Wesley McCraw's Blog

The Sluts by Dennis Cooper

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

CriminOlly is a BookTuber that specializes in crime, pulp, and horror. He has talked a lot about disturbing books.

I was watching one of his reading updates, and he was in the middle of The Sluts by Dennis Cooper, so I decided to give it a shot. A recent disturbing book that I really liked was Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, so I thought I would be pretty comfortable with this one, which has some of the same type of content, but The Sluts is disturbing on a whole other level.

After I finished reading it, CriminOlly put out another video saying that The Sluts might be the most disturbing book he has ever read, and this is coming from a BookTuber who has put a lot of effort into finding and reading disturbing books. If I had known, maybe I would’ve thought twice before reading it.

The Sluts was written twenty years ago, but it feels more relevant now than ever. It’s very much about Internet culture. It starts with posts on a male escort review website. The users of the website often present themselves as totally sadistic, but it’s clear early on that you can’t really trust anything they post.

In a typical horror novel, there is a level of suspension of disbelief, but you’re always looking for moments that don’t ring true. When you get scared or disturbed, the falseness breaks the illusion. It’s just a book.

But the review website posts are all so unreliable; instead of looking for what is false, you’re looking for what is true. The falseness is everywhere. Looking for something to believe in all the horror makes you participate with all the other people using the website. It breaks your usual defenses when reading horror. Your morbid curiosity pulls you in. You want to believe super horrible things are happening, and you even feel disappointment when something horrible you thought happened didn’t. You piece things together in your own mind. You become an Internet detective, finding clues in the darkest corners of the Internet. And you know in your heart, there is a real corner of the Internet that is precisely like this. You’ve seen hints of it everywhere.

The Sluts is easily the most disturbing book I can still recommend. Many books are disturbing just to be disturbing, but The Sluts has something relevant to say. It exposes the dark heart of our current culture in a way that nothing else has. It might even expose something dark about you.

Link to my YouTube Review

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Here is June’s update about my YouTube channel. This month was Pride and my birthday.

These are my stats at the end of month five: I have 35 subscribers, 4,200 views, and 96 hours of watch time for the lifetime of my channel. I had very little growth this month.

June did not go as planned. I was excited to post videos for Pride Month, but then I got Jury Duty and served as a juror on a criminal trial about an unhoused person shoplifting $17 worth of food. They wanted to charge him with robbery (which means they said he used force to shoplift the items) even though he was the one tackled and injured. It was me arguing against eleven other jurors that he wasn’t guilty of robbery, because I was the only one who thought trying to walk away from security guards didn’t qualify as force. I argued with them for about four hours, and it ended with a hung jury.

Shortly after the trial, I had my birthday and vacationed in Las Vegas. After getting back, I never got back into the swing of making videos. I read some books and worked on my novel, so I was productive, but not on my YouTube Channel.

I ordered a microphone, so the videos for July should have improved audio quality. I won’t need to be so close to my iPad, which should help.

I need to just film a video! I’m overthinking things and feel a bit paralyzed. I want the videos to be better, but that makes it harder for me to motivate myself to do them.

Here is May’s update about my YouTube channel.

These are my stats at the end of month four: I have 32 subscribers, 4,000 views, and 90 hours of watch time. My most viewed video has been viewed more than 420 times, and now I have a new video viewed 400 times. I would like to break 500 this month for one of my videos, but we’ll see.

My main goal for May was to continue to make videos about each episode of The Rehearsal this season. This went pretty well, but it was essentially my minimum goal.

I feel more confident about my channel than I did in April. I’ll be taking a week off to travel, so I’ll try to post more videos the other three weeks. (I made two videos today.)

Here is this month’s update about my YouTube channel.

These are my stats at the end of month three: I have 25 subscribers, 2,666 views, and more than 51 hours of watch time. My most viewed video has been viewed more than 420 times.

My main goal for April was to practice filming reviews and attract more subscribers with consistency and predictability. I did not do this.

Progress has slowed down on all fronts. I’ve posted far fewer videos. “The BEST 1990s Horror Films ” video did the best, with a few videos about HBO shows also doing fine. I feel much less confident about where I’m going with my channel. I will continue to make a video about each episode of The Rehearsal this season.

I think I’ll also try to do more random video ideas, like when I first started.

I’m going to try and post an update about my YouTube channel every month.

These are my stats at the end of month two: I have 22 subscribers, 1,300 views, and more than 29 hours of watch time. My most viewed video has been viewed more than 300 times and has 8 likes.

My topics and post times have been all over the place. For month three, I plan on releasing three reviews a week. Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. My release time will be at 11am PST.

My main goal for April is to practice filming reviews and attract more subscribers with consistency and predictability.

Although the channel’s growth has been slow, I’m still feeling good about my progress. For March, I got lots of practice editing and made an intro for my channel. I’m excited about next month!

My first month on YouTube went well. I posted pretty much every day and got lots of practice, which was my only goal for the first month. I’ve settled on being a BookTuber and calling my channel Books Under Your Bed. For March, I’m going to be posting on Tuesdays and Thursdays and maybe a bonus video every once in a while when I get a random idea that I want to film.

My best-performing video has 35 views and 3 likes. I’m happy with this. As long as I keep growing and learning, I feel like I have a good chance of eventually developing a solid platform. I’m aiming for a year of consistent posting before I try to publish my next book.

I probably should have started this YouTube channel a few years ago, but as the saying goes, better late than never.

This month, I’ve been posting YouTube videos for practice. Every day, I record 2-3 minutes of me talking to the camera about whatever. Next month, I’m officially starting a review channel. I’m still trying to figure out what to call it. Something to do with speculative fiction, but lots of people don’t even know what that term means.

I need to avoid the pitfall of spending too much time on my channel and not enough time on my writing while still producing high-quality videos. This should be easier as I get more practice, but I’m worried that my writing has already suffered a little. I also need to up the amount I read so that I have fresh things to review.

Here is a link to my YouTube Page.

I was hoping to have my horror novel ready by October and then by the week of Halloween. Now, these dates have slipped by, and I don’t seem to be any closer to the finish line. I need to stop making tentative goals. In November, my only goal will be to improve my creative process.

I don’t have a consistent morning routine. This often wastes the most productive hours of my day.

I don’t use a cellphone, but like most people, I write on my computer, and this is where I also use social media, watch YouTube, and surf the net. This is a major problem. I’m often distracted, before, during, and after I try to write. I took a break from the internet for three days and vastly improved my productivity. I need to figure out some kind of balance.

I would like to learn a number of skills so that I can do them myself (proofreading, copyediting, cover design, marketing). This is overwhelming and will take years of practice. I’m not starting from scratch, but I’m unclear on the best way to improve. The obvious answer is to just start anywhere and learn what I can. Once I have a better handle on the topics, I can create a study plan for myself.

I’m reading enough fiction books, but I could do a much better job of learning from them. I need to start taking more notes and jotting down more ideas.

That’s a lot for one month. Even if I address only one of these problems, it should drastically improve my artistic output. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels time is running out.

This won’t come as a surprise, but I had hoped to finish The Queen in Yellow last month, and that didn’t happen. I finished a draft, but now I’m going back through the whole thing again, trying to cut as much as possible without hitting a main artery.

110,000 words is just too long. A horror novel should be easier to pitch if it’s under 100k. I’m aiming for 90K, but we’ll see how this pass goes.

After all the cuts, I’ll need to do yet another pass, making sure everything flows and that my cuts (and minor additions) are an actual improvement.

I see all this taking at least another month, but I’m not letting this hold me back from researching agents and indie horror publishers. My goal is to write a few generic query letters this month and send out targeted versions well before my birthday in June.

For the past week, I’ve been trying to imagine a way forward. What kind of future do I want to make for myself?

I was drawing a blank.

I want to continue to write. That’s simple enough. And ideally, in this imagined life, I would be some kind of visual artist, maybe eventually making a graphic novel.

The problem: I couldn’t realistically picture a reality where I could support myself with my art without working myself to death, which kind of ruins the dream.

I listened to some podcasts and audiobooks. I read some blog posts and newsletter articles. I watched too many YouTube videos.

The future seems to be a pretty big unknown for every writer and artist. Part of that is AI and the rapidly changing publishing industry. Part of that is the general state of the world. Writers and other artists are feeling the weight of late-stage capitalism now more than ever.

How can I imagine my happy artistic future in all that mess?

Maybe it’s simple.

This is an old idea, but everything old is new again: my goal is to earn 1,000 true fans.

You can read more about the idea in Kevin Kelly’s essay 1,000 True Fans, but the concept is that it’s not about marketing or getting the book deal or selling a million eBooks; it’s about making connections, one fan at a time, and producing premium art for those people to treasure.

Getting 1,000 fans seems doable, right? It’s not superstar level or anything. It’s just a thriving life as an artist.

If you have enough true fans, you can do a successful Kickstarter, you can make direct sales, you can stay your strange self, and you can compete with the AI deluge that is coming. You can stay human. We’ll all need that quality going forward if we want to stand out.

I think the most direct way to do this is to become an artist that deserves 1,000 true fans and to document the journey. It’s the simple Show Your Work that Austin Kleon talks about.

At this point, I’m not really sure where this journey will go. But that’s part of the fun. All I need to do is start with the basics and grow from there.