October 12, 2025

Three weeks, twelve new chapters, stitched onto the nine I abandoned last year. Twenty-one in total. My own Divine comedy minus the divine, with Kafka moonlighting as my ghost editor.

And yet, here I am, crying in spirit with Trump, because we both lost our Nobel prize to a hungry man. Laszlo Krasznahorkai keeps fining apocalypse in every sentence, while I'm stuck here wondering how to pay the new cigarette and alcohol tax, let alone self-publish my way in literacy eternity.

First stop: Substack. Views trickled in, but subscribers didn't. I was Milli Vanilli: loud for a beat, then the tape skipped and everyone left. At least they got a Grammy. I didn't even get a cockroach egg.

So, I crawled to Royal Road. Thought I was Murakami, dropping chapters into a deep well, waiting for strangers with flashlights. instead, I become Kafka's cockroach. Three thousand views, mostly from friends I bullied on Whatapp. The algorithm floor has never felt so sticky.

Wattpad? Worse. Murakami's jazz bar at 3 a.m., lights on, pianist gone. I wished for the Dawn and Dusk, with a young Salma Hayek stepping in my one true reader. No luck.

Then Reddit. Dostoevsky's basement. The accuse me of shameless self-worship, of being Marvel's Ultron in human disguise. I almost gave up until two heroes appears. My Superman and Wonder Woman. Two readers who actually liked the book.

That's when I realized the WWF: my novella isn't romance, thriller, or memoir. It's literacy fiction which is just a fancy name for a damaged diary nobody knows how to sell. Too little blood for a thriller, less kissing that a dating app, and far too many pages on the semiotics of a wet cigarette butt to pass for memoir.

Kafka didn't know he was Kafka. Murakami didn't know spaghetti plus Thelonious Monk would count as literature. I didn't know a broken Rolex and fireflies in the dark make me "literary." But here we are.