Early morning walk and I remembered exactly why I’m here.

We had a three day retreat with the network of ecologist groups to plan the next five years’ actions. I normaly don’t talk about work here, but this is what I do, whenever I’m not writing fiction or performing. Twice a year we escape the city to come together, bounce some ideas around, talk around the fireplace. I’m always a bit reconciled with the human species when I see the quality of people gathered there. And, notwithstanding good company, the wild also makes things beautifully clear.

Yes, May Madness is raging on, yet a moment’s peace is enough to see true, if only for a while.

Now back for the theatre festival, the bookfair and more craziness!

See you ’round Necropolis…

Necropolis IN PRINT – limited edition!

I’m proud to announce that Necropolis, Book 1 of the Malice Cycle is now available in a limited, underground edition. Now is your chance to see what all the fuss is about!

So three years in the making and still no publisher for the first book of the Malice Cycle. Yet instead of sitting on this ominous tome until publishing hell freezes over, I’ve decided to do a small, clandestine print, so you don’t have to wait anymore. This underground edition features unique artwork, 330 pages of pure anticiv goth fantasy, complete with glossary and translations. This is the real deal, and it’s only 15 bucks. It’ll be on sale whereever I am, in the couple next bookfairs and events in Montreal. I’ll also stash a few copies at the Insoumise bookstore for your pleasure. And if you’re not in Quebec and you’d like me to mail you a copy, just write to me at press@daemonflower.com and I’ll make it happen.

Only 30 copies have been made. Remember: underground means it won’t be online anywhere: we’re talking face-to-face, obscure fetish commodity. I rushed like a mad scientist to get this edition on because you people who have been following me those past years deserve to see this, and I can’t wait to share it!

This week, some inspiration for the 5yph3r’s Aeon Construct: Stuxnet – the first weaponized computer virus, and the concept of metamorphic code. Taken from Wikipedia, for the simplest overview imaginable.

Do you think a single person could create this kind of code monster? And if so, imagine, for a second, what that person could be like.

***

Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in June 2010. It initially spreads via Microsoft Windows, and targets Siemens industrial software and equipment. While it is not the first time that hackers have targeted industrial systems,[1] it is the first discovered malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems,[2] and the first to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit.[3][4]

The worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but includes a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes.[5][6] Stuxnet infects PLCs by subverting the Step-7 software application that is used to reprogram these devices.[7][8]

Different variants of Stuxnet targeted five Iranian organizations,[9] with the probable target widely suspected to be uranium enrichment infrastructure in Iran;[10][11][8] Symantec noted in August 2010 that 60% of the infected computers worldwide were in Iran.[12] Siemens stated on 29 November that the worm has not caused any damage to its customers,[13] but the Iran nuclear program, which uses embargoed Siemens equipment procured secretly, has been damaged by Stuxnet.[14][15] Russian computer security firm Kaspersky Lab concluded that the sophisticated attack could only have been conducted “with nation-state support”.[16] This was further backed up by the Finnish computer security company F-Secure’s chief researcher Mikko Hyppönen who commented in a Stuxnet FAQ, “That’s what it would look like, yes”.[17] It has been speculated that Israel[18] and the United States may have been involved.[19][20]

In May 2011, the PBS program Need To Know cited a statement by Gary Samore, White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, in which he said, “we’re glad they [the Iranians] are having trouble with their centrifuge machine and that we – the US and its allies – are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them”, offering “winking acknowledgement” of US involvement in Stuxnet.[21] According to the British Daily Telegraph, a showreel that was played at a retirement party for the head of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Gabi Ashkenazi, included references to Stuxnet as one of his operational successes as the IDF chief of staff.[18]

***

In computer virus terms, metamorphic code is code that can reprogram itself. Often, it does this by translating its own code into a temporary representation, editing the temporary representation of itself, and then writing itself back to normal code again.[1] This procedure is done with the virus itself, and thus also the metamorphic engine itself undergoes changes. This is used by some viruses when they are about to infect new files, and the result is that the “children” will never look like their “parents”. The computer viruses that use this technique do this in order to avoid the pattern recognition of anti-virus software: the actual algorithm does not change, but everything else might.

While polymorphic viruses cipher their functional code to avoid pattern recognition, such a virus will still need to decipher the code – unmodified from infection to infection – in order to execute. Metamorphic viruses change their code to an equivalent one (i.e. a code doing essentially the same thing), so that a mutated virus never has the same executable code in memory (not even at runtime) as the original virus that constructed the mutation. This modification can be achieved using techniques like inserting NOP instructions (brute force), swapping registers, changing flow control with jumps or reordering independent instructions. Metamorphic code is usually more effective than polymorphic code. Unlike with polymorphic viruses, anti-virus products may not simply use emulation techniques to defeat metamorphism, since metamorphic code may never reveal code that remains constant from infection to infection.

Metamorphic code can also mean that a virus is capable of infecting executables from two or more different operating systems (such as Windows and GNU/Linux) or even different computer architectures. Often, the virus does this by carrying several viruses within itself. The beginning of the virus is then coded so that it translates to correct machine-code for all of the platforms that it is supposed to execute in.[2] It is possible, in theory, for a metamorphic virus to rewrite the temporary representation of itself into another set of instructions, intended for another computer architecture. If one were used, the API may also have to be changed in the leap to a new platform.

So this is where I was yesterday and today, protesting the Plan Nord. A thousand heads of industry were getting lip service from our glorious leader Jean Charest, whose reign is swiftly coming to an end. They were promoting the Plan Nord, which is the biggest industrial development project in the history of Quebec, which will increase social inequalities and harm the environment further with dams, mines, new roads and even uranium mining. For big industry, it’s a banquet, and the PM is whoring it all out.

Here’s some videos, I’m too tired to go into detail.

Outside, this is just a fragment of what went on:

And inside, you can see the PM making fun of the protesters, and you can hear those thousand industry motherfuckers laughing it up. But it must have been a little less funny when they realized they couldn’t leave the building.

Well, 46 pages now and getting into the 9th chapter. Progress is slow but steady. And I am entranced by every single second, every waking moment towards the tale of 5yph3r, Aurélie, Q’inp and of course, the red-eyed Malice.

Now, the main characters have been fully outlined and we are sinking deeper into the thick of the plot. So far I believe to have succeeded in setting the mood of the Enklave – a heavy, dismal background of misery and inequality, the hi-tech and low-life of cyberpunk – of future civilisation. Now all we can do now is sink further in – things are about to get much, much worse.

In fact, I’ll cut this one short and go back to work! Off to the salt mines!

This week, I’m letting you in on my sources. The topic: authoritarianism.

The 2nd book of the Malice Cycle is a deep exploration into the themes of theocracy, fascism and authoritarianism. Through the organization called the Enklave, I am extrapolating from the height of the power of the Teutonic Order (a catholic, theocratic military order) to illustrate the makings of an absolute nightmare.

As an anarchist, whether outspoken or still in closet, you piece together all the critiques of hierarchy, submission, domestication, alienation, and etc. You know that authoritarians have highly compartmentalized minds (believing only in the parts of the bible they like), are hypocrites (ex. pro life AND pro death sentence), don’t respond to facts at all (ex. global warming), can’t hold up to their own theories (ex. you always the find the anti-gay with a male escort somewhere) and express a deep seeded hatred for anything outside their ‘in-group’. You know their leaders are sociopaths and their followers utterly blind. They believe in things that aren’t there (i.e. God) and will grind you into dust in the name of love.

We anarchists are the anti-authoritarians. It’s our specialty. It’s what we do best. It’s also the reason we fight with communists so much, and the reason every communist revolution followed with liquidating the anarchists. It’s the reason people love or hate us with passion.

And lots and lots of books were written about fascist regimes and dictators and Wall-Street and Jesus freaks, BUT I think I found the greatest singlemost complete study on authoritarianism ever. It’s this Bob Altermeyer, a psychologist from Calgary (home of the Conservatives!!) who spent his entire life devoted to this subject. And the epitome of his work can be found online, and it’s free, and it’s smart and rigorous (and surprisingly funny!).

I only wish I’d discovered it ten years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time. So do yourself a favor and before you rant against the Tea Parties of this world or Stephen Harper, read this wonderful study.

It’s on! Just completed chapter 7, made small additions to the overall structure with a new twist. I’ve had a quite a few epiphanies and am making progress. Page 39 and counting.

The entire 2nd book is now permanently lodged in my subconscious mind, with every fucking chapter a livid fragment in a vast gallery. And I’ll try to take every waking moment to pry this vision out with literary pliers and beat the gooey stuff into passable form. Yes, puppies, we’re making progress.

Suck on that, universe. Suck on it.

In addition, I can now look to this summer where I’ll carve about five weeks off work and will try to leave the city. My goal is to have some sane time, somewhere in the wild, near water, and just fucking live and write and create.

Alright, with Valacchia now behind me, in a matter of speaking, I can go back to Malice!

Yay!

In the meantime, here’s some thoughts on marketing. Very à propos.

As the ringing in my ears slowly subsides and the alcohol vapours slowly evaporate, I think back on Friday night’s Vallacchia launch event – Burlesque Macabre – and breathe a sigh of absolute contentment. It was, by and large, the biggest booklaunch of my entire writing career and the fulfillment of a very grand vision dating nearly a year back.

A vision, yes – and in such the event became its own creature, beautiful and unpredictable. After three hard months of working tirelessly to beat and shape chaos into this fitting form, I am taken with both wonders and lessons to learn. So before we go forward with new schemes and projects, let’s just take a moment and do a little debriefing. I promise, after that I’ll talk about something else.

Results

The event was a success, through and through. About a hundred people showed, which is less than expected but was more than enough to fill the place and spend a very memorable evening.

My opening speech was greeting with more cheer and laughter than I could have hoped for, I managed to be somewhat coherent doing so, and managed to bash conservatives and thank everyone who’d helped me in the whole Valacchia process, many of whom were in the room. They had what was coming their way – my most heartfelt thanks.

Also, and more importantly, the performances were unbelievable. The Sin Sisters performed divinely as they always do, delivering haunting, seductive and particularly dark performances that will surely be remembered for the next decade. I know I will. Then Silent and Cold gave their best show ever, a full hour with encore, and it was pretty fucken epic.

I won’t recount the whole evening cause you had to be there, but I’ll say this: it was more praise then I’m entitled to, and I’m humbled by the greatness of all you people. I’m reminded there actually is a point to all this – you.

Lessons to learn

Even if the event ended up a success it proved much trickier than I expected. And I’ve been producing events and shows for the past ten years. But putting this together proved was particularly dense.

… anyway, onwards!

So, tomorrow night is the launch party for Valacchia. It promises to be the biggest event I ever put together. Three months in the making, and a very passionnate sally out of – and beyond – the usuals suspects of the anarchist milieu. For most of the two hundred damned souls expected to show, this will be the first time they’ve ever heard of yours truly. That was precisely the point, leaving the echochamber and bombing to as large an audience as possible.

The Katacombes are welcoming us in their incredible venue, will their skull-columns, shoe-shaped couches, dark ambiance and fucking awesome staff.

On the menu, we open with a mute screening of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outerspace, played over my personnal selection of horror-punk and psychobilly (Calabrese, Misfits, Zombina & the Skeletones, etc.). Then I take the stage for about four minutes and editorialize, make a few bad jokes about Twilight, pretend I’m very humble and mature, compare Stephen Harper to a scatmuncher and exit the stage under a flurry of flung beer bottles and applause.

Then, the incredible Sin Sisters take it away with numbers featuring dance, tease, black comedy, fire, and I’m told, a bunch of horror gory stuff. Industrial duo Silent and Cold come on after with an hour of incredible tunes, and then DJ Wax will spin us some old school goth until we all pass out on the dancefloor.

So, here we are folks. Me and mine are off to celebrate the simple pleasures of life: fake blood, fire and buckets of ale – and not in that order. Hope to see you there.

In the meantime, enjoy this little treasure I found. If you hadn’t figured out why I write vampiric erotica, fight the mainsteam, and curse every religion there are, this should give you a fair understanding. Toodles.

27 months into the Malice Cycle and you will notice, reading posts from these last six months, that production is stalling. This half-hearted hiatus is become harder to hide and none easier to break. And if I’m gonna be honest with you – which is really what our lives depend on – I have to elaborate on where we are, what’s going on and where we can expect the project to go from here. Strap-on puppies, this is gonna get technical.

What I had planned

Production of the Malice Cycle started Dec 09. Initially, I had planned to write three books, one per year, concluding the prod phase for the end of 2012.

What actually happened

As of Feb 2012 (66% of the timeline) I’ve managed to reach about 40% of the goal. The first book, Necropolis, is done. The second book, The Enklave, is some 40 pages in out of 350, with the entire structure finished. Book three, The End of Everything, is just a set of ideas.

What went wrong

A number of things happened in that timeframe which affected production negatively. Soon after the project began, my close artistic partner betrayed me and I had to sunder the relationship. I moved twice. Then I got a new job, a big, a huge job, as head of the Quebecan network of ecologist groups, with a staff of 7-8 people. The stakes got higher, the hours longer. And then, just a few months in, another first: I get a call from Guy Saint-Jean publisher telling me they’re publishing a french novel of mine (Valacchia), and moreso, they want to publish more, a sequel, and another, and reedit old works, and basically any work I do in French. So I wrote a sequel, which took three wholes months, and had to work greatly with the publishers to fix up and market Valacchia, which was another six months.

In the meantime, I didn’t want to isolate myself in my writings, to cut off all social bonds and bury every single free hour in a sollipsistic bubble. So I engaged the Anarchist Writers Bloc and Anarchistes Anonymes collective projects. It’s vital to keep inspired and living – without any grasp or feeling of immediacy in my community and the various policital struggles that could better the lives of everyone, I would be a lesser person and all honest reasons to write would cease.

In all, the irony of these past three years is that both most significant halts to The Malice Cycle – my career as a geographer flowering, and my writing career skyrocketing in French – are actually extremely positive things. But they’ve drawn me away from production. On the long term, however, they’ll help me get published.

A problematic move

Besides surprises and opportunies I had to react to, there was a move I made which, looking back on it, seems problematic. As soon as I finished Necropolis, I kickstarted the post-production phase: the Embassy project where I sollicited advanced reviews from other authors, submitted the manuscript to publishers, produced a trailer video. All that took time, and it aimed to get attention to the series, though without a whole marketing team to do that, the time I invest is taken away from actual writing. Perhaps it was too soon, because it definitely post-poned production of the 2nd and 3rd book. The edge, if you could call it that, would have been to get picked up by a publisher (fingers crossed still), and it would free my hands and leave me to concentrate on what I’m good at: fucking writing.

One way down, one way forward

That being said, I want to move forward with The Malice Cycle. I still believe, as I did when the first thoughts of the tale emerged in 2008 some four long years ago, that it is the most significant literary project of my life… so far. Because of the subject and the depth to which I wish to represent it: civilisation, and the fall thereof. So I’ll keep going. I don’t see a way back. I still think all those other projects will eventually help me push this one – in the long term. So I want to keep going, but clearly, I need a plan.

A plan

If we talk schedule, for March, the riff-raff for Valacchia should calm down by mid-march, then a quick polish for the sequel draft – Le Jardin des reves. In April, there’s paperwork, for public libraries in Quebec, and a grant application to the Fed gov. But come May, through August, I mean to further, and possibly complete, book 2 of the Malice Cycle. That’s my only production window on the middle term.

Because if the publishers havent pick up Malice by then, I’ll do a DIY edition to be launched in the Fall of 2012. Around that time I’ll be knee-deep in post-prod with my publishers for Le Jardin des reves.

And that’s it. A plan. There’s lots to do, but I can’t wait to get back.

If it takes two, three, four more years, I’ll make it. And I’ll be here, week after week.

Another week of ceaseless grinding, my ever so fragile muse pureed between mortar and pestle.

With the Valacchia promo sent into hyperdrive, the new play, the AWB’s new anthology, and saving the world (which is like telling a suicidal compulsive gambler not to jump down that skycraper ledge, not so much because you want him to live, but because your foot’s chained to that fucking idiot’s belt) I can’t find the time to write for Malice.

So what am I going to talk about this week? Not Malice – though I think about it every fucking microsecond – no, let’s do away with niceties! Today smells of Spring. Spring – in February, but hey, let’s not worry! So how about I chatter on aimlessly about the one and only thing keeping this battered chunk of flesh alive at this point?

Coffee. Coffee. Coffee!

I said coffee. Not pansy fucking tea, that’s for hippies and people who want to live long healthy lives. Nah. Fuck ‘em. And not energy douchebag fuck drinks, that’s just bubblegum flavored meth, kids, stay away.

I’m talking about black coffee. The real deal. Forget milk, forget sugar, forget every little fucking trinket people in the stuff to make it taste less than what it fucking is. Yes, pure, black coffee. Blood of the Midnight Goddess, pool of acid void, refuge of the harrowed mind, black coffee – yes, course freely, lead us down into spirals of alacrity, set witchcraft to veins and fire to wit! Flow, dark river, flow!

My writing ritual, for most things intellectual but especially creative writing, like plays, and novels like The Malice Cycle, is inherently linked to coffee consumption. I have to sit, and I gotta have music, but without coffee I have a really hard time putting down anything coherent. Then, when that porcelain cup rests next to me, all round and fuming and sexy, my mind can finally set into motion. I don’t even need to have a taste for the process to ignite – the smell suffices. And then the first sip – my fingers start running across the keyboard, all ablur. My eyes pierce the screen while the inner workings of my mind spin madly. And I write. Pages will wash upon the beach of my novel effortlessly.

But the spell does not last forever. I can never hold the trance longer than 4-5 hours without jeopardizing the following day’s session. Pushing the machine, if you will, is costly and makes me sluggish. I’ve found, it’s better to sustain work everyday then to cram it all at once, which is a balance everyone finds faced with their own limitations. And so is my creation contained to a chemically-induced pace, and while my addiction rules, I owe caffeine the most creative moments of my life.

Soon, there will be time. The acrid nectar will fill my cup, and then, only then, will I meet up Malice again and writer her a fitting tale.

Writing. Yes, I think I remember how that works.

By: Karla Fetrow. Featured on Subversify Magazine, Feb 2nd 2012

Necropolis… A shivering trip into a world without light, a world without hope, a world so destroyed, the rules of society are reversed.  Morality is viewed as the pursuit of pleasure.  Philosophy is an art freely engaged in, as long as it contributes to inertia.  While reveling in their decadence, they do so with the determination to never again repeat the structure and motivations of the past that they are sure contributed to their downfall as a civilization.  That is, until Malice comes along.

Book 1 of The Malice Cycle carries the reader into a surreal future where faith, light and hope are relinquished to forget everything except the collapse of the Old World, using it as a model of what to avoid if they did not wish to see the destruction of their own limited society, where community is declared false and nothing more than a conservative gesture to defend that which would hold us hostage.  Malice, the youngest of the Morbid daughters, a family held in high esteem, begins to question if there was something more than just the dark existence of their lives, replete in fineries, self-indulgence, sexual promiscuousness, but lacking in curiosity and inventiveness.  She is accompanied by the “Shadow”, who compels her to question the rituals that would hasten her father’s death, and to explore the edges of the void, a hostile land of poisonous insects and hallucinogenic plants, in search of a sister who has disappeared and is rarely talked about.

Malice’s journey into self-awareness is a lyrical account that strips back both the layers of personality that define her motivations for stepping away from the society that has molded her and the fabric of society itself, holding up its flaws and poking holes in its weaknesses until the society itself begins to unravel.  The author, Bruno Masse, already has a few remarkable accomplishments.  At twenty-nine, he is an author, researcher, musician, activist and publisher. He has written several novels and poetry collections, as well as five plays, four of which were enacted during the annual International Anarchist Theatre Festival of Montreal. He was the co-founder and active part of such collectives as The End of the World Comittee, La Foret Noire, Liberterre, the Anarchist Writers Bloc and Anarchistes Anonymes, and remains an active contributing author at Subversify.

I asked Bruno about his day job in environmentalism and if it had been an influence for choosing the stark, barren background for his Malice Cycle series.  Apart from his job as coordinator for the Reseau Quebec Ecologist Group (RQGE), he has also worked also worked on urban agriculture projects and collective gardening, and was a university researcher.  He answered, “that was mostly “brain-mercenary” contract work and I don’t really boast it. I don’t mind if you use stuff from my work or make reference to it, to be honest it generally never overlaps and most people I work with have no idea of my novels or artwork on the side, and I don’t really mind. I wish it was all in sink but it’s sometimes quite contradictory, but that’s self-evident. Just to be clear, the official positions of the RQGE are not the ones I distribute on my own time, even though we’re in the same fields and agree on the basic key principles (a solidarity society, a better natural environment, etc.).

Now, my inspiration for Dystopia is a culmination of my experiences as an anarchist (and precisely, part of the anti-civ or anarcho-primitivist movement), various hypothesis about the fall of Civilisation, mainstream anthropology and a collection of theories on utopias and social change. That, and of course my interest for gothic/dark aesthetics (as manifestations of negative/critical thinking and nihilist philosophy, but something I’m also drawn to quite irrationally). My main idea is that of a utopia in practice that is one exactly because it strives consciously not to be one, which explains why they called it Dystopia. If people who claim to be perfect are the usually the worst, if you actually try to be imperfect, you have a better to chance to be more humble and not give in to totalizing thoughts and practices (which lead to totalitarianism). In a way, it’s a system that most mainstream environmentalists would hope for: a city that is 100% sustainable, supported by permaculture gardens that require little work, and most time is spent on leisure. But by mimicking a model born from the Neolithic revolution, I aim to illustrate that the “roots” with necessarily reproduce the Civilisation process (i.e. Morbid’s takeover). The reasons for that are a population so vast that immediate relationships are not constantly possible, and such emphasis on culture (Dystopians prize literature, music, debate, art, etc.) will necessarily distantiate people from one another, introducing mediations that will enable class divisions.

I delve into gothic/horror/noir themes because they carry a mood of loss and contemplation I think is inherent of the human condition and wish to undertake fully. To me, it’s more honest and liberating than the “dictature of happiness” we seem to live in, where frowning is pretty much forbidden, medicalized and shunned, and so is critical thinking.

The people of Dystopia see themselves as rebels who escaped Civilisation as it collapsed and have tried, as best as they could, to make sure the mistakes of the past would never be replicated. I wanted to do a sort of tribute to the nobility and the courage of such devotion, the kind I have seen in anarchists but also a lot of people with radical ideas and practices. In such a sunless and depressing world, they’re paying the prices for mistakes they aren’t responsible for, and that’s a clear reference to the fact that life conditions in this day and age are receding and that’s something entirely new to mankind, since the industrial revolution. But I also wanted to go beyond all that that and illustrate how difficult it can be not to reproduce the sick schemes of domination and authority.

Also, since I’m bilingual, in a province that seems to strangle itself with split cultural identities, I thought it would be interesting to imagine a people who clearly used to speak a different language and lost it completely, and make the reader feel a bit estranged from all the French dialogue, and show them how it feels at first to encounter cultural references you can’t understand, but moreso, to show how much it doesn’t matter in the end, because we’re just humans after all, who love and laugh and hurt and die like any.

The main character of Malice, besides all her human qualities which I hope are as poignant and vivid as they are to me, is basically a play on the concept of Chaos. She possesses something nobody has, some love her for it, most despise her, and a lot want to use her. She’s like a sort of exotic life form sent into an indigenous habitat, or a sort of technological leap that dwarfs everything else in the field. She’s a paradigm shift, and I want to illustrate how devious power can be, and her tragedy in a way is to echo what happens to anyone who’s opressed when they’ve had enough and finally fing a way to escape. Like the French revolution. The oppressed feel such anger and rage that it has no choice but to come out in a traumatic way, it’s an ugly, violent thing, and it’s a normal natural response to aggression. In that way, she is liberated and beautiful, because we see that the people who hurt her had the very best of intentions, but acted in really horrible ways regardless, and have to answer for that. I wanted to show that sometimes freedom is a “by any means necessary” kind of thing, but that it’s not the answer to everything, and that’s a notion Malice will learn at her own expense.

Also, there will be a sequel and a third book. It’s meant as a whole, the structure itself was done even before I started book 1. I’m currently writing book 2.

As to how much of my background I’ve used for the book, for the setting and the world itself I can say that I’ve had to delve extensively in my knowledge as a forest technician, and as a geographer, if only for the physical, environmental aspects of the Island. But I also drew from years of study into sociology, anthropology, psychology and philosophy – of which I draw mostly from nihilist thinkers like Cioran, Nietszche, Schopenhauer, but also from the Frankfurt School, primarily Adorno. For the critique of civilisation I take a lot from John Zerzan, who’s influenced me a lot (the opening quote is his) and whom I actually know. He has made reviews of all my English novels.

To conclude I’d say I draw a lot from the style of Frank Herbert in his Dune series, because to me any political discourse cut from its setting is absurd, while any storytelling devoid of incisive critical thinking is a waste of time. By trying to weave a compelling narrative and include ethical questions and layers of philosophical complexity, I try to make a read that will entrance and challenge the reader and perhaps help him or her grow in a meaningful way, even if that means feeling angry or depressed at first, because we live in fake world that’s making life agonizing and quickly threatens to take most of the planet in its fall. The logical response is revolt, and that’s what I write about. Like Karl Klaus said: it’s not so much what we create that matters, but what we destroy.”

“Do you plan, at some point”, I asked, “ to use a model of a society in your series that strikes a happy balance between the extreme of totalitarianism and dystopia, or to some viewers, what might be considered decadence?  Or do you think human nature doesn’t make that possible; that it has a tendency to veer from one extreme to another; never arriving at a middle ground for long?”

Bruno answered, “I don’t plan on using an ‘affirmative’ model that I would deem ideal. The island of Dystopia is a failed utopia, many aspects of it (little work, no technology, few social mediations, balance with nature) are true ideals to me, its flaws become apparent as the novel progresses (namely, the roots of civilization). Questions are really what I want to draw. Ultimately, I want people to think for themselves, and that is precisely how I see society getting any better – if at all. But I don’t believe the problem lies in human nature, empathy and solidarity are natural for the vast majority of us (minus those 1-2% psychopaths, who’d hunt you for sport). Culture is the problem, and not just one or the other, but culture itself, which is negation of nature, and is getting increasingly complex. The result is broken ecosystems, pandemic’s, weakened bodies, famine, mass psychological distress, to name a few, and of course, having to be in school twenty years to find a place in the system.”

The book certainly draws questions and the failed Utopia becomes a painful examination of cultural failure as the traditions that rooted themselves into this anti-civilization become the very thing that imprisons these survivors of catastrophe. “I also wonder a little about the environment you place around Dystopia,” I told Bruno.  “The natural environment outside the catacombs and cities seems to be a hostile one with limited resources, yet you symbolize a brighter world with a yellow flower.  Is my perception a result of the darkness around the story itself?  Is Dystopia an inclusive society with no connections with an outside world that might in fact, be radically different, or is it part of an overall disintegration of the cities, with a random rural society that has reverted back to basics?”

“Good question!” Answered Bruno.  “The Collapse did leave endless spans of land desolate and lifeless, which the denizens of Dystopia call the Wastes. But I’ll leave you guessing. Those points will be addressed in the next two books.”

Bruno Masse’s “Necropolis, Book 1 of the Malice Cycle” is scheduled to be released this year to the general public.  Tangled in a twilight zone that slumbers between science fiction and fantasy, with bold, poetic strokes, it paints a haunting background and an unforgettable character in Malice.  Be among the first to collect the beginning of what is bound to be considered classical anarchistic fiction from a very memorable writer.

My dayjob is sucking me in, what used to be four days a week turned into five or six days a week, with Valacchia’s booklaunch hastening to a triumphant note, and more exposure from my work. There’s no more free time, just decisions to miss opportunities and people to let down, whatever I do.

So. Whichever way, it’s become apparent that The Malice Cycle isn’t moving much. It’s a nightmare I am painting with the brush of the everyday, often dulled by routine and sharpened by the tragedies of life which I remember, currently experience and dread to come. Don’t get me wrong, it is my most meaningful work at the moment. But structurally, it falls a the bottom of the priority list. But I try, I do.

Now while I’m eating the pavement, I need things to look forward to. Perhaps a day – a sunny day in Spring when I can warm my face, listen to the trickle of melting snow, coupled with bird song, cradled in a gentle breeze from the West. Then I’ll sit down to write.

On we go.

p.s. With the Cooke Agency and PM Press having passed on Necropolis, I’m left with four prospects left. If (or when?) that falls flat, I’ll go all DIY and buy a catapult.

Information Sickness – constant stream of irrelevant data punctuated with the occasional speck of truth, a faint glimmer lost in a sea of publicity, PR campaigns, talking points and fast opinions.

By the age of 18, the average Western-world individual will have been subjected to over 200,000 ads. You will spend 12-20 years in school and just barely understand how and why the world works the way it does. You can name hundreds of brands but you can’t name more than a handful of bird or tree species. And an army of bosses, landlords, parents, teachers, preachers, bankers and politicians will push you around and instill the notion that authority is good, for no other reason than it is.

Modern society can be broken down in fairly loose terms. The top 2-3% is made of psychopaths who feel the same way about you as their coffee table, and wield immense power precisely because the consequences don’t affect them emotionally. Another 10%, more or less, is made up of socialists – empathetic people actively involved in trying, and failing, to make the world better, greener, more equal. A place you actually want to live in. Some of these are peaceful bureaucrats, others outright revolutionaries. They fight amongst themselves and find meaning in doing so, because the horror of the everyday is better faced by keeping eyes open.

The rest is the dormant, silent majority, a swarm of countless people who, slumberous, are tired, grumpy, quick to anger, but quicker to reconciliation, and only want one thing: to go back to sleep. You can lull them, or poke them, but while they’ve still got something to lose, they’ll keep to the routine without a fucking clue. When they see rich people, they envy them. And when they see revolutionaries, it doesn’t inspire them to fight, no, it comforts their inactivity, because if someone else is willing to take the risk, then why should they?

And this mass, this swarm of such incredible potential, is the object of every single media strategy, every piece of information launched through every medium conceivable – mobilization from the upstarts, or PR campaigns from the upper class. And the roaring mass speaks to itself, trying to conjure some appealing reflection to quell the perennial doubt that they are actually wasting their lives in servitude.

The ensuing noise is the Information Age.

And I was contemplating these concepts these past weeks as I was interviewed twice. My performances were rather poor, really, not because I didn’t want to express myself, or didn’t have anything relevant to say, it’s probably exactly because I was so eager I talked so fast, didn’t pause, rambled on nervously, spewing words and ideas so fast, terrified at the thought I couldn’t get it all out in the couple seconds allotted.

In the Information Age, what doesn’t make enough noise doesn’t really exist. This notion alone haunts me, because it is the apparatus’ own exigencies, not mine, not objective truth, merely circumstantial, and temporary. So why play to what you know to be false?

Because countless variables are explicitly poised on such contrivances, and they don’t care that it’s false.

So yes, composition is hard to attain when everything seems to be at stake. Somehow I’m stuck between the pressure to express the meaning I wish to convey and the simple need to be who I am – which is just me, and hardly fitting for a public figure. The contradiction is manifest.

Consider the Void, consider peace, silence, the beautiful moment of absolute nothing. We must be who we are.

Currently sucked in the vacuum of Valacchia. Until the fateful launch party on March 9th, it’s going to be shameless promotion, interviews and worldwide conspiracy.

Meanwhile, Anarchistes anonymes met up last night to grind over the new play, Anar Écoute, and this time it looks like its going to be five of us, with a guest director. I produced the first draft of the sketch play but everyone will pitch in, rewrite and add new material, and I’m happy it can be such a collective effort. If we’re gonna bomb on stage, at least we’ll bomb together!

And lastly, the Anarchist Writers Bloc is hard at work for the next anthology, which will be bigger, better, and, well, just plain fucken anarchotastic.

So, there’s that, and of course my day job.

I’m fucken swamped. But I still daydream about the Malice project and squibble some lines here and there. Not much progression for the time being, but I swear, we’ll fucken get there, puppies.

In the meantime, here’s an à propos clip of Grinders, my latest discovery here in the heart of Necropolis, the Grinders comedy club, Theatre Sainte-Catherine.

Production of the 2nd book has slowed to a halt. Yet evenso, the literal hamster keeps spinning, and sentences unfurl without my consent, all the way up there in that caffeine-soaked melon of mine.

“And why is that?” Well Timmy, I’m currently ploughing through a combination of exhaustion and excitement, which the French call fébrilité. On the one hand, I’m in total shock before human ignorance and arrogance, fighting bureaucrats and conservatives on a daily basis and completely unable to get over how fucking cannibalistic the dominant class is. Meanwhile, “Mr and Ms Everybody” love and envy the rich, instead of experiencing deep and utter contempt for them. All the torches and the pitchforks are neatly locked away in the basement but the iPhones are out in seasonal colors and Twitface nears the billion users.

The late Fredy Perlman wrote, back in the 80s I believe, that “now is a perfectly good time to go insane”, when he was referring to the dying beast of capitalism taking everything in its fall – us, life on the planet, and your mom. And I have to agree with him. The fact that a handful of sociopaths managed to climb the ladder and enslave everyone below in one thing, but how the silent majority stays silent, with everything that’s going on, is completely beyond me, and I honestly think anyone willing to look long enough on the state of the world will go completely bonkers. Fighting for sanity in the modern is a daily struggle.

But hey, it’s just reality!

Cut to commercial!

On the upside, did I mention Valacchia was already on pre-order? That’s the second half of fébrilité: excitement. My very first mainstream book, sent out into the world and miles away from any notion of control on my part. Of course, it may very well be lost into obscurity by the second week. Or the third. But some may find some thrill into my lines and warm themselves through the last months of this harsh Quebecan winter, and if that’s wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

And if you don’t think that’s funny, wait until I hit my first interview and watch me blush until my head explodes.

So, I’ve submitted Necropolis to 5 publishers: ESP Books, Arsenal Pulp Press, AK Press, PM Press and Tom Doherty LLC (Tor, Orbit). A sixth submission was made to the Cooke literary Agency, who could, if willing, make more submissions to publishers who only talk to agents (Random House, Big Cahoonas Ltd, etc.).

I’ve already been turned down by PM Press because they’re overloaded, but they complimented me on the quality of the submission, so I guess I got that right.

Now, I’ve got five fishing lines in the water and six-eight months to keep fingers crossed and take compromising pictures of the chief editors (one of these plans is a joke of course, but guess which!).

In the meantime, if the concept of publishing full-length novels in the age of Twitter is not ludicrous enough, I invite you to ponder the empirical data pertaining to the relationship via publishers and the general market.

I’ve already mentioned that people like Twain, Proulx and Tolstoi started out as self-published authors, so that’s no secret. A fun fact to consider however is that many best-selling authors were previously turned down by buckets of publishers before selling millions. Like Herbert’s Dune, which was rejected approximately 23 times over ten years before becoming the greatest best-seller of sci-fi.

JK Rowling, though I despise her work (and her fans) with a rare passion, was turned down ten times for her first Harry Potter book.

Stephen King was also turned out about twenty times for Carrie.

Wait!

Think about it for a second. That means, twenty times, some guy in an office looked over Stephen King’s manuscript, scratched his balls and said with the utmost certainty “nah, that’s crap, NEXT!”. That’s twenty corporate entities who made a decision so profoundly and thoroughly incorrect as to completely contradict the one and only skill they’re are supposed to have: the ability to predict if a piece of written work will sell or not.

It’s happened time and time again. The logical conclusion is that publishers are just fallible people and not shamans – they don’t have a crystal ball and when they pass on a submission they’re also taking a risk. What that means for me is that I do have some chance of getting picked up, but if I don’t it doesn’t necessarily mean Necropolis is a poor novel or even doomed for commercial failure.

So, can I actually predict the chances I have, come up with some formula based on my current (lack of) fame, my sale record, my Google rank, the scope, type and size of the publishers, the weather outside when the publisher gets my submission, whether or not they had time for that quick rub-out before coming in to work, and the number of typos still in the book divided by total word count?

No. It’s not a perfect science. This whole fucking thing is a few notches south of complete lottery, and I got a couple tickets. It’s fucken pathetic, and I don’t know what else to do. So, let’s pretend to hold our breath, because, who knows? I got published in French, why couldn’t I get published in English? Just cause I can’t write, does that mean I shouldn’t get those millions of dollars either? Fuck, this is America, when did talent ever enter in the equation?

Here’s a list of 15 best-selling authors who got the run-around before dipping their balls, or ovaries, in literal gold.

http://io9.com/5668053/15-classic-science-fiction-and-fantasy-novels-that-publishers-rejected

Meanwhile, a minute’s piece…

Forward

I’ve climbed mountains far and wide
Wandered grassy plains and forests wild
And though the load was often heavy
I carried mine and walked forward

I’ve survived cities big and small
Worked hard and harder and then more
And when the fascists screamed at me
I held my head up and bit my tongue
The bosses and the lovers and the psychos
When they knocked me down
And kicked me
My head still high and both fists low
Biding my time

Proud in dismay, but always forward
Often heartsick, often plain sick
Forward and forward
In circles
While my flowers died
Winters fell in succession
I lost the laughter of children
And the company of friends

I swore there would come a day, oh did I ever
A moment when the rules would change
The ground would stop shifting beneath my feet
I could finally breathe
And build a life
Just a little further down
If only
I was wiser, if only I got stronger
A little luck to meet the right people
The very impossible people
Thinking there had to be a way
Somehow

Meanwhile life is passing by
Years and tears spell out different lessons
You get wrinkles and enemies
You run from more than to
The odds get so clear: they’re set against you
The principles are wrong: you’re a joke
The pieces don’t fit
And you try to figure out
How to be happy
How to just walk on
And go
Forward

Back from a lightning rump in Maine with a pack of fudge and some 14 hours’ bus ride etched into my butt, tired but somewhat serene, ready to pound my frontal lobe against the intricacies of literary delusion.

I’ve got about 10 days’ vacation to fast-track three more submissions for Necropolis, and to that end I’ve decided to add a few overdue trinkets to the novel, namely:

In alphabetic order, some 100 quick description for all unique names, terms and characters. It’s a classic tool for fantasy books to help readers when they feel lost through the narrative, and it’s important so as not to stick to the little details and lose sight of the story.

I wasn’t going to, but after long exchanges with my editor for Valacchia (similar questions) I decided to put translations of every single word that’s not English and bundle them all up by chapter in a list at the end of the book. Thing is, I put in little bits of French (and maybe one or two Latin expressions) in the whole novel, as Dystopians are distant descendants of a French-speaking culture, which they refer to as the Old Tongue. About 90% of these are simply cosmetic and do not provide any significant information to the story, but a few do contain certain insights into the thoughts of a few characters (namely, Léandres) and there’s a few poems in French. Thing is, I know that most of these bits would be useless to the reader, but the reader doesn’t know that, and I didn’t want it to get frustrating.

Finally, and this is only if I find enough time, I’ll make a map of Dystopia and one of Necropolis. I’m a fucking geographer, so yes, I can make maps, and I’ve always found visual material to be very helpful when reading a story that rests strongly on spatial positions, land descriptions, etc. Hey, if they’re any good, I’ll post them here as a little treat for you guys.

Yams, yams, Santa Claus, bla bla bla.

I’m off to Maine to sample what it’s like to get fat and stupid in the US of A, overdose on fudge and come back crawling. It’s a bit of a getaway between me and my sweet queen of the underworld, before the madness starts again in 2012.

Publishing update: PM Press, AK Press and the Cooke Agency have been bombarded with a submission for Necropolis. I have three more targets in my sights, and then I’ll take a break. Fuck it’s long – you have to tailor every fucken submission in little anal details – page lengths and bio size and cover letters that apparently must contain all the content of the submission and isn’t quite a fucking cover letter anymore – because we’re very anal in the book biz, yes, yes, and I won’t say I ain’t, bubba!

So have fun, abuse every possible substance you can find until January 2nd and straighten the fuck up for another fucking year of fuckity, fuck fuck fucks.

See you in two weeks!

PAPERWORK!

I’m at around the 7th chapter of Book 2, and am now pausing two weeks to do…. fucking paperwork.

You will remember the Embassy project (here and there), which I’ve decided to conclude, after some 8 months of e-mails, hundreds of dollars in post and print, lots of misunderstandings and lost time and resources, mingled with brilliant encounters with incredible humans. In total, 4 reviews have come in, with somewhere between 1-2 uncertain ones yet to come, maybe, perhaps, if at all. But after extending this thing month after month I’ve decided to move the fuck on.

So there we go, the Embassy is closed. My thanks to Jason McQuinn, Norman Nawrocki, Joseph Vargo and John Zerzan for trusting me even through my many flaws as a writer, and lending some time my way.

The ever fine folk at Subversify Magazine suggested we do an interview instead, which is set somewhere after Xmas.

What next?

Well, publishing, puppies, publi-fucka-shing.

Now, trying to get publish. Trying. Submitting. Submission. I’ll do it, I fucken will. More money down the drain, more rejection, yes, bring it on! I’ll bow low to every little anal-fixated demand from these pimps of a feather, tailor submissions, sacrificing the long hours of what little free time I have, send my precious pages to every side of the globe and I’ll eat those fucken rejection letters, yes, ah, ah, it’ll be great!!

Yes, ten years of writing down the road and now I’m quite familiar with the process of strutting my literal stuff down FameWhore boulevard, showing a bit of leg to attract the attention of vapid business men driving past, hoping to get a few bucks for a quick and dirty one. Sure, I’ll put on that make-up, I’ll do freaky stuff, I’ll put on a pig nose and squeal, motherfucker!

Wonder why I’ve been doing DIY so long? Cause I hate that fucken process. It’s the fucken lottery, and I don’t play, and I don’t write to please the fucken masses, I write to disturb them, and they won’t like it, and neither will the publishers…

Sure, I’m already signed with one publisher, that’s true. But it’s in French, it’s in Quebec, and it’s erotica. The Malice project is outside those three categories, so it’s back to square one.

Yes, I might be cynical, but I’m not blind. There’s a reason I have to try. Distribution, marketing – it’s the two systems I can’t handle on my own, it’s a scale larger than any one person, however gifted or capable, could ever achieve. So yes. I’ll even try the agents, yes I will. Why? Cause the big publishers, those who could carry this whole stuff worldwide, they don’t talk to authors, they speak to agents.

It’s an ugly fuck business, and it hurts me to even think about it. But if I’m gonna write, if I’m gonna fucken try, I’m gonna go all the way.

All the way. If only to prove how flawed the system is.

Latest review for Necropolis, by anarchist essayist and editor Jason McQuinn, of the Alternative Press Review and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.

***

Necropolis is a mordantly gothic tale of a goth enclave believing itself the last Dystopian city of Man, lost in the midst of a vast unknown void. It’s a tale told in melodic, though often melodramatic, prose with clever bits of archaic English interspersed with highlights in la Francaise. (Keep your dictionaries close.) In it the mutant heroine, Malice, is sickened by the suffocating expectations of an increasingly superficial, hedonistic population in a decaying, semi-anarchic city governed by the Tenets of Dystopia. The story recounts her turn from passive victim to author of her own bloody destiny. If you enjoy futuristic, gothic fantasy with plenty of blood and gore, conspiracy and betrayal, this story delivers it with an anti-civilizational edge.

Happy birthday, Dev Diary, you’re two years old! The Malice Project is slightly older, but who’s counting?

Two flippin’ years, man. The blog’s received around 4,000 hits, which, for a project that hasn’t been published from an author with no mainstream publications, is pretty fucken awesome.

So far the damage has been substantial. You’ve seen me beat my head against proverbial walls, rant against humanity, babble on about pointless drivel and otherwise detail every single advance of my project with numbing precision. But we’ve survived.

Sure, I’d be lying if I said the production schedule’s in tip top shape. Truly, it’s now a battered whore of a timeframe, bruised and bloodied and carelessly flung into the recycling bin. BUT I’m not that far behind.

Let’s see….

Book 1 is nailed and done, and we’re still waiting on a few more reviews. The handful of people to have read the first draft were very much entranced by the story, if for the fact it breathes synthax errors and typos. Four other potential reviewers double-backed once they got the book, which is not a good sign. Besides, it hasn’t been submitted to any publisher yet, as the reviews are still coming in. Personnaly speaking, I am satisfied with it, and if I died of a massive aneurysm after this double espresso, I’d die happy leaving this masterpiece behind.

Book 2 is under production, with about 25 pages in, which is just a humble beginning. All the structure is done in detail. I expect it to be done sometime in the summer of 2012, but who fucking knows.

Book 3 is just a vision at this point, with the major plot lines in order, but no clear structure yet. The end is very clear however, it’s what I began with.

Sometimes I see the entire Malice Cycle in a single black-matte hardcover, a thousand pages thick, and the word Malice etched in silver engravings. It would be a thing of decrepit beauty, and scar the minds of its readers forever.

A man can dream. Maybe in another two years the project will finally be over.

A toast!

November drapes slowly parting – Nature yawning greatly before moons of slumber.

Economies crumbling, cities burning, innocent people shot down like dogs by police and military forces. In all directions, rich hateful men scheme at hardwood desks, and their peons drudge on the everyday teeth clenched to keep the rage down. Rivers of blood here, piles of money there – screams and laughter and comments from reality show stars. Hundreds of wildlife species die out every single day. Up North, the ice is melting faster than ever. And those in power won’t do a single significant thing.

This is our world. And here’s this week’s Stimulator.

So, I’ve been sick for two weeks – what started out as some strange virus doubled into acute tonsilitis, with the fever, the pain, the nausea, etc. Nothing new, but quite crippling. If there was a God, that would be His almighty finger down my throat.

With the industrial-grade antibiotics and aspirin I’m forking down at the moment, I must once again salute modern science, which often has a short-term solution for the long-term problems it creates. And I fantasize about rusty mellon-ballers doing away with those useless fleshy appendages.

In the meantime – and an infinitely more pleasant note – I’m happy to reveal the photo that is most likely to be selected for the cover of Valacchia, due to come out in Feb ‘12. (Photo and modeling by Candace Barbieri of Candylust.org)

I presented this shot to the publishers last summer because I felt that her attitude and the quality of her work were the best way to represent this novel, and the publishers, with the distributor, all agreed. I hope this is only the start!!

Nothing much to say this week, so here’s a much better thing instead – this German short film about the rise, and fall, of Civilisation, seen from two grumpy rocks.

SPOILER ALERT!

This week, a brief glimpse into the new characters of the 2nd Book of the Malice Cycle: work title The Enklave. I’ll try to give out too much info to spoil the plot, so here’s a bit of (after)taste.

Aurélie: Acolyte in the service of the Archon, a beacon of moral and physical superiority, bred and trained to enforce the theocratic order of the Enklave. Implacable and cold, an incisive mind ensnared in the worship of Luminon, who only speaks in the verses of the Book of Insufferable Light. But inside, there sleeps a yearning for more, to escape the numbness of her aesthetically perfect world. In the meantime, she drowns her ennui in the flesh – and blood – of Handmaidens.

5yph35: By day, just another slave to the production line, toiling hard to meet his quotas and escape the scrutiny of the higher ranks. But by night, he injects himself with XI – a rare and costly compound which enables him the edge: the chance to work without sleep, thereby gaining the hours of night to work on his creation. 5yph35’s vision is code and algorithm, self-morphing equations culminating in Aeon: an AI construct, his only friend, which he means annihilate the entire Enklave. But can he make it in time before he is discovered, or worse, his own flesh fails him?

Q’inp: Strong, simple, gentle Q’inp is a pariah in the underworld of the Symbii-kin – beings of extreme joy who smile constantly and do not tolerate those who can’t, or won’t. Theirs is the cave society sheltered from the surface, who must work constantly to feed and power the Enklave above. They live in symbiosis with a species of fungi creatures, of whom only the most wretched are denied. When a misunderstanding leads the Symbii to lock Q’inp away, he will have to choose between his natural empathy to forgive, his self-loathing of being different, and the urge to escape and take back his freedom.

Down to the 3rd chapter of Malice’s 2nd Book. It’s moving slowly. I’m having trouble making progress because the world I am so desperately trying to depict reminds me too much of my own – I have very little distance towards the themes I wish to express and my work, like my political life, are all focused on these.

Sometimes, it’s hard to deal with reality, not because it’s so bad, but because it’s getting worse, and I can see, hear, feel it. Every second I spend escaping reality makes me slightly weaker, but it also gives me some kind of break I find hard to resist. And so we go, stuck between fighting and retreating, acting and recoiling. And it’s always been like that. I don’t know any other kind of life.

Camus’ assertion that what we do, in life, might very well be in vain, follows me whatever I do. It’s helped become a humbler person, more apt to help and listen and give, than the arrogant wretch I used to be. But it’s also undermined my confidence in several endeavors that might, after all, be utterly pointless. The world, as it happens, can validate my actions or not, it’s beyond my power. But then I must ask myself: why am-I here, and why am-I even trying?

Everyday I learn the same lesson all over again, that about 99% of all humans do not value truth, not when it conflicts with their habits and values and faith and privileges. So they keep going without a hitch, and the world keeps turning into a lifeless prison.

Ergh. Anyway. A question of balance. I’ve decided to reduce the time I spend with computers and take up healthier activities, like relaxing, cooking, sowing. I’ve taken up the Piano again, with parts by Nox Arcana. Maybe I can be a stronger, better person. Maybe there’s a point to all this.

There has to be a way.

October is a busy little beast. For the next three week-ends, I’m knee-deep in various mind-lifting activities, mainly, a weekend of frolic with my beloved in the autumn spells of the old North, then a weekend retreat for work, and then, well, it’s fucken Halloween.

I’m writing book 2 of the Malice Cycle like a maniac, every free minute I get. It’s going well.

In the meantime, here’s a new release: The Police Pimp, which will be in the next Subversion anthology. Read it on Subversify.

Side note: this story came to me in a dream, about a month ago, pretty much as is. My dreams are rarely so coherent, funny, and frightening. Enjoy!

I’ve officially started writing for the second book of the Malice Cycle.

After some six months of running around and banging my proverbial skull against every flat surface, I’ve done it, words are forming complete sentences, images are being drawn and I’m no longer just thinking about the project, but making it, which, dear puppies, is a great big fucking relief.

I’ve often associated the process of novel-writing with the act of birth, in a plethora of more or less disgusting analogies. Well, I’d been a-hurtin’ mah noggin’, and the pushin’s plum hard for a simple country goth.

So, the overture’s done. Now, 50 chapters all lined up.

First impressions: the cyber-punk-ish feel of the 2nd book feels refreshing, after the more medieval-antiquity feel off the first. More possibilities to explore, and I can’t wait to continue.

That’s all I got, for now. I can tell you that I’m thoroughly depressed about the Plan Nord. It’s a sick plan from sick minds, and every single sane person left in this fucken iceland is currently wailing in agony, while blind, rabid swine are sharpening their sickles and getting ready for the reaping. Civilisation is marching on, and Nature is on the receiving end as always. I don’t know if cynicism can save me now. This is really bad.

Third Review for Book 1 of the Malice Cycle.

This one comes from Norman Nawrocki – internationally acclaimed musician, author, speaker, and all-round rabble-rouser!

“A must read. Bruno Massé uses his black as coal but highly developed visionary imagination to weave an alternatively delightful, magical, disturbing and profoundly damning social critique of contemporary society and the future that conceivably awaits us. The book explodes with passion and longing, love and rage and limitless fantasy. Challenging and provocative, heartbreaking and endearing, it is also captivating and full of action. This is a remarkable accomplishment from a masterful story teller. It reveals yet again the talents of one of Canada’s brightest from the new generation of the global anarchist literary scene. ”
- Norman Nawrocki

William Gibson, father the the cyberpunk genre, once wrote that science-fiction had become moot. Why? Because, he said, we’re already there.

Mind you, this is a poor rendering of that masterful statement, (blame my microwave-blasted memory!). Still, the point is very much there. Projection into forward existence is relevant insofar as there is any distance to cover.

The possibilities of prolonging this unsustainable society are receding fast. And anyone can aknowledge this, wealthy or poor. If you are a rationnal, cartesian person, you will read the UN’s reports and on overpopulation and the general ressource-crisis we are in. The numbers speak very loudly. If however, you have a more sensitive, intuitive mindset, you will simply take a look around in the world you live in and realize just how much we’ve wronged the natural world which gave us birth.

When early first science-fiction was but an appraisal of technology, the evolution of the genre into cyberpunk noted an incisive critique of the role of technology in society, to be used, as argued Orwell, solely for repressive ends.

And now, the genre of cyberpunk has paved way into post-apocalyptic, fulfilling the fear that science, in the hands of our psychopathic leaders and somnolent slave-masses, would indeed bring us head-on into the collapse of Civilisation.

This is where I come in.

The Malice Cycle stems from post-apocalyptic and into post-post-apocalyptic, where we see a new society being born from the fertile ashes of a scorched Earth. No utopia: rather, a flawed society, explicitely bent on embracing it’s own inadequacies in order to expiate the last remnants of man’s culture. Then, finding a sense of truth in lack of purpose, in chaos, in the sensual becoming of an endless chain of qualitatively different presents.

Only in embracing their flaws do the inhabitants of Necropolis find reconciliation with the human condition. Because we are what we are, no more, no less. And it is pointless to wish for a clean break from what the world once was, unless there were total obliteration of human life – in which case, there is no story to tell, and this is what Malice will ultimately seek.

My tale, as the vivid description of a nightmarish reality, is not particularly new. My wager – which is really what my entire life’s work comes down to – is that weaving moving fiction from life into threads of social critique and the lessons learned from millenia of human revolt can help people understand the origins of domestication. If enough of us understand this, and we can find each other, and we can hold our ground, then perhaps we can cast off this plague once and for all and effectively put and end to History.

So this week, I joined FriendFace. Erh, I mean Facebook.

This makes me, as Bill Hicks would put it, another whore at the capitalist gangbang.

It should be noted for posterity, if not as requiem for my sanity, that I did resist the social network plague for a solid five years. Five fucken years. And then, I bent in the wind like a good reed and decided to go with the flow. And drown in it.

And why, you could say, would I stoop to the level of the plebes, by which I mean substantial number of fairly intelligent and progressive beings? For the same reason I learned to speak French as a toddler: it’s how you people communicate, so it’s what I have to do. I’d rather use smoke signals, interpretive dance or even the French language I so learned to speak.

But NO. You humans, you fucken billions of masses of privileged “I have access to the Internet” types had to go to that fucken frizzy little fuck ugly-ass, poorly-coded vanilla fucken network, and now, I can’t reach you as fast anywhere else cause YOU’RE ALL ON FACEBOOK.

So there we go, you made me do it. As the last human to fall into the trend, I am not responsible for my own actions.

Now, bring on the new stalkers and bring back the old psychos I’ve so desperately tried to avoid.

Fuck I hate Facebook. So see you there, and you better come to my events, or I’ll fucken poke you to death.

http://www.facebook.com/Necrosolis

So, Malice should be jealous. I keep neglecting her, and her rapacious friends, for my other trilogy – the infamous French horror-comedy smut series.

Ok, so who in their right mind would juggle two trilogies at the same? No one, that’s who.

And this bat-monkey shit makes regular incursions into my otherwise perfect storm.

Post-production is not unlike masturbation. For real satisfaction, you gotta take your time. And if you accept that pure, ecstatic fulfillment is your goal, you also accept a worthwhile emotional and logistical investment. But if for some reason – and there are always plenty of god-fucked reasons – the process is halted, hindered and otherwise delayed, the journey can easily turn into a fairly frustrating ordeal. You gotta get there. But what’s it gonna take?

“Gee, Bruno, what do you mean exactly?”

I mean, I’m in post-prod for Valacchia, and my editor, who is, to be fair, excessively talented, insightful and incisive, has given me about a thousand suggestions and corrections for me to plough through. That in itself is fucken awesome. And relevant. And absolutely necessary. But it means Malice must take a backseat for a moment.

And I’m losing sanity points faster than Herbert West.

C’est la vie!

This week, I’ve laid down the entire structure of the 2nd Malice book.

That is, chapter by chapter, what happens, to whom, how, why – which mood, what important elements to carry. Every plot element is defined and sorted. It is, basically, the bare-bones of my little creature. Fifty chapters.

It’s a crucial point, one you can never, ever overlook, and every single detail you overlook is another pair of teeth waiting to bite you in the arse whilst writing the next page.

Now, the average time I spend on structure between even starting to write goes from six months to a year. It’s a painful process, because even though you’re making the hardest decisions you are at the same time farthest from their description. And with this particular book, we’re talking about… nine months so far.

The reason is that I’ve neglected this portion for Book 1 and that gave me great pains to tie loose ends mid-way through. Now, that might be tough titties for me, but that doesn’t matter, what’s terrible is that lack of preparation usually shows, and that’s fucken murder.

So, fifty chapters, all lined up. Soon I can begin. First, I want to settle the other fifty chapters of Book 3.

Then, puppies, we’ll have the perfect weapon.

Back in full force after a particularly intense summer. I’ve had a month off from work, which enabled me to tie a lot of loose ends.

Necropolis is now more polished, with the post-prod almost finished (all typos cleaned at last!). The only significant re-writing done concerns the end, with a minor change. Still waiting for blurbs from various sources. By the end of September the great charm operation will start and I will strut over the globe’s publishers to be signed. Oh, what fun that will be.

Besides all this, book 1 of the erotica series, work title “Valacchia”, is currently in post-production and still scheduled for early 2012.

The Website has been updated with a French page, updated bio and a new academic article on erotica, which will come in handy if I get critics my way after the release of Valacchia.

Otherwise, the AWB’s back too and we are working a bigger anthology for May 2012. Callout for submissions will come soon.

And the AA theatre troupe will start producing a new show for next theatre festival. We are cracking out heads at the moment, all sorts of goodies should come out.

NOW WITH ALL THIS ASIDE….. I’ve managed to start work on book 2 of the Malice Cycle. This is huge. I’m just at structure right now, but proper writing is very close. Another 50 chapter to go. Oy oy.

Finally, you may have noticed, the summer was fairly intense politically, with the creation of a new anti-anarchist (or anti-anti-capitalist) task force in Montreal’s police, called GAMMA. With all the police repression we’ve seen in London, there seems to a quantifiable world-wide trend to beef up the prison-state and further choke everyone’s right’s, or as I like to call it, fucking up Orwell’s dusty corpse in the pooper.

I’m taking a break from the DevDiary folks, back in September 2011.

Here’s a picture Kayleigh took of our cat Ziltoid. This adorable blood-thirsty critter from the underworld is sleeping on top of a review copy of Necropolis, book 1 of the Malice Cycle. And it serves to illustrate exactly where the project is at the moment: snoring.

Over the summer, I need to fix all typos, do some substantial re-writing and get all 8 blurbs back. In the end, we’ll have the full shiny version, and we’ll be ready to strut our nihilistic stuff in front of all kinds of publishers. And if they don’t want it, then fuck ‘em, I’ll publish it myself.

Then in August, I’ll get a month off from work and begin the 2nd Malice book. If all goes well, we should have a solid ground from where to stretch the creation process over the coming year.

But you know, I’m tired. So I’ll take my leave of this virtual landscape and bid you farewell until the Fall.

Cheers, truffles and Molotovs.

-Raven

A new blurb just in! This time from John Zerzan: one of, if not the most influencial critical thinkers of our time.

***

BM may indeed be “Canada’s darkest author” but this ravening civilization we all find ourselves is darker.

So I am happy that he pushes on with his ambitious writing. Necropolis is an ancient tale – and couldn’t be more timely.

Bravo, Bruno!

***

There are seven more to be confirmed, since Nancy Kilpatrick very politely declined upon reading the first few pages.

This is taking forever.

I’m currently stuck on the curb back to the Malice Cycle until August when I plan to devolve back into an oyster and cram the second Malice novel with a gooey vengeance. Work title: the Enklave. And the ideas have been piling up for the past six months. I’ve taken notes up the wazoo and am fairly ready to start, if only theoretically, as I’ve little brain-power to actually get down to it.

And it was a perfect plan, save that the road keeps getting longer and longer as my writing speed has been reduced to a crawl. So I complain, with the kicking and the screaming. It’s not pretty. I have to write. I have to… write.

Gah, fuck this shit. What the problem? The new laptop, maybe? Yes, the old thing died on me after seven years – three novels and as many re-editions, one trip across the big blue and enough schemes to make Netchaiev purr like a kitten. I’m writing on a new laptop. Me, the anti-civ, the primitivist, the anti-tech, am just another slave to the machine. And this one feels more alien. It’s light, it’s efficient, it’s fast. No charm at all.

The beatnics had type-writer fetishes. I’m blogging about laptops. The circle never ends, and I’m behind schedule. But I love writing, and I wish it came easier… and that, somehow, I had more time, and that it had a little less of me.

Time.

…

June is here, along with the Scorcher. So while I sit here suntruck and delirious, a couple news.

1. Subversify Magazine have agreed to review Necropolis! Karla, Grainne and Mitch are going to take a whack at this evil opus! The review will come out next Fall. This brings our total blurb count to a potential 10.

2. The Anarchist Writers’ Bloc fiction anthology is reported to have sold about 250 copies! We’ll be hosting an open meet sometime in July for anyone who wants to get involved.

3. I’m having tech problems with this fucken Wordpress architecture. Sorry for the missed schedules, I will try to keep the updates closest to mondays at 8:00 am.

And lastly, because I’m bored, a little wit from Derrick Jensen.

Question: how many environmentalists does it take to change a lightbulb?

Answer: Ten. One to write the lightbulb a letter requesting that it change. Four to circulate online petitions. One to file a lawsuit demanding it change. One to send the lightbulb love and kindness, knowing that this is the only way real change occurs. One to accept the lightbulb precisely the way it is, clear in the knowledge that to not accept another is to do great harm to oneself. One to write a book about how and why the lightbulb needs to change. And finally one to smash the fucking lightbulb, because we all know it’s never going to change.

So I’ve had my first meeting with Guy Saint-Jean Éditeur and am simply ecstatic. These are the most gentle, funny, open-minded, and thoroughly smart people you could find, and I couldn’t have hoped for a better team to work with. We have talked about a lot of different things for the future, but I can simply reiterate, as I’ve said a few weeks back, that there will be more erotica novels to come. In total, I have plans for three, and while the first will come out early 2012, and I’ve got the layout for a second and third. We are planning to release all three one year at a time, so, 2012, 2013, 2014. And then, who knows?

This means that my writing schedule for this summer is a little less loose. I’ve got to be ready for August when I have a month off and will cram for Book 2 of the Malice Cycle.

Yes, the Malice Cycle. This is the whole point, and not one I had lost sight of. I think it’s healthy to interlace projects, gives me room to breathe a bit between one opus and the next. Writing is exhausting, mentally, and also physically – when I go in a vacuum of inspiration.

But let that pass. For now, let’s celebrate. It seems I am breaking out in French at a time when I had lost hope of getting recognized in my own land. My eyes are still upon North America, but every single notch forward is all the more levers I can use.

This is the edge, friends. So here I am, dazed, surprised and euphoric. I’ll savor it, while it lasts.

Sorry for the delay!

The month of Anarchy has ended gracefully and I feel both inspired and spent beyond measure. I’ve been recoiling, I hope you understand.

While the Theatre Festival was a triumph of gut-laugh and and side-splitting fun, the Bookfair was a chance to talk with the readers. It’s hard to describe what I felt when people came to my table, grabbed a few book and started talking about Bruno Masse. It was hard to contain my surprise. Then a few times they would decide to buy a book and I’d just ask, do you want it signed?

The new book covers were all the rave, and it was brilliant to see old friends again and meet new people. The Anarchist Writers Bloc is on fire.

Last thing: next Friday is my first meet with the publishers for Valacchia. I’m giddy like a schoolgirl!

Writing this in the midst of the Festival of Anarchy. I wanted Chaos. And here it is.

The anti-civ week is over and I’ll be performing two plays at the Theatre Festival this wednesday with the Anarchist Writers Bloc and the Anarchist Anonymes troupe. Next weekend, the Bookfair.

Then, first meeting with my publishers concerning Valacchia. Will pitch the visuals of Candylust and try to get her onboard. So far, so good.

When the reviews get back in September for Necropolis, I’ll build the press kit and start hawking to publishers around the globe. This will be another six months at least, and a year IF the book is picked up. In the meantime, book 2 and 3 will be well underway.

Here we go. Kicking ass and taking names.

p.s. this is ANARCHY! Come and say hi!!!

Writing this on the morning after the Canadian Federal Election. I feel a certain pain in my mid-western region.

To say that I, that all of Quebec feels bitter-sweet would be much of an understatement. This rash of far-right, fundamentalist neoconservatives, empowered to plunder this northern land and brainfuck us until 2015 can hardly be soothed by the sweet, sweet social-democrat balm that washed over our political landscape.

Now, let me tell you something straight: I’m an anarchist, and anarchists make an effort not to vote in representative democracy elections. The vast majority of us agree that real democracy (i.e. power to the people) is contrary to parliament, government and any form of hierarchy. It’s absurd that the electorate spectacle would warrant a few to do whatever they want for (and to) the whole, and voting is but a symbolic implement in that direction. Like famed 19th century French révolté Élisée Reclus once wrote: “To vote is to abdiquate”.

Still did I vote. For the first time in my life, though I’d swore I’d never. And I wasn’t the only black-flag wielding upstart to grudgingly trot towards the urn that day. Our logic is as ugly as it is simple: anything but the conservatives. Give me slack-jawed sex-addicts, crack-smoking dog lovers and bubbling hockey fans. Anything but Conservatives. Armani suits, chronic masturbators and scat munchers. Anything but Conservatives. Yes, that’s the level these gun-loving Jesus freaks have reduced us to: begging for the lesser evil with what little we got left.

True, these elections did actually provide a formidably greater good. The social-democrat NPD was clearly the best alternative: greener than the Green Party, left-winged, humane and courageous enough. In an uproar, the entire Quebec province, nearly 30% of Canada’s voters, gave them the go, making the NPD the new official opposition with 102 out of 308 electoral districts. In a fun turn of events, the Quebecan Bloc was practically wiped from the map, signaling the death of mainstream Quebecan separatism. Second twist: the Liberals (liberal in name only) were humiliated and very nearly cut in half. Oh, the sweet sound of demagogs falling.

And althought the political landscape shifted overnight the fascists have been elected with a tight majority… Tighter than a choirboy before Easter, but enough to let them do whatever the fuck they want, for four despicable years. And why do I know they won’t hold back a second? Cause they only understand force. That’s their whole platform. Fear-mongering and antisocial measures, widening the gap between classes, tramping down human rights and selling off the environment to the highest bider. There’s no legal way to stop them. They own a Senate filled with retired sport stars, they’ve got the influence, and tar-sand cash up the wazoo. Sounds familiar? You know it. It’s our very own Republican Party. Being convicted of corruption and held in contempt of Parliament twice never stopped them. As a minority they already made us groan, cutting funding to all organizations to disagree with their policies, giving tax-cuts for the rich, helping the murder of civilians in Afghanistan. Swelled by pro-life Christians, neo-nazis and greedy folk for whom the neoliberals weren’t enough to the right. Yes, sociopaths in power, and the only thing that can stop them now is Revolution.

What else can we possibly look forward to? If the last seven years with a Conservative minority felt like slow suffocation, the next four can be nothing but a full-on nightmare.

So there we go, idiocy, bigotry and fear win again. We have another lesson in nihilism and all that’s left to do is plot and get drunk, and not in that order.

Nothing is neutral.

That’s the first thing I learned when I began my political life. There is no great spectrum, no safe zone at the middle, no objective extremes, and more importantly, nowhere to hide.

This is a lesson I am forced to learn time and again.

There have been times when I’ve sought surcease from the relentless drive of activism. Entire months I’ve vyied absently, distancing myself from the struggle against authority and civilisation, searching to regain past strength and morale I could never find. So much time lost in vapid activites and yet I can’t see how more constructive I could have been – there was nothing from which to create. I myself am oft as desolate as the ground on which I tread.

But human stupidity never stops and seeps into everything, revolting me back into sense, mingled with the occasionnal flash of wit from the more, and ever so wretched, incisive and empathetical minds. And so I always come back here, to the fight, the cause, the struggle. I remember the only way out is further in. Words, only words, and their reality portains a much heavier sense, an unbearable weight. We – underline we – are alone. I see the other anarchs and we talk, we laugh, we scheme. Such camaraderie ever warms my heart. But the chill – the sidewalks, the concrete, the idiots fucken screaming – it’s everwhere, at all times.

I’m sick of looking at computer screens.

Aye. But look yon: May in Montreal, Festival of Anarchy.

I can make it. Death, I am told, is not an option.

“The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane.” – Derrick Jensen

Movie time!

Here’s a must in honor of the Anti-Civ Week here in Montreal.

This documentary features brilliant authors John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen, and goes a long way to illustrate what I – and loads of other people – have been trying to say about the world we live in.

Enjoy!

Something about RPGs.

It was six years “dungeon-mastering” D&D games with friends before I started writing my first novel. Now, at 28, I still play RPGs every other week, more often than not as the storyteller, for which I have to script key narratives and events.

For the past 16 years, games have lasted from one quick session to sagas ranging one or two years. The practice of storytelling has had a definitive impact on my writing technique, more than I would care to admit.

For one, pen and paper RPGs are nerdy, stereotypical, somehow alienated social rituals and otherwise male-dominated, with the random female incursion, which is rarely satisfying on their part. There are a lot of critiques I could make here, yet I can honestly say such activites, if done the right way,  still appear as more humane, social, and interactive form of distraction than typical TV-watching or clubbing, and can at times be truly challenging, empowering, and fucken hilarious.

When I was 12 and living in Sainte-Adele alone with my mother, there was little to do besides study and wander out. TV already presented itself as a deadening contraption, romantic pursuits were manifest in short, confusing blunders and imagination – an overwhelming, overpowering thirst for grandeur and discovery – was burning us from the inside. We were always on the lookout for adventure, and literature, with its tales of courage and conquest, appealed to us on a level we could barely escape.

My first experience with pen and paper RPGs was thirlling in its new possibilities to create adventure from thin air, and all the while disappointing from the unimaginative, stunted abilities of my “dungeon-master” at the time. (Oy, that expression sounds so wrong. The DM is only the person in charge of storytelling, as opposed to the mere characters which the others invidually portrayed.)

Anyway, this dissatisfaction with the original experience is what lead me to become a storyteller myself. Through the years, the depth and attention to detail I gave every session made me the storyteller of choice in all my gaming friend circles, and it was a task I only took a break from when time came to run short.

The process, I found, of spinning a tale in which characters would be given absolute freedom, was incredibly challenging. Then, it wasn’t about taking freedom away from my players, but understanding the psychology of each character, with their own flaws and aspirations, to predict which way they would react, which path they would choose, if they’d elect to fight, or stay, retreat or plunder. Once I narrowed it down to a few options (which I rarely got wrong) it would be my mission to surprise the players and put them in such a mood, such sense of identification with their character, that when I put them in a bind, cut them short with events they couldn’t be prepared for, resolving them came to them as an actual quest. Whatever I couldn’t or wouldn’t plan, I had to improvise, as confidently as though I’d written it word for word. By the end of a climax, every character would be bruised and bloodied, and if they’d actually won their goal, it would feel like an actual victory.

And this is it. Putting sense and force and value in a trail of events as to make them short of real, that is the real fun in writing. First, you have to make the effort of accepting the characters and getting close to them, so close to feel them yourself, and then you move the world around to nudge them in a direction they both yearned and feared for. Then, you stand right behind, as they are the ones who have to fight, and if you’ve spinned a potent enough tale, they will.

And I’ve done this hundreds of times. This is how storytelling has lead me to write novels. And I still find it entertaining to play again, though childhood is so far away. Instead of looking at a colors on TV, we make a tale of our own, infinitely richer, into memories we get to keep, forever.

Oy!

The first review for Book 1 of the Malice Cycle has arrived, from Joseph Vargo of Nox Arcana. Mr. Vargo had previously agreed to let us use the song Mysteries of the Night for the Malice trailer.

Necropolis is a Neo-Gothic milestone that stretches the boundaries of dark fantasy to challenge the flawed conceptions of conventional society. Author Bruno Masse masterfully weaves a darkly imaginative and intelligent story, rendering it with lush, poetic language to create a complex and compelling Dystopian mythology filled with moody landscapes and a fascinating hierarchy of characters.

John Zerzan has also recently agreed to review the book. Bringing the total reviewers count to 8, in quantity, though in quality, this far surpasses anything I’d have hoped for or am even entitled to.

More news from nowhere

And it’s getting strange in here

Yeah it gets stranger every year

- Nick Cave

Pause, break, hiatus?

Call it what you want. Truth is, until the end of May, I’m not going to be working on Malice.I still think of it everyday, but I don’t have the time, the strength, the presence and focus to do anything constructive in that area.

There’s too much on my plate. If you take a look, just a measely little sneeze of a look, you’ll see shit’s getting worse in Quebec, in Canada – the environment’s getting it bad and all the psychos, the scumfuckers and the gready toads at the top of the ladder all agree on one thing: we gotta exploit every possible ressource now, whatever Quebecans won’t buy they’ll sell to the highest bidder. Why? Cause demand is growing and supply is thinning. Simple as that.

That means my work gets harder, and by harder I mean more stressful, more hours, more angst, more hopes crushed… and some relative victories along the way. Relative.

Alongside, I’ve involved myself in four projects and I’m spread too thin. Anarchist Writers’ Bloc anthology. Play for the anarchist theatre festival. Anti-civ week. And a sequel to Valacchia. By the end of May everything will be over. Summer will be easy. I’ll even get August off.

Now, I need to focus before the wheels come off. I’ll still update this place, cause I need to vent, and there may even be a tickle of wit to it all.

Chaos, my friends.

Chaos.

p.s. Alana, I’ll write soon. I haven’t forgotten you.

The Malice Cylce. Book 1. Necropolis.

Ouverture. Triste Amour.

What’s really true in today’s society?

A quick glance at today’s world would lead you to believe that apprearances are, by and large, all that matter. One’s power grows in so far as one’s ability to make others believe grows… which is only ever so efficient if one also believes.

If Cioran and Wilde had in common the assertion that life, essentially, is only livable insofar as we bring mystery to it, they failed to mention the amount of damage societal delusion would wreak upon the natural environment.

The greatest figures of society are the most eloquent liars.

Artists – culture technicians, solipsistic to the bitter end
Politicians – demographics whores (and whores have more dignity)
Media – caged birds, tortured to tell
Cultists – slaves without any master in sight

And us, the plebes, the lower-class – we who maintain all these skullfuckers in power, culprits in every conceivable level of this mind-raping pyramid.

… and activists? Sadly, waving flags trying to resurrect old legends. An inch closer to the truth, if only by failing at a game to which they never set the rules.

All wrapped together in culture, so certain, so sure of everything, and we talk so loud, but even drowned in noise we remain silent, absent, conditionned to pretend, like so many pornstars on screen, faking orgasms, willfully acting out the image of ourselves, performing for an audience that couldn’t possibly tell the difference and has never cared less.

Modern man is a running man.

When set to compete against each other, there is no limit to the amount of time and energy we are willing to dish out, not to win, but merely to stave off defeat another day. Keeping up is enough to draw the breath from you and poison your existence, reduce you to an automaton that performs best when it questions least. There is no question how insufferable this situation is. In the every day slavery of hyper industrial society, the alternative to work, if you can call it that, is death.

Considering we are born equals in most of what make us human, the idea of winning the race seems illogical. The distance you can put with the other competitors is the Edge: the surplus, the advantage. And how to you beat the odds? How do you get the Edge?

5yph3r is not smarter or stronger than the next guy. But he has discipline. And he is willing to sacrifice everything he has to fulfill his aim. While he works during the day, he spends his nights creating his vision, his one great scheme: the Aeon Construct. His edge is time, those few hours he steals by taking the XI compound, which enables to function without sleep. But there will be a price to pay. Nobody can bend the laws of nature indefinitely. The Collapse has taught humanity that much.

Breathless. Those who win, they were never even in the race. 5yph3r knows it. The only question left is: will there be enough time to complete his vision before he too collapses?

And what about the Malice Cycle?

Dear diary, let’s dish out some development.

So… where… were… we… ah yes, Necropolis in post-production, meaning, fixing typos, synthax and such. All the copies I’ve sent across the globe for reviews, as part of the Embassy, are inherently flawed, in that they are not the final final product, but my reviewers – brave souls that they are – have been told as much, and though no few words can prepare the unwilling mind to survey such linguistic hackery, I’m willing to bet the story will matter more than the fleeting typos.

That’s done. Now, what about book 2 ?

Here we begin again. Worktitle “Enklave”. Here we move from the post-collapse victorian/dark ages theme and full on to cyberpunk. For the most part, Malice is no longer the main character, but an element in the background, a rumor, a whisper. We delve into the post-collapse society with hooded eyes. This observation is a partial one. Biased, as humiliating as any urban experience must inherently be.

The same dark aesthetics are still here, but as continuation, and not repetition. Three major characters’ lives interweave to form the most vivid, most violent representation of a social order based on scarcity and a putrefying culture.

And how’s the thing progressing? Well, I’m still working the skeleton. I kind of have to span the 3rd book at the same time for the sake of pace and unity, so I still have a way to go. I plan to have seriously started the narration by this summer, hopefully when I get a month off from work. Until then I must get a feel of the world, the characters – they’re in my head, and in my soup, and I live with them as with ghosts, with still faded outlines, until they become real, to me, and I can write them as I would draw from a model.

When everything feels right, I will pen it down, and it’ll flow like the Ashen.

Here it is, after rounds of useless teasing, a big, a huge, a ginormous annoucement, straight here on the Dev Diary:

I have recently been contacted by Guy Saint-Jean éditeur with an offer to publish Valacchia.

…

I’ll let this settle in for a second.

Ready? Ok.

First question on your mind might be, “Valacc-what, and how to you pronounce this thing?”. Legitimate interrogations, truly. So I’ll break it down, simply.

Valacchia is the name of a secret project I worked on in the Fall of 2009. It’s an erotic novel.

What is it about? The name refers to a fictionnal manor in the province of Wallachia, Transylvania (Romania). I would describe the story as an r-rated Rocky Horror hommage… without the singing. It’s light, humorous, explicitly raunchy, ethical but not explicitely political. Between you and me, it’s an attempt at sex-positive narratives, beyond the boundaries of gender, without both the puritanism of the Right and the dumb moralism of the Left. But bluntly, it’s erotica. Not porn, but not far from.

So, a little preambule if you will. The Fall of 2009 was a strange time in my life. I was in between apartments after escaping a long, abusive relationship, and was recovering from depression. My plans for relocation had been delayed due to logistical details – hence I had a few months to wait while I could get my life back on track.

The onlooker would deem this to be a desolate time, but it wasn’t. I had friends and I felt free. Also, I had time. Lots of time. So much time indeed, that I elected to explore different narrative styles to prepare for the uncoming Malice Cycle. I wanted to delve deeper into gothic imagery to sort the purest essence of it, weight in the dark, wild fabric from cheap contraptions and illustrate, in my own subjective way, a shriven, passionnate recount of vampiric aesthetics.

That experiment turned into Valacchia. For six weeks I wrote – I had little else to do, and I enjoyed the process, the newness of it all. I used my native French, which I seldom do anymore.

In the Fall of 2010, in a flurry of publishing submissions of all former titles around the globe, I decided to go on a whim and submit Valacchia to one publisher alone, Guy Saint-Jean, because they had published Marie Gray’s Naughty Tales series, one of the few great short story collections of its genre, and the my first encounter with it, some fifteen years ago.

Now, the irony, you must understand, is substantial, and one I’ve often pondered, if not too long. Consider that writing a novel, to me, always takes between one and two years, except for this one, which didn’t even take two months. Also, take into account that I’ve been effectively rejected from every single publisher, French or English, worldwide, until this hole in one. Two freak exceptions joining in the middle, an epiphany of sort. But I’ll just consider myself lucky and wait to draw conclusions.

We have yet to go over the details and set this deal in stone, now, let’s celebrate!

To Valacchia!

Sorry for the delay!!!

I’ve just got back from Toronto with my beloved Kayleigh to see Tim Burton’s exhibition. Do you know Burton? He’s a talented young chap, really underrated, indie and obscure. Well, obscure anyway. While in TO, we also got to sample the local goth finery and go to the CN tower for vertigo and research on book 2 of the Malice Cycle, that is, witness a metropolis from a bird’s eye view.

But the point of this week’s post is an update on my own little Dystopian Embassy. You may recall from a former post details on this blurb campaign where I planned, underline planned, to contact several authors and artists to see if they wanted to look over tome 1 and possibly, if they thought it was any good, give me a little review or blurb. Consent prior to shipping was imperative, as 20$ per book and shipping costs, I coudn’t afford to send out copies at random.

Last time, I drew a small list of likely candidates, some people close to me, others less, and some whom I’d never even contacted. Since then, I added a few names. Now, a few weeks have passed and I’ve received a lot of responses – all willing to look it over!!

It’s a triumphant step forward… and though the book still has typos and such, I could very well be a diamond in the rough, which I might even be able to tell if I had any perspective left on it.

Here’s the updated list and status.

John Zerzan – no answer yet
Norman Nawrocki – will look at it
Joseph Vargo – will look at it
Ursula Le Guin – no answer yet
Derrek Jensen – will look at it if the book is published
Nancy Kilpatrick – will look at it
Jeff Somers – will look at it
Alan Moore – no answer yet (unsurprising!)

New names

Stuart Christie – will look at it
Jason McQuinn – will look at it
Kevin Tucker – no answer yet
Fifth Estate – no answer yet
Ron Sakolsky – no answer yet

So five copies have left by mail, to Canada, the US and the UK, and a sixth I delivered in person to Nawrocki here in Montreal. We have until the end of August to see the results. And as I am reviewing the book myself for typos and mistakes in spelling and grammar (and cringe at every one of them) I still hope that the essence is carried true and that some critical response is echoed from across the great continents, and the Atlantic.

Will bring you more updates as the project progresses.

Be sure to tune in next week for some SERIOUSLY COOL NEWS. I’ll give you a hint: it involves blood and boobies!

The question is not, has never been whether or not Civilisation would fall, but how and when.

To some, it is the single most depressing notion ever. In a way, frivolous: no more Xbox, no more iPods. In others, outright inconvenient: no more contact lenses, contraceptive pills, antidepressents. And then, irremediably deadly: no more insulin, kidney dialysis, etc.

But to those who care about cause and consequence, the truth of our present condition is all too obvious, as domestication, crippling sedentarism, alienation and weakening bodies reveal themselves as the rotten fruits of this inhuman lifestyle, brought on, unwillingly, by technological industrialism. Quantity does not compensate for lack of quality, and as our own experiences of life are turned into nightmares from birth, so does the natural world crumble under Civilisation’s unquenchable thirst.

But as most hasty critics of my anti-civilisation thoughts would call me sadist and misanthropic for even implying that we should pull the plug on this artificial world to which some, or rather most, are addicted to an unprecedented degree, you should know, I did not come to the anti-civ critique straight away. It is not, to be honest, the thought-system I am most comfortable with. Why? Because it is the only one that adresses the problem directly, and facing reality scares me, though I try, every fucken day.

Mainstream anthropology as already widely recognized the paradigms of the green anarchist, anti-civ, primitivist critique: humans lived better and worked less before the Neolithic Revolution. For two million years our brains and physical capacities have been fairly similar, and have actually only recently started to be degraded. That was about 10,000 years ago.

I do not mean to say we have to go back to anything, because we can’t. But I don’t see any future for Civilisation. In, fact it doesn’t. The truth of Civilisation, and the reason why it’s rampaged on without any significant challenge since the Neolithic Revolution, is because it has no ends, only a means. It is, you could say, just a process of complexification – of culture, of techonology. It will only stop of its own when the ressources needed to fuel its advance run out, that is, when the natural world is affliced in such as to no longer enable human life.

I would rather we had a peaceful transition to an actually sustainable existence. Do you think it’s going to happen?

… the Collapse, as described in the Malice Cycle, is probably the least fictionnal part of the story. As Nietszche said for the rise of nihilism – that page of history can be written now, because all the conditions are already here.

Ultimately, if we imagine dismantling civilization, actively and consciously destroying it, not in order to institute a program or realize a specific vision, but in order to open and endlessly expand the possibilities for realizing ourselves and exploring our capacities and desires, then we can begin to do it as the way we live here and now against the existing order. If, instead of hoping for a paradise, we grasp life, joy and wonder now, we will be living a truly anarchic critique of civilization that has nothing to do with any image of the “primitive”, but rather with our immediate need to no longer be domesticated, with our need to be unique, not tamed, controlled, defined identities. Then, we will find ways to grasp all that we can make our own and to destroy all that seeks to conquer us. – Wolfi Landstreicher

The review copies of Necropolis have arrived!

The first step of my furious publication Plan is now complete. It is both simple and devious, and perversely deluded.

Like the Thirteen Black Knights who sent out into the Void, I will now send Seven Review Copies across the World for blurbs and praise. For a whole year I have trained my envoys, given them the utmost care and conditionned them to return. Directions I have set – yes, yes – but will they reach their objectives? Who is to say what they’ll encounter, out there, all alone?

You may notice, Lulu Press cut the books too short on the right side, some of the last letters have been amputated. The cover is only temporary and by no means used for commercial purposes. I’m waiting for replacement right now. Meanwhile, I’ll start contacting the aforementionned authors to see if they’re interested, and then off to the post office. The Embassy can begin.

Oy, if I get as much as three blurbs, I’m calling this a vibrant success, and praise Buddha’s shiny belly.

Now, now, moving onward: a little treat this week, transcript from the first page – a quote from John Zerzan’s Future Primitive. It kicks fucken ass, and it’s how the Malice Cycle begins.

The refusal of community might be termed a self defeating isolation but it appears preferable, healthier, than declaring our allegiance to the daily fabric of an increasingly self-destructive world. Magnified alienation is not a condition chosen by those who insist on the truly social over the falsely communal. It is present in any case, due to the content of community. Opposition to the estrangement of civilized, pacified existence should at least amount to naming that estrangement instead of celebrating it by calling it community.

“The Nihilists’ Dictionary: 2) Community.”
- John Zerzan, Future Primitive.

To chronicle the passage of time… discordant timelines battle away at my narrative. This Dev Diary, it’s about the making of three novels, it stretches for years, years! But every week is a particle of infinity into my own existence, pitiful like the next, bound by the exact same laws, though I try to be different.

I could tell you that I’m considering eating meat to test whether or not it’s the reason my immune system is caving in. I could tell you that a secret work of mine is a hairspread away from being published mainstream. I could talk about my next comedy play, or the upcoming Anarchist Writers’ Bloc anthology. Better yet, something close to home, another headline in the history of human mediocrity, when a giant oil conglomerate sues a critical citizen for all he’s got.

But you see, that’s exactly it. The fact that I’m ploughing through the human condition, shoveling my way, digging the hole in whichever direction I think is appropriate – and all the junk falling down from the corporate gods, the constant violence of civilisation. Interfacing with the nonsense on an hourly basis, not because I agree, but because I want to go on. Whatever works on the short term, and all ideals whither and die.

The alarm clock wakes me up every morning, then I go to work and sit in front of a computer, filter information, send out more into the verse. I come home, sit in front of another screen for entertainment. Between Friday and Sunday, I try to save up as much as I can to go to my laptop and write for Malice. There are computers all around me, at all times. I despise them, they are merely the epitome of everything that’s wrong with civilised humanity, but I go to them, constantly, because the world I see outside my window is bleak and grey, and I need to feel like I can relate to something that’s not so ugly. Rebellion through culture production might be just another form of diversion, and I feel lost. And I’m writing this on a fucken Dev Diary. The solipsistic snake is eating itself.

In real life, I smile a lot. I laugh, I tell jokes, I listen. I’m a fairly light, easy going, spirited person. When I tell people I’m a nihilist, they tend to argue I don’t look the part. But I tell them, being a nihilist doesn’t mean you think everything’s always going to go wrong, it just means accepting there’s a solid chance everything we do – everything – may all be in vain.

When all is said and done, we still have to live, don’t we?