What's Quantum De Luxe?

The End is the Beginning

So WTF is Quantum De Luxe?

Sounds like the name of an Eric Johnson album. Or some kinda vacuum cleaner.

Wasn’t my thing called “Words of Iron”? What happened to that?

Am I just being flaky?

No. I’m making some big changes to all this social media blog/vlog/marketing/presence etc. deal. Actually, one could say I’m making changes to life, the universe, and everything (creatively).

I have an entire dissertation that can explain where Words of Iron went and why, but that’s for another time.

Quantum De Luxe is about turning a page (cliché, I know for the literary world), and starting something new. The end is the beginning, a great writer once said (ahem). And so it is.

But why Quantum De Luxe?

Sitting at my desk, thinking about the future, about where to go from here. I can’t continue this way. More of the same will not cut it. My hand slowly strokes my wiry beard. My finger traces the scar on my face.

I think about how it got there, about the eerie calm that accompanies the pounding heart, the jitters that come and then turn to stone, the hyper awareness that emerges from tunnel vision. The way time can both race and stand still in a moment of chaos.

I glance down at my old Royal typewriter. It’s a gift from my greatest fan, my amazing beautiful wife. It’s a bit like the one I had when I was a kid, and a reminder of the Royal Enfield Bullet 500 I used to have. The model placard catches my eye. It reads: “Quiet De Luxe”. The same model Hemmingway owned.

There’s a writer who also had scars, who also understood those moments of chaos. I’ve merely had brushes with chaos by comparison. I almost giggle to myself, wondering what all the disparate little camps of critics and self-appointed cultural purity police would have thought of ol’ Hemmingway; one side screaming “misogynist” at his writing, the other yelling “degenerate” at his personal life, while he hurled empty bottles at them and continued to smoke and pound away at his Quiet De Luxe.

Probably would have been a fun guy to hang out with. Not really my kind of author. Being mildly dyslexic, even without knowing for most of your life, makes you pretty picky about authors. If I like your work, you’d better believe you’re not boring or overly wordy. Which means if I’m not into your work, you shouldn’t take it too personally.

I glance past the typewriter, to the little scar on my left wrist. You could say it’s the only intentional scar among my vast collection, where a doc slid a guitar string up to my heart and opened up a mostly blocked artery, granting me a bit more time on this bright blue ball at the center of the universe with everyone that I love, and the rest of you talking monkeys, who I also love, most of the time.

Talking monkeys, sacks of blood and bone and water and rock, neurons firing in a chaos of quantum entanglement, punching away at a keyboard as Sturgill Simpson’s Mercury in Retrograde plays in the background and slightly drowns out the squealing whine of my tinnitus, and all the while…

A smile crosses my scarred face… and I remember how rich I am, that even that scar is a treasure, a lesson learned, a meaningful event, one of many times I’ve stood for something, even if it was just a friend and not some grand noble cause. But then, maybe that’s as noble a cause as one could have.

To paraphrase Two-gun Bob: I’ve lived, I’ve burned with life, I’ve loved, I’ve slayed (and been slain) and I am tired. And I am content. But I am not done. The end is the beginning.

You indie creators. You magnificent bastards. You have things to say. I want to hear them. The world wants to hear them. I am tired of all the negativity. I am tired of all the talk about how to build a better gate instead of how to better create. I don’t care what’s in your pants. I don’t care who you f**k. I don’t care if you go to church or not. I don’t care if like 9mm or .45. Sweet potato or pecan. I am for you. I am on your side.

I am your weird uncle, I am a space cowboy, even sometimes a gangster of love, and I am on your side, you magnificent talking monkeys.

You fans of indie creators, I am for you as well. You are not forgotten. People aren’t reading books like they used to, and it’s our fault. We write books for ourselves. We write for other writers, many of whom are dead. We write for a model that is dying. We’re snobs. We cling to old IP’s and old tropes and write thinly-veiled fanfic when we know better. We have talent (most of us) and imagination. We just have to quit being lazy and grow a pair.

I’m just getting started with this thing, yall. My own work is getting a shiny coat of paint, including my mistreated novel, which is getting a remodel into a trilogy, with some expansion and a bit of extra polish. I also hope to make a little bit of history with it, but I can’t let the cat out the bag just yet…

Look for some older work to trickle back onto substack, after a bit of cleaning and maybe some updated artwork, along with some new work and that new project I keep teasing yall about. Follow if you don’t want to miss out.

A podcast is also coming, which should be different from anything anyone else has tried. If you’re a creator, I will be looking to talk to you.

In the meantime, this had been the first official Taco Tuesday at Quantum De Luxe. These will hopefully be regular posts every week until I can get audio straightened out, and then we’ll hop to video, hopefully from the studio.

Stay tuned. There is so much more to come.