
***NOTE: Thank you to everyone who bought these works! Follow me on twitter at @khole_emily for news on next steps regarding the Deluge DAO. These works are still available for viewing at [folia.app](https://www.folia.app/works/11)!***
 
## HELLO AND WELCOME

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/1c7c81e2-1f3b-4380-bff7-dd22c85c3d77.png?height=1678&width=3030)

Today I’m very excited to launch three new works on [Folia](https://www.folia.app/works/11) – CODE OF HOLES,  PLASTIC BEACH and THE FUTURIST. These three NFT works are generative poems I created with new digital language models and algorithms, plus my own poetic composition. The proceeds from this Folia auction will be completely redistributed to queer, trans, experimental and undersupported writers as the first action of the Deluge Books DAO. [Deluge Books](https://delugebooks.com/) is the mass experimental queer literary press I run with collaborators in New York and Los Angeles (try to say that five times fast). Ever since I [crowdfunded my new book BURN ALPHA as $NOVEL](https://emily.mirror.xyz/0AFENlMKv9amUC1OJIZY26udpISw_raXkoEcvelPvzg) we have been excited about the possibilities of crypto, Mirror, and NFTs for generating new methods for sustaining original literary work. You can read a little more about my thoughts on that in [my interview in Decrypt](https://decrypt.co/68981/emily-segal-novel-crowdfund). Down the road, we are pumped about the possibility of crowdfunding for the Deluge DAO on Mirror and our own social token :) Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @khole_emily or at emily@delugebooks.com if you have thoughts or suggestions about that!





## MORE ABOUT THESE POETRY NFTs...
 
Last summer I started making an experimental series of language works that used AI, cut-ups and word generators as a form of divination. These poems are the product of that process.
 
I have always been inspired by William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin’s ideas around how cutting up a text could generate visions of the future or flashes of a deeper truth. When a chaos element got introduced by slicing something up and rescrambling it, the deeper meaning of the words could show up on the surface of the new arrangement. This new layer of meaning could be poetic or divinatory. I've always been interested in divination, and especially since my job as "trend forecaster" is a kind of tacky contempo version of divination, it's interesting to me to mix the various spheres where divination goes down: astrology, tarot, cut-ups, data dives, pattern recognition, etc. Introducing randomness in poetic composition has been a persistent theme since Tristan Tzara and Dada, through the Surrealists, hypertext poets and beyond. 
 
Over the summer of 2020, my friend K Allado-Macdowell got their hands on a pilot version of GPT-3, the language model. (Eventually they helped [my project Nemesis write our DOOM! trend report](https://nemesis.global/memos/the-doom-report) using it.) While K started writing an amazing book using GPT-3 at warp speed ([Pharmako-AI, now published by Ignota, here](https://ignota.org/products/pharmako-ai)) they meanwhile indulged me by running fragments of my own poetry and existing poems by writers I loved through the machine, generating text for me to play with. It was all rather astounding and addictive and I looked for a way to work with it directly, since the real thing was only for researchers at the time. 
 
Luckily, that’s when I found out that a game called AI Dungeon, which is a browser-based text roleplaying game, supposedly used GPT-3 as the basis for its premium version, and you could use it to generate texts if you paid the $9/month. So I started making poems using AI dungeon, dodging its role-player-ish verbiage most of the time and trying to get it to present some far-out truths, which it did.

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/ad9d3716-e893-42e6-9bb7-a0bbf3f5bc11.png?height=1590&width=1588)

One of my early experiments became the basis for the first poem here, CODE OF HOLES, when the game started describing light as a "code of holes" which I found rather dharmic and spooky and appealing. I then took the text generated by interacting with the AI dungeon game and did a Burroughs-style cut-up to it, then edited it into something pithier. Instead of presenting it on a page in the normal way, I justified it in a square and used black emoji as a form of punctuation, since I think it emphasizes the code/hole content motif. The font I used is a nasty free dafont called hole-hearted, another echo of the theme. 

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/e7012e9d-bd18-4d72-bbfd-b14768c9ff49.png?height=1592&width=1596)


The second poem, PLASTIC BEACH, is about having sex with Kylie Jenner. I dreamt I had sex with her in a beach vacation setting surrounded by family, and it included an obscene squirting element. When I woke up I wrote out the dream in order of its events to turn it into a poem but it was too linear, just sounded like badly written erotica. So I ran that text through [an algorithm that mimics Bourroughs-style cutups](http://www.languageisavirus.com/cutupmachine.php) and suddenly it was turned back into a dream, like the cutting and scrambling allowed the dream logic came to the surface again. Bonsai-tree-style pruning and editing followed. There's an influence of the poet Bernadette Mayer here too who worked a lot with dreams and dream logic in her work. You can check out more of Mayer’s writing prompts [here](http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html).
 
The font used in the second Folia work is another dafont called PLASTIC BEACH (also the title of the piece) and the background is a photo I took of the sky while tripping on acid on Laguna Beach on the last hot day of summer.
 
![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/f852bb61-78d7-407a-a007-e13011cf2f37.png?height=1590&width=1580)

The third piece, THE FUTURIST, came out of my original experimentation with GPT-3 via K. I had asked if GPT-3 could write poetry, and they said yes, but epic poetry, because it did better with longer text samples. Inspired by this, I sent over the first few pages of [The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley](https://poets.org/poem/descent-alette-i-walked), a feminist epic poem and one of my all time favorite books. The Descent of Alette begins in a world where everyone is trapped underground on an infinite subway system. In the world of the book, the “tyrant” stands in for a male supervillain responsible for the suppression of authentic life, and the consciousness of the poem begins to tangle with him. The poem uses a very particular quotation style in which each phrase is bracketed by its own quotation marks – GPT-3 aped this perfectly on the first try, which was eerie, since it’s so unusual. THE FUTURIST is like a riff on one of the tyrant’s moments from the original book, but made kind of fluffier and more treacle-y...a supervillain gone soft in the machine. I edited the original GPT-3 sample considerably and replaced the quotation marks with smiley dingbats (thematically linked to the poem’s smile at the end) and hearts. The font is Futura, obviously! I feel the overall effect is like deep fried Joe Boxer.

 
## MANY THANKS TO...

The Folia crew – Dan Denorch, Everett Williams, Billy Rennekamp. My Deluge Books collaborators – Cyrus Simonoff, Hannah Baer, Taylor Thompson, Calvin Waterman and Max Ackerman. K Allado-Macdowell for being there. Elaine Kahn and the Poetry Field School Workshops. Kei Kreutler for breaking this and many other things down for me. Dena Yago, period. Patrick, Denis and the whole Mirror team. My $NOVEL supporters who I still can't believe exist. Kay Gabriel’s Bernadette Mayer Class at the Poetry Project. And finally, as always, Math Bass <3 

## IF YOU'D LIKE TO GET IN TOUCH

I'm on Twitter at @khole_emily, Instagram @nemesis_emily and reachable at emily@delugebooks.com XOXO

## ONE MORE NOTE

The energy consumption of this project and all Folia projects are fully carbon-offset via Offsetra.

THREE POETRY NFTs ON FOLIA - THE DELUGE DAO

BURN ALPHA NOVEL


***NOTE: This crowdfund is now closed! I'm incredibly grateful! In order to keep in touch, reach out to me with your Ethereum address on Twitter at @khole_emily after you've contributed (at this point, I am obsessed with you, which is a plus!)***

### Here we go...

Welcome to a new experiment: using crypto to crowdfund my new novel, working title BURN ALPHA. The supporters of $NOVEL would be the first of their kind, since no other novels have ever been created this way, in the history of literary culture :) 

[BURN ALPHA NOVEL](crowdfund://0x95d0A89943E0e3e05d290Fc07462c148EB6a11Ff?network=homestead)

## BURN ALPHA $NOVEL supporters will receive:  

### TIER ONE: Everyone

- Stake in manuscript excerpt from Act 1 of BURN ALPHA which will be posted on Mirror and minted as an NFT
- Stake in the first edition NFT sale of the full book (this comes later, of course)
- Mention in the book’s acknowledgments, along with my massive gratitude!

### TIER TWO: .5 ETH +

All of the above, plus...

- Special supporter-only limited edition hardcover copy of BURN ALPHA
- Limited edition supporter-only BURN ALPHA merch
- Access to periodic supporter-only readings of manuscript in process


### TIER THREE: 1.5 ETH +

All of the above, plus...

One on one call with me: either a chat about writing, a chat about whatever is on your mind, or a tarot / astrology reading 

Sneak peek of the full finished manuscript before anyone else

### More about this project:


Usually, novelists go to great lengths to fund their own novel-writing process by working other gigs, selling commercial writing, or – in significantly fewer cases – getting an advance from a publishing company. All of these methods have drawbacks, in the forms of limited time or limited creative freedom for the author. On top of that, the process of creating these works of art goes on behind a veil of secrecy, away from the community that will ultimately enjoy the final product. As an author and publisher, I’d like to change all that. This crowdfund will take us one step closer to a better future for writers and readers everywhere. 

I am so stoked to immerse myself more deeply in writing my second book and to share it with all of you.

Phew! Without further ado...



### The Book:

My novel-in-progress BURN ALPHA is a homoerotic teen thriller about a group of three girls at an elite New York City private school who stumble into busting a global sex trafficking ring related to their school and ultimately shut the school down, set in the mid-2000s in NYC. There is also an esoteric/supernatural element that informs how they gather information and fight the power – that part is related to Goetic magic, but it wouldn’t be very occult if I spilled it all here. 

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/4c4c8322-1fa8-4d91-a8f8-629d56413991.png?height=1630&width=1056)

The book-writing process was inspired by my fascination with the [very strange, real 1973 Sci Fi book Space Relations by Donald Barr](https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvgpm3/epstein-truthers-are-obsessed-with-a-sci-fi-book-about-child-sex-slavery-written-by-bill-barrs-dad) – who was the headmaster of the Dalton School in New York where Jeffrey Epstein got his first gig (incidentally, Epstein was my mom’s high school math teacher). 

![](https://video-images.vice.com/articles/5d56c6ec4d02ea00084d5162/lede/1565968446993-0-5.jpeg)



The vibe of BURN ALPHA is candy critique: Q Anon meets Umberto Eco meets Gossip Girl. My first novel was [Mercury Retrograde (2020)](https://delugebooks.com/collections/books), which was a New York Times New and Notable Book (!) and was released through [Deluge](https://delugebooks.com/), a press I run with collaborators in New York and Los Angeles ([more press links and info here](https://delugebooks.com/pages/links)). 

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/df270ae5-1111-4265-bf77-4619d1a2213e.png?height=1078&width=1072)


BURN ALPHA would be the second installment in a series of fictional works I’m doing about power structures and how they shift or collapse. I want to crowdfund so I have uninterrupted time for world building and funds to work with the excellent editors in the Deluge network. I’m also trying to learn-by-doing in order to explore new models for publishing overall. This process will help me check out new structures for authors I publish through Deluge, and the larger community of queer, experimental, literary writers of which I am a part. 

I’m excited about crowdfunding and the world of social tokens because they open up new ideas about how writing can be generated, published and sustained. The world needs an attitude adjustment when it comes to how books are made, sold, and distributed, and writers have been waiting too long for better ways of working at better rates. (Platforms like Substack can show us a little of what might change but are only a drop in the bucket...they are also kinda hybrid old- and new-generation in a way that feels limp to me.) Therefore, this experiment is one part of figuring out what does and doesn’t work! 

And luckily, since I run [my own press](https://delugebooks.com/) we already know that this book will hit bookshelves (and e-readers) worldwide once it’s ready!


 

### Here are the basic mechanics:
The initial manuscript excerpt will exist on Mirror, publicly accessible to all. It will be minted as an NFT utilizing the Zora protocol. Supporters retain a stake in both the manuscript excerpt and full manuscript NFTs. Any time these NFTs are sold, a percentage goes back to the token holders, who can then redeem them for a proportional share of ETH in the shared pool. The first edition book is minted as an NFT from the crowdfund, the future value of which routes back to the crowdfund and therefore the supporters. Supporters will forever be linked to the crowdfund as patrons that made this project (and the future of literary fiction) possible.

 
### More about the BURN ALPHA story:

The three girls at the heart of the story are Elizabeth Macabee, Gillian Shapiro and Archer Fast. Archer is the daughter of a major American political dynasty and also happens to have the headmaster of their school for a father. Gillian is the child of a Goldman Sachs investment banker and Israeli emigre psychoanalyst – though her upper Madison Ave. meets East Hampton set up should make her a shoe-in for popular girl, but her queerness (as yet unarticulated) and body type (not thin enough) preclude this, so she ends up working an alternative angle of social capital: cool clothes, music knowledge, humor, and drugs. Elizabeth, understated and sardonic, is the least privileged of the three, though hardly poor in any consensus reality idea of the term. Raised on the Upper West Side by her academic parents, she is shielded from the high octane world of elite private schools (xoxo) for a good portion of her childhood. 

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/ec4a1a29-dcab-4751-a2d3-84e015f20b19.png?height=848&width=854)

For most of that period, Elizabeth’s mom is a PhD candidate in the sociology department at Columbia studying the network effects of a Panama Papers-type cabal of offshore accounts among the world’s wealthiest people. This eventually trickles up to the school’s trustees, who don’t like it. Elizabeth’s mom gets gaslit out of her grad program and has a psychotic break which includes her murdering the family dog – Elizabeth discovers them both covered with blood on the black-and-white tiled bathroom floor of their apartment on 106th Street. After Elizabeth’s mom emerges from the psych ward, she is totally blackpilled and utterly exhausted by the idea of fighting the power in any form. That’s when she sends Elizabeth crosstown to the ultra-tony Salisbury School, where she intends for her daughter to meld with the elite. Elizabeth’s friendship with Archer and Gillian pleases her in this vein, though if she knew about their daily after school ritual, she would likely be less happy: three girls smoking lots of weed-laced-with-bits-of-PCP in Central Park by the Met. It is during one of those wavy afternoons that the girls slip into another nearby realm, where a piece of information is revealed to them in the form of a crumbling old book. That book implicates Archer’s family and the whole school they attend in a global sex trafficking ring (yes, Epstein-esque, but as if the 2008 Epstein bust was the whole kit and kaboodle, not a slap on the wrist). You’ll have to read the rest of BURN ALPHA to find out what happens!


## More about me:

I’m a writer, artist, and trend forecaster based in Los Angeles. Some of you might know me as one of the co-founders of [K-HOLE](khole.net), the trend forecasting group best known for popularizing normcore, or as part of [Nemesis](nemesis.global), a consultancy I run with Martti Kalliala. My first book, Mercury Retrograde, was released in November 2020 by [Deluge Books](delugebooks.com), a mass experimental queer press I founded with collaborators in New York and LA. My writing has appeared in The Guardian, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, Dazed, Mousse, 032c, e-flux journal, and many other publications, including anthologies by Verso Books and Sternberg Press. I’ve presented portions of my first novel-in-progress in art contexts at Project Native Informant in London, the Witte de With Contemporary Art Center in Rotterdam, the Berlin Biennial, the Serpentine Gallery, and elsewhere, so this crowdfund would be a further iteration of an existing exploration into opening up the novel-writing process in unexpected avenues :)

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/6f6555cb-298e-4921-b421-52b5146c8928.jpg?height=2291&width=1535)



You can find me on Twitter at @khole_emily, on Instagram at @nemesis_emily, on my web site at [emilysegal.net](emilysegal.net) and if you'd like to drop me a note, I'm reachable at emily@delugebooks.com
 
## Praise for my first book:

“Emily Segal is **almost mystically attuned to the cultural logic of our era**. She lives its pangs and contradictions intellectually, emotionally and somatically – late capitalism’s Simone Weil.” Tom McCarthy

“I really liked reading this book. It’s the longest reply to “where have you been?” you’ll ever get from someone you first met in a skype chat which Emily Segal is to me. It’s **a brilliantly written novel** of a moment in search of a shimmer, half ‘here’, half digital, an everywhere post branding workplace place where few have dared to live and this writer, explorer, critic, philosopher of nonbusiness has done it deep. Segal's style is widely smart, different than deep (always). I mean her Mercury Retrograde is, it truly is.” Eileen Myles 

“‘Mercury Retrograde’ to me feels like **fiction's next historical leap**. It's smart and engaging (and bingeable) and yet it also feels necessary in a way that almost all books don't. It's a signpost that points to where the culture is headed, which is heady stuff, yet there you have it.” Douglas Coupland 

“I had so much fun reading it. It’s so fucking smart. It’s like **a love story between a girl and her intellect**. And it’s so cool to be all up in there with her.”  Michelle Tea
 
“A thought-provoking and often extremely funny first novel looking back at the 2010s, which I couldn't put down. I should also say this book offered some very cathartic **food-for-thought on the strange ways capital, cultural capital, and the Internet interacted in the 10s,** for those of you who are still haunted by trying to make sense of it all.” Emilie Friedlander, VICE

“**Dripping with line-level genius juice.**” M.E.S.H.

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/f134c960-788f-40c4-a89c-0c7eb66126ce.jpeg?height=2049&width=1536)


## ADDITIONAL REFERENCES:

[Crowdfunding Writing with NFTs — Mirror](https://dev.mirror.xyz/llJ_AboiDJwB_ZAFz-CXU7fL2p8v5Wz6MjfluLafewQ)

[Crowdfund Block on Mirror](https://dev.mirror.xyz/igPh3OWGfT3ERv16GZdyQeI7t3FdkK-8zsKlHKSX-lc) 

[$GENERALIST](https://generalist.mirror.xyz/1T0h7VGDcECJuifK4TPDfRoUQ3zaO_tPwdZV-dtnNqw)

[$ESSAY](https://j.mirror.xyz/uVGCCwwm3k341lPpxaJmHTZROESVse9Pe_rmbiuUAC0)

[$MOOD](https://appliedarts.mirror.xyz/vbiD5sIgZaqUAuXu0P6SkvmCNOM7MtRCdqsEDyxsOXU)
 
 




THREE POETRY NFTs ON FOLIA - THE DELUGE DAO

HELLO AND WELCOME

CROWDFUND A $NOVEL: BURN ALPHA

Here we go...