I downloaded a free, illegal .PDF copy of William Gibson’s Neuromancer after I wrote my blog article “Slow to Change.”

I read several pages. I liked it, but it’s too smart. There’s a lot of smart readers out there, but not enough to make one really rich. William Gibson is a fucking genius. He’s way smarter and more educated than Stephen King.

I am a connoisseur of the stupid. The mass appeal. I am going to have to be minimally intelligent to appeal to the New York literary gatekeepers, but once I get in I’m going dumb all the way.

Stephen King used to write dumb, very successfully. The biggest weakness of The Stand, his most successful novel, was when he wrote the political committee parts and they all yapped ideas. Ideas are useless.

Genius is dull. Artistic elegance is unappealing and doesn’t hold the attention. A lot more people would read if authors weren’t so fuckin’ boring. I have an inestimable gift: I am as bored of writing as a stupid person is. I am a genius with the taste of the proletariat. I’m very, very lucky.

I have the brains and the chops to be writing high literature, but for now I will confine myself to the very, very stupid, and violent, and sexual. I love all those things. They turn me on. William Gibson wrote science fiction because it is the preeminent field of ideas. Of new things. The only thing I want to be new in my fiction is a new way for women to suffer. I hate the word women. It has been elevated.

The novel has been evolving over the past centuries into a form where it can be almost interesting. It is incredibly hard to write an interesting novel. There is a dead white space that rises up between the lines in any written work.

To write an interesting novel, you have to be brilliant. But brilliance comes with its own traps. The intelligent brain wants complexity, convolutions, repeated patterns that go nowhere.

There is a magnificence with the dumb, the stupid, the low. It is a fertile field, but it requires more than just boredom to facilitate it: it takes energy, persistence, a crude form of creativity.

In time, I shall be a master of the low. I will be mega-successful. I will poison minds with my work — some minds — and elevate other minds with my work — some minds.

God, I love myself.