstone 4, the gravel bike. I switched the drop handlebars for a carbon fiber straight bar, which might be considered sacrilege to many, but my neck and shoulders could not deal with drop bars. This required changing the gearshift and brake levers, and I ran into cable trouble, but I think everything’s fine now. The bike is now ridiculously light compared to my daily, and will be a lot of fun off-road.

7. The cats had their first vet visit. I thought Zuzu would be trouble, because I can’t even get within ten feet of her most of the time. Four of us were able to get her wrapped, inspected, and injected. Diego was 100% noncompliant and we had to skip him. He also gashed my pretty good in the hand, and it looked like I slashed my palm to take a blood oath with someone. The doctor gave us drugs (for him, not me) and we’ll try again later. We did a dry run last night, giving him Gabapentin in a treat. He ate it, but wasn’t entire into being knocked out. I did at least weigh him, and he’s now 14.5 pounds. So I’m expecting the same diet-and-exercise lecture every single doctor ever gives me, even though my current BMI is probably below normal now.

8. I try not to go to the mall that much anymore, but I went to Stoneridge today and the JC Penney there has closed. This really throws me off, not because I needed to buy some Arizona jeans, but because by default I always park in front of that store. Now I park there but have to walk over to the next entrance, and the whole thing throws me. I think far too much about this, and how I always park at the same exact place at every mall I’ve ever regularly visited. Like at Concord, it was at the Wards by the door closest to the Automotive entrance. At University Park in Bloomington, I always parked by the Sears on the west side. That mall is still there, but the Sears is long gone, razed and replaced with a Fresh Thyme grocery store and a little row of outward-facing shops. University Park Mall in Mishawaka, I always park north of the JC Penney. I don’t know why I always have to park in the same exact spot, and if other more sane people just park at the first place they can find a spot or what. Anyway.

9. I’m now at the part of the trip cycle where I’m clamoring to take another vacation in a few months, but don’t know where. This is a long and multi-dimensional decision. Whatever you were about to suggest, probably not there.

10. There were only nine things. There were three posts this month, though. That’s progress. The last time I had four posts in a month was 2024. August 2023 had seven posts in a month, which is unusual. I remember various times I thought about posting every single day, and I have no idea how I’d ever do that, short of quitting my job and making this my main project.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve re-released my 2014 book Atmospheres on Rumored Books.

TL;DR:

• Print: Amazon.com
• Kindle: Amazon.com

This was an interesting one. I am approaching the end of writing Atmospheres 2 and figured I should probably have the original one in print too. I dusted off the old Scrivener file from twelve years ago and gave it a quick editing pass. (I didn’t change content, and mostly fixed dumb comma usage and a few typos.) I also finally ditched that stupid CreateSpace-generated cover.

In doing this, I dug around for old drafts and tried to research the genesis of this book. The original was published on March 2, 2014. Because I write in Scrivener and constantly refine a single document, I don’t really generate discrete versions or drafts. I knew I did have working drafts I sent to someone in PDF format from October 2013 and January 2014. But when looking through old email, I was astonished to find a May 2013 draft I sent to Ray Miller, when the book had just been named and was only 5,000 words long. It amazes me to read those early snippets, really just bursts of ideas with absolutely no structure or routine.

I combed through the six drafts I found, and wrote a bit about the development of the book, my process, and how the drafts mutated into what I ended up publishing. I’ve also included some never-seen-before outtakes from the early drafts, including a bunch of that email to Ray, plus a few segments that were dropped from the first edition. It’s about 40 pages of new material.

Atmospheres is one of my favorite books, along with Rumored to Exist. I think it’s one of my most “Konrath” books, and I can still turn to a random page, read a few lines, and find something hilarious I completely forgot about. I’m glad to have it back in print on Rumored Books. And I can’t wait to finish the sequel.

If you’re new here, maybe I should back up and explain this. Here’s the post I originally made back in 2014.

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About a year ago, I started writing this experiment, which was a collection of almost ambient scenes, brief snippets of no story, just outbursts of emotion or scene. I wanted to eventually link them together in some way, but it became more important to simply generate the pieces each day. When I worked on finishing Thunderbird and doing all of the steps of publishing it, I needed to continue writing something, and that’s where the beginning of Atmospheres started.

I’ve always had a minor obsession with Jim Jarmusch, and I often listen to the soundtrack to Broken Flowers when I’m writing.  One of the songs on there is an edited clip of the Sleep song “Dopesmoker.” I’d been vaguely familiar with them from a million years ago when I used to write about death metal, but wasn’t fully aware of that particular album. I’d read an interview with Jarmusch where he talked about being preoccupied with that song, so I got a copy, and then I became locked into it.

If you haven’t heard it, the album is one song, a 63-minute stoner metal number that’s essentially a single heavy riff played over and over, while talking about a caravan of weed-priests crossing the desert to Jerusalem with their magical hashish. The lyrics are corny, but the song itself is an hour of pure hypnotic sludge, and puts you in a trance mode. And while I did not imbibe in the titular substance discussed in the song, I made it part of my process. I’d sit down every day, put the song on repeat, and completely lose myself in it, writing about whatever escaped from my subconscious thought onto the page.

Within a few months, this brought out an incredible pile of 500 word chunks, some perfect stories, some absolute junk.  But it amazingly brought out some common threads through the manuscript when I pushed them all together.  There’s a scene in the Naked Lunch movie where Ginsberg and Kerouac (or facsimiles thereof) go to Interzone to visit Bill, and  find an apartment filled with scattered random notes (and heroin), and that’s what the book read like before I started editing.

This is by far the most challenging read of any of my books.  It has a story arc in three acts, but it doesn’t have a conventional plot, which will throw a lot of people.  But it contains a lot of brutally honest writing that cuts deep, and it was a lot of fun to write. If I had to compare it to anything I’ve done, it’s a lot like Rumored to Exist in ways, but I think the pieces are darker with a lot more thickness to them.

This is my tenth book, which is a strange milestone to reach.  And every time I finish one of these, I fall into a deep depression and a brief panic, first as I wade through all of the production steps of releasing one of these things, and then as I try to start the next project.  And I have no idea how to sell this book or what’s next, so I’m not prepared for this. But, I need to keep working, so I will.

Anyway, check out the book, and let me know what you think.