Reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly are in, and we’re off to a strong start, fam.
Author: Matt Casamassina
Author.
Degenerate Hits Day One on Audible
Hot take: audiobooks are the best versions of books.
I’m no purist who insists books must be experienced in quiet, reflective solitude, or that the truest, best form of any novel is simple words on a page.
Nah fam.
I’m a reader, too, and as a reader I sometimes fall victim to all the pitfalls of reading. Skimming over obvious paragraphs. Speed-reading through good parts. Losing the pace.
Can’t do that shit in an audiobook, unless you’re an irredeemable Satanist who listens at 2x or 3x speed. You go at the pace of the narrator. And on top of that, you’ve got a professional who can bring your characters to life in theatrical fashion.
So I’m a big fan. And as a big fan, I always dedicate a lot of time and effort to the Audible versions of my novels.
Degenerate is my most ambitious Audible book yet, and I’m happy announce that it will be available for pre-order on October 30, just a day before Halloween. And that it will debut alongside the digital and print versions of the book on November 19.
As an audiobook, Degenerate weighs in at just over 15 hours, which also makes it my biggest audiobook to date.
I’ve teamed up with the incredibly talented Philip Nathaniel Freeman, who narrates the book with passion. We’ve got music. We’ve got what we call audio flourishes, meaning sound effects that enhance certain sequences. And in my opinion it all comes together in a beautiful way that allows Phil’s voice to remain the star of the show. I hope listeners find and enjoy it in this format, as a lot of love and work went into its creation.
Here’s a little sample for you. (Note: For the purposes of this sample, I’ve cut off the opening credits and crossfaded straight to the first chapter, but the final book transitions more seamlessly.)
Trailer
Short and sweet. Preorder here: http://linktr.ee/degbook
Degenerate: November 19, 2025
Fam, we have a release date. And a final title. Headline spoiled it, I know.
I posted a couple polls and Degenerate beat out Anxiety most of the time. Also, some commentators said Anxiety made them feel, well, anxiety. So we’re sticking with the OG title after all.
Books industry moves too goddamned slow for me. I queried a lot of agents. Got a couple dozen rejections, which I’ll go into below. And I’m the worst self-promoter in the world because I just can’t be bothered to keep at it. I’d much rather get Degenerate out there so I can focus on the next novel, Dust and Fury, which is moving along at a rapid clip.
The good news is that November 19—chosen because it’s right before the Thanksgiving holiday but also because it’s nineteen, and any horror fans know the significance there—is set in stone. Barring an act of God. A publisher swoops in and buys it out from underneath me. And knowing what I know about the books industry, fat chance. So that date feels concrete.
Also positive, the book has been read, reread and reread, cleaned up and polished, copyedited to death, and beautifully formatted for digital and print. Meanwhile, the audiobook is halfway finished and the narrator nails it. More on that, including a sample, in my next post. There’s the AB-tested cover art. There’s the full spread for print. There’s the art for Audible. There’s all the marketing text, key art, illustrations, and more for store pages. And if you’ve never built a store page before, that shit has its own level on the Nine Circles of Hell. All of this to say, feeling pretty good about where the book is and where it’s going.
Fast forward to release so peeps can be like, “worst book ever Matt shoulda stuck to video games.”
I mean… maybe? You never know how your novels are gonna be received. My last two books have garnered a lot of praise from critics and customers alike, which I’m incredibly thankful for because, again, you have no effin’ idea how it’s gonna go.
So rejections. Not my favorite thing. I prefer ice cream, mind you, but I don’t hate them, either. They’re part of the query process, which is what I do hate. Not because you put something out there and it typically gets rejected a lot before someone cares. I’m okay with that. What I despise is how long this process takes. The books industry seems to be fighting tooth and nail to remain slug slow in a world that races at the speed of light. Agents sometimes take a year to come back to you. A YEAR, people. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
I’ve run a video game publisher for seven years or so. We get video games submissions daily. We respond to them within a week.
What I hate more than anything is the template response in rejection letters. It looks something like this.
“Thank you for allowing me the pleasure to consider your new book, [BOOK TITLE HERE]. Unfortunately, this project is not the right fit at this time. Please remember that yada yada yada…”
Un-actionable. Useless.
I would much rather this:
“Curse you for subjecting me to this gutter trash attempt at fiction. I read maybe two pages before it became clear to me that you should pursue another career or hobby. Not only is your writing rudimentary at best, the premise ludicrous, but your characters are thinner than the pages they’re printed on. This is unsalvageable. Please, never email me again.”
People. That is actionable feedback. I understand what didn’t work for this agent. They’ve told me my writing is so bad I should ponder a career change. That my story doesn’t work. That my characters suck. That, in their opinion, it’s all unfixable.
When we reject a game, we tell developers why we rejected it, and rarely if ever have we leaned on the gag-inducing excuse, “Not the right fit at this time.” And if we’ve ever used some variant, we’ve offered context. Because we want our partners to take action. We don’t just want them to go away.
This Sunday rant brought to you by… coffee.
What’s in a Name?
I’ve been thinking about the title of my third book as I’ve started to pitch it around to various agencies. Degenerate was originally intended as a double entendre meant to describe the main character and his stress-induced macular degeneration. But then I wrote the story and our accidental hero really isn’t a bad guy. He’s just racked with anxiety, which is the source of so many of his problems. With that, I may change the name.
More to come.
Dust & Fury
Now that DEGENERATE is in the can, several things are happening in tandem.
- Agent queries
- This is a long process and one that ages authors by 725 years minimum
- Edit of Degenerate
- It’s a pretty clean draft, but I’m waffling on whether or not to get an outside edit done anyway because best foot forward and all that
- Reason I might not do this is because it’s going to be edited post agency no matter what
- Marketing materials for Degenerate
- Covers, art, possibly a trailer
- Much of this is already done, which is good
- Future publishers will probably want to redo it anyway
- Putting the “feels” out on the audiobook
- Again, moot if I go the agency/publisher route, as this will be handled externally
- And finally, starting on the next book, which is…
D&F (which is what the cool kids call it) is written first-person present tense and follows Anouk, who’s “seen eight times as many suns as most” and aims to find out why. There’s a rich, beautiful, at times horrifying world here. More to come, but if you scroll down my feed, I posted a snippet of an early chapter some time ago.
It’s a Wrap
Fam, we did it.
DEGENERATE is finished!
140,000 words, 440 manuscript pages, and something like 615 novel pages.
Picture proof, dumb dog included.
Much more to come.
For Realsies?
Quick update for the New-ish Year.
After much deliberation, thousands of increasingly pathetic excuses, and a commitment to doing literally anything else, I am for realsies finishing DEGENERATE.
I’m a procrastinator by nature but this has been epic procrastination even by my standards.
For the past three weeks I have spent my Friday and Saturdays, from approximately 10am to 2pm, knocking out thousands of new words on the path to completion. We are now in the final scene before the epilogue, the latter of which will take me about an hour to knock out because it’s been lingering unanswered in my mind for two-plus years.
End scene, much harder, but making progress.
Picture proof: Me at my office right now, writing.
So for realies, how much time until done? Well, now that I’m adding at least a thousand words per sit down, the official answer is soon. End of February, latest, and I’m using the official ‘for realsies’ label here so you know it’s for realsies.
Likely, though, much sooner. I told my wife yesterday that it’s happening this week. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep to that timeline. I didn’t tell her for realsies. But I’m certainly going to try.
If you’ve been waiting for me to get off my ass and put out my next thing, we’re almost there. Well, at least with the writing part.
Sophistication Trailer
Experimented with a combination of AI tools, free assets, and heavy video editing to create what I think is a passable trailer for my second novel, Sophistication.
AI detractors will continue to shit on AI models and listen, it’s warranted. I’m glad there’s debate. I think there are real ethical questions that need to be answered. Simultaneously, there’s no denying that as a tool to assist the natural creative process, AI can be very powerful. To be clear: I have not and will not ever use AI to write. What’s the point? I love writing. Why outsource that to anybody?
Anyway, I ain’t got the time or money to produce trailers for my books at a level that I feel represents them in the best light. But a bit of time dedicated to AI renders and lots of editing over the course of a few hours, and you get something like this. (And yeah, I know there’s some jank. I could render more options and probably fix the weird hands, etc., but I’d rather be writing.) And this is just a test to see where this stuff is at, which, spoiler, still isn’t quite ready for prime time.
Starcophagus
Sometimes you just gotta admit when you’ve failed. And this isn’t one of those times because despite forever delays, goddamn it, I’m seriously wrapping up Degenerate. The problem is that I’m writing about two words per day so it’s taking me longer than normal. But they’re two super choice words.
Anyway, to distract myself from actually finishing something material, I often start writing new books instead. It’s far easier, you see. And I’ve been meaning to pen a first-person novel. So here’s a little excerpt from the very-dumb-but-also-kinda-okay named Starcophagus.
—
STARCOPHAGUS
LOG: ROBERT MCCARTHY; LAST RECEIVED
MAY 5, 2037, 18:37:11
Welp.
So, hi NASA, and maybe the Air Force, probably the Pentagon by now, and if by some miracle this makes it past all the bureaucracy to Mom and Dad, too, wonderful.
Folks, I’ve got some good news and bad news here. Maybe let’s start with the good, huh?
Assuming this stupid marshmallow suit is recording and I’m not just talking for the sake of it right now, in about, well, something like six hours, video will be on the way that proves yours truly, Rob McCarthy, master linguist extraordinaire, now holds the interstellar record for the longest spacewalk. Fuckin’ A right. Eat your heart out, James Voss and Susan Helms. Get out of here with your weak shit.
The bad news is that by the time you get this transmission something like twenty-four hours from now—these delays are really annoying, by the way—I’ll be dead.
So… yeah. That sucks.
Okay, listen—Mom, Dad—if you’re watching this, it’s okay. I knew what I was signing up for, understood the inherent risks, and listen, for real, it’s all right. I only hyperventilated a little earlier and I didn’t start recording until after I got myself under control. But seriously, as far as dying goes, suffocation has objectively gotta be pretty high up on the list of options. After a while, I’ll just get really tired, drift away peacefully, and that’ll be all she wrote. Unless, you know, a micrometeorite traveling at 160,000-ish miles per hour obliterates me, but that’s super duper unlikely—and if we’re being honest I’d be dead before I knew what was happening anyway, so hey, that’s also a win.
I’m not terribly worried about the latter possibility. It’s called space for a reason. It’s spacey. And yeah, there’s space dust, too, but your chances of running into it are infinitesimally small, especially if you’re floating around in the wide-open darkness of interstellar space. Truth is, there ain’t shit out here.
Well, except for good old Voyager 4. I can still see her floating about a football field’s distance away. Gotta say, she’s lighting up the vacuum. Admittedly, that’s because she’s on fire—and lemme tell you, if there’s a God watching over the vastness she’ll explode into a billion pieces while I’m still awake enough to see it. That’s my final wish—just to see that fuckin’ ship disappear forever.
The crew’s dead, in case you hadn’t figured that out yet. Everybody. The captain. Felicia. Jory. Susan. The Russians. The Chinese. All gone. And me next.
Still, I’d rather be here than there. That should tell you everything you need to know, but allow me to be crystal clear on the point. If that ship comes within a 100 million miles of Earth—if it slides into the goddamned solar system—you blow it out of the sky. You send everything, you hear me? Nuke the shit out of it. Shoot whatever other insane bombs you got at it. Laser it—I don’t care. But do not send any more people. I’m repeating that just in case you’re too stupid to listen the first time. Do. Not. Send. Any. More. People.
There’s a reason I’m floating out here in cold space and not sleeping in my underwear on Voyager 4. And spoiler: It’s not because I’m adventurous.
The object—the starcophagus, as we’ve been calling it—is the textbook case of curiosity killed the cat, and by cat I mean the human race. We should’ve left the goddamned thing alone.
A NOVEL CONCEPT 