Stranger Things are Afoot...

The following is me thinking aloud about how to change and adapt this site. I'm going to say it a lot below, but let's just get it out here right now:

YOUR EXPERIENCE OF THIS AND THE PLEASANT GREEN SITE WILL NOT ALTER IN ANY MEANINGFUL WAY AS A RESULT OF THE PROPOSED CHANGES.

STAY EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE, I CAN WORK AROUND YOU.

The latest Lovecraft Investigations crowdfund has a week left to run, and so an opportunity has arisen to come up for air and take stock.

This week's Economist carries a long piece about how American cultural dominance is slipping. This is not a side-effect of politics, but of technology and economics. Economies of scale used to mean that the best profit model for the music industry, for example, was to make an American band into a global phenomenon in order to sell a lot of CDs. Now people don't buy CDs, and the means of production are much more affordable. So musicians can make their own music to a professional standard and then release it themselves via downloads and streaming services. At one time, we were worried that globalised technology would homogenise everything, but we turn out to have been wrong; what is actually happening is that all around the world, local artists, working in local languages, are dominating local streaming services. Danish people used to buy American music because that was mostly all there was. Now Danish music dominates streaming in Denmark.

As the world gets more connected, communities become more local. And even though the big studios and record labels are still US-based, their output is reflecting the change. American shows and movies now account for way less that 50% of the output of American streaming services. Hollywood might be in some trouble here; we're heading towards a world where the audience for US cultural output is shrinking back to within US borders.

Who knows what will happen, but these are interesting developments.

Meanwhile, some stories I wrote for an audience of one under a BBC Radio contract seem to have taken off to the extent that our latest crowdfund just sailed past the £350,000 mark with a week still to go. This is small potatoes in Hollywood terms, but very big potatoes in the world of audio fiction. And it highlights something that I think is interesting.

One of the tricks of corporate capitalism is to present itself as the only legitimate model. Thus Orson Welles, for instance, is considered to have not lived up to his potential because his movie career took a dive after Citizen Kane. But what actually happened, in a nutshell, was that a studio butchered The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil, so Welles left Hollywood and travelled around the world making movies like Chimes at Midnight, Othello, The Trial and F for Fake. These movies were not made with Hollywood money, so the refrain is "Poor Orson".

I claim no insight into how Welles really felt about this, but he made some extraordinary films outside of the Hollywood system, and I don't think you can reasonably consider this body of work to be a failure solely because of where the money came from. Did Orson have to consort with some shady characters and occasionally (and arguably) debase himself to raise money? Yes. But exactly how is making something as utterly anodyne as Jack Ryan: Ghost War, with money from a megalomaniacal Trump acolyte, not debasement?

So it is with this perspective in mind that I turn my attention to the story universes that I have built, that I control, and that have a burgeoning and enthusiastic community growing up around them and which, at time of writing, seem to be doing rather well for themselves. Is this stuff going to make Hollywood money? Maybe not. But what is Hollywood money now, if Hollywood is loosing its hegemony? And where is the pride and sense of fulfilment in making edgeless "content" for a streaming service?

The culture seems to be breaking down into smaller, more localised pieces. Super-fans now drive engagement. Global domination is only a (somewhat) reasonable goal if your overheads are in the tens or hundreds of millions, and it is increasingly hard to achieve anyway. And yet, every morning, we are expected to gather hungrily at the gates of the Hollywood factory and fight each other for the chance of a job on the production line, making meaningless widgets that no one needs, to feed the content monster.

And yes, of course, there is a room inside that factory where stunning, original things are still produced. But the dark secret of that room is that pretty much no one in there gained access via the factory floor.

But here, where we are all gathered, it is possible to make something unusual and idiosyncratic for a small enthusiastic audience. We have wheeled the wagon into the town square and we are selling tickets for our show. And by selling those tickets, we pay our bills and, in success, put something in the bank to develop the next show.

That's what I'm focusing on now. Smaller, more focused. More control, more fun, more fulfilment. And direct engagement with the audience, instead of a reliance on development people and execs and an algorithm to tell me what they think people want.

I'm not creating stuff for everyone, I'm creating stuff for people who like what I like, and it turns out that there are enough of those people to sustain this idea.

And with this new focus, comes some changes:

• Cartoon Gravity is no more.
• The Pleasant Green Universe is no more.

But don't panic (I flatter myself that either of those statements caused panic); nothing is changing from your end of things, or nothing material. A while back I announced my new company, Pure Hokum Ltd, and I described it as an umbrella encompassing five more or less distinct story universes, including Pleasant Green. The divisions between those universes were already a little blurry (Kennedy Fisher has shown up in the Aldrich Kemp stories, for example) but it felt like I should differentiate them for legal/rights reasons. But that's not a game I want to play any more.

In Obsidian, where all the notes and characters etc for these universes are held, everything is now in one folder called "Universe". It allows me to browse and find connections among characters and places and things that can cross the old, arbitrary lines of demarcation that I had created. I can stop worrying about who lives where, so long as the stories that come out of the mix are, in themselves, distinctive and deliberate.

Aldrich Kemp lives and operates in the same world as the Department of Works, even if their paths rarely, if ever, cross. Aldrich is a member of the Pendragon Club. So is Parker. So are Kennedy Fisher and Matthew Heawood. That doesn't mean they have to share stories all the time. But the idea is that they CAN, or at least that they can stroll in and out of each others stories.

And removing the borders between worlds leads to something I hesitatingly refer to as a "rebrand": Pure Hokum no longer manages five universes. Those universes cease to exist as separate entities and become "The Pure Hokum Universe" (don't worry, I'm not expecting that to catch on - it's just for me).

The Pleasant Green site stays where it is, doing what it does, because that is the Red Hook Stories website, and it is an in-world thing that I love working on. It is not going anywhere.

Up to now, there was the Pleasant Green site, and then there was Cartoon Gravity, where I wrote about whatever I fancied (and a lot about writing and process) and there was Pure Hokum Ltd, which was intended as a kind corporate flag-planting exercise that was distinct from both Pleasant Green and Cartoon Gravity. Well now that is the change I am about to make.

Cartoon Gravity becomes Pure Hokum

I'm not expecting you to follow this, because no one can, or should, be as intimately acquainted with the behind-the-scenes set-up of these sites or the companies involved as I am. But here it is in a nutshell:

Currently there are two sites - PURE HOKUM is a "corporate" website and CARTOON GRAVITY is my personal blog.

All the advice says that your corporate website (Pure Hokum) should be a professionally presented home-base offering information on your company and blah blah blah. Boring. Not interested. I see no reason why a company, especially one doing what we do, can't be a true reflection of its owner's personality. Cartoon Gravity is that, but it's currently a personal blog, distinct from the company, because that's how everyone does it.

But I don't see how the two things are different in this case, so I'm smashing them together.

Over the next few days/weeks (months, let's be honest), I'm going to be redesigning and rebranding Cartoon Gravity as Pure Hokum, and shuttering the old Pure Hokum site. For Cartoon Gravity subscribers, all that really means is that this site will have a name change, it will look a little different, and the newsletters will be coming from a different address. All the content will still be here (and I'm working to move the previously paywalled stuff out to be available to everyone) and the newsletters, Wednesday Wonders etc will continue.

After the change, anyone looking to find out what Pure Hokum Ltd does will land on a page talking about audio fiction and stationery and task apps and assorted chaos and they might be confused but fuck them because this IS what Pure Hokum does - I talk about these things and I make stuff, and I don't find the two things to be usefully distinct. I am the company and the company is me. I don't want or need a corporate website, I want a space for people to gather who want to talk about the things we all like talking about and who might also be interested in the audio/books/merch etc that we make.

At the same time, the Cartoon Gravity Club, where many of us hang out on a daily basis, will be properly re-titled as The Pendragon Club. We're all members of that, alongside Kennedy and Heawood and Parker and Aldrich, because we are all simultaneously inside the world and on the outside, looking in. (That makes sense to me, at least).

This is about breaking down barriers between me and the audience/community, and between fiction and reality. We just might be entering a brave new world of smaller, niche cultural endeavours that are community-supported, self-sufficient and answerable to no one. I think/hope that this is the way things are going, but there's no road map, so we need to create a staging post here, so that we can strike out into the wilderness and find out what's there.

The new Pure Hokum site will be that staging post (again, Pleasant Green stays Pleasant Green, don't worry). This will be where we talk process and writing and general stuff, but it will also be a home for new fiction and ideas and world-building that is still in the Pure Hokum Universe but does not belong on the Pleasant Green site, because that site is run by two characters who cannot see the universe as a whole.

I seriously doubt that this has clarified anything for anyone, but I needed to set it down on "paper" as a statement of intent. As I start rebuilding, I think it will become a lot easier to understand.

The takeaway: Cartoon Gravity is rebranding as Pure Hokum. We're building something really interesting here, and we need to spruce up headquarters a little bit to accommodate it. Yes, there will be beanbags and a slide.