A question for all of you: Do you consider any written works too experimental and non-commercial? What would you consider too experimental for a book, if anything? Allow me to take some time to explain why I ask these questions, and how they affect human culture.
Years ago, I developed a deep passion for writing, particularly fiction. I’ve never professed myself a flawless author. In fact, I’m somewhat critical of the four novels I’ve written. I’ve evolved as a writer like many others, and only recently came to pursue a creative direction profoundly divergent from my literary origins. I always wanted to be authentically deviant from the industry norm, but even within my own career path I’ve deviated sharply from my initial style and interests, and not in the way some authors change only in slight differences and genre focuses. Even the work that is the subject of this post’s title has become a shadow of the past to me, giving way to a deeper, darker, stranger breed of literature rarely found on bookshelves.
As a writer and researcher, I am interested in many fields: dreams, nightmares, sleep paralysis, hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, hauntings, demonology, cosmology, cryptozoology, metaphysics, insanity, astral and infernal visions, advanced intelligence, alternate dimensions, transhumanism, global catastrophic risk, UFOs, DMT realms, salvia realms, surrealism, the occult, transcendence, eternity, and immortality. I am very bored by conventional human culture, the typical surface-level subjects such as politics, celebrities, sports, film, news, tech, social media, memes, popular music, fashion, and so forth. I’ve become disillusioned by modern society. None of it interests me very much, all the trivial little gadgets and the cults of personality and the incessant conflict over political structures and other artifices. Eventually you’ve become so familiarized you can glance at a news article or even a novel and anticipate exactly how it will be written. Is anyone else here utterly uninterested in contemporary culture? I just can’t bring myself to care about any of it, when I see and sense deeper, darker, and stranger realms in the cosmos beyond and within, as well as in the scattered episodes of phantom oddity that’ve plagued this world for ages. I am far more interested in a single soul’s nightmares and apparitions than I am in the entire array of daily news items produced by this planet. Tell me of your nightmares. Tell me of your specters. I have no use for much else now. I wish to know more of the life beyond this world, and, more importantly, of the phantasmagorical life within life itself. It is the hidden mystery of the mind that draws me most now, above all other mysteries.
There is much more I could say on this subject, and much more that I would say if there weren’t stringent constraints on the freedom of authors to discuss their own works. I will only say, in conclusion of this introduction, that an editor once informed me my works are “too experimental and non-commercial” to be published. Personally, I take this a compliment. They didn’t tell me my works are poorly written, or insipid, or unoriginal. Rather, my works are apparently intolerable to the industry gatekeepers because they’re “too experimental and non-commercial” – as if experimentation is taboo and all works must fit into a neat little cookie-cutter standard of commercialization. My work seeks to explore and illuminate how truly bizarre, magical, and enigmatic this cosmos is. I also dislike some of the conventional artistic standards, which I find pollute the central essence of art. There is a certain system in place that defines how writers should and shouldn’t write a book, which elements it should and shouldn’t include, and so forth. This can easily serve to suppress experimental works, especially works that do not conform to some of the usual conventions. Unfortunately, it would appear I don’t fit the mold expected of writers in our current world. I’m curious about the true limits of experimentation in philosophy, art, and literature. It seems there’s a vein of culture that abhors experimentation, and I’m interested to hear some of your thoughts as to the limits of experimentation in our world.
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D.L.X.