27 Apr Confessions and Published Works

A kind hello to all the new subscribers to this newsletter and thank you to all those who’ve stuck around over the last year!

I’m going to start off with something simple, a confession: 

I’m horrible with social media. I’m bad with liking, disliking, commenting, boosting. hosting, posting, reposting, tagging, retagging, hashtaging, and probably a dozen other virtual verbs I don’t know about. 

But I see the good and the bad in it.

The good is in the power to connect people in a globalized society where many are staying put these days and need a way to stay in touch.

The bad is in the power to influence people: to reinforce their own ideas as some sort of collective sentiment, growing mere ideas into full blown beliefs through avatarizing and algorithmisizing thoughts and emotions. Look at that, I’m even making up verbs just to describe it. Powerful stuff! 

Nonetheless, I’m horrible at it. So I have this newsletter to stay in touch and tell you about what’s going on with my writing these days. Feel free to send me your newsletter too, or an email, or a message on Twitter (oh wait, don’t do that, I suck at it). But I’d love to hear from you, in any event. 

The picture you see at the top here is me writing my first novel, Datapocalypse, from the patio of our rental home in Milies, Greece in 2017. I was so innocent then, so naive, wide-eyed, like I could just come up with some wild story idea and it would be gold. I was an amateur author then—who am I kidding. Now four years later, I’m still a cock-eyed optimistic writing (hopefully much improved) speculative fiction. Stories like: 

Social media bio-digital viruses getting injected into an innocent adolescent’s mind – Viralpocalypse, published in Flash Fiction Magazine, March 2021;

Cyborgs escaping their testing ground in Australia by dismantling human control systems, planting a rogue agent many years earlier – Eye for Ego, published in Bengaluru Review, March 2021 (sorry about all the click bait!);

An old man tries to overcome his wife’s death using her life-sized, speaking, mind-reading hologram – Sparks of Selma, unpublished;

And most notably, 

My two-novel story about peoples’ selfie, social media, and picture-taking infatuations causing an AI, run by a faceless corporation, to go rogue and begin purging the buildings, monuments, and people depicted in such photos in order to balance Earth’s total carrying capacity for data storage – Datapocalypse, self-published 2020 on Amazon/KDP; and its sequel, Deepfake is already. The short and sweet version of the synopsis is: a story about love, too much data, and the end of the world. 

Please check them out! These are some of the major what-ifs I wrangle with on a nightly basis, sometimes in my sleep. Most are available for free. Likes and comments are highly appreciated! Even on social media 🙂

…My writing started in Greece. Who knows where it’ll end. But it won’t end today. Not unless the corporations invade my dreams tonight and implant a brain devouring virus-bomb that detonates when the sun rises tomorrow. 

Hopefully you’ll hear from me next month. I hope to hear from you. 

Peace, love, datapocalypse!
cdk