ABSTRACT:
Unsatisfied with the passive engagement of the facevirus, our internet marketing / social virus team has begun conducting experiments in new realms of social media marketing. We’ve plumbed the weird facebook, let’s see what happens when we go looking for punters on the weird OkCuspid?

INTRODUCTION:
We were very excited about the format. With facevirus we had to search for new “friends” based only on who has the freakiest looking profile pic / name (ended up with lots of death metal bands). With OkCuspid, we can harness a search algorithms designed to dangle companionship or intimate connection over lonely people for the purpose of selling lonely people our smut!

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Preliminary testing is inconclusive, but shows potential. With some tweaks to the parameters, and an actual product to push, we believe this method will produce a significant buzz and at least a few sales. It is certainly better than the facevirus, or our attempts to solicit agents and magazines.

METHODS:
First, we created an OkCuspid profile, our name is Zelig_Rana, so if you use the cuspid, and would like to flirt pointlessly with whichever agent happens to be conducting the experiments, do as thou wilt. We answered a slew of questions, trying to guess what answers would make us most attractive to our target audience, which was a challenging bit of mental gymnastics. Mostly we just answered the sex questions and politics questions in the most libertine and hedonistic ways possible. Avoided questions about drugs or jobs or anything like that.

Then, we started sending messages to highly rated strangers. Our sample size approached 100 for this experiment, mostly people living within a few hundred miles of Chicago. We set our sights as broadly as possible, and went based on “match percentage” because we suspect “special blend” is a lie used to direct some action at the less satisfied customers and keep them on the cuspid hook. We do not want to keep anyone on this social virus’s hook. That would not feel good.

The messages we sent started with “Heteropocalypse virology experiment 2 underway… Would you like a random sample?” Regardless of how people responded to that, we replied “It is a novel. A single sentence will be randomly selected and transmitted to you. If you so desire. Be forwarned: it is a novel of absurd satanic erotica.” because we believe in informed consent.

Enthusiastic respondents were then given a random sentence from the story. Selected using an online random number generator. Then we continued with a series of pre-written follow up questions, such as “Would you say your feelings are more… intrigued, or concerned, at this point in the experiment?” and “How would you feel, if I told you that you have expressed greater enthusiasm than any other subject of this experiment? A. Pity B. Shame C. Pride D. Lied to.”

Some questions offered additional samples, or the preceeding or following sentences, and one offered “If anything you wanted could happen next, what do you suppose that thing might be? In the universe, on this metaphysical plane of existence. If a stanking pit to the netherworld were to open up, releasing our dark lord to grant you a wish, what, pray tell, would such a wish be?”

RESULTS:
Two respondents said they would pay to receive the full text. One requested it hand-bound in leather. She included: “mmm… leather” to drive the point home and insinuate something about her personal life.

A few respondents also attempted to hook up with the conducting agents in person, but (as we suspect is so often the case) schedules and geography did not align before the conversation fell to the second page of the respondent’s message inbox under the slew of unsolicited dick picks and “hey sexy” messages that seem ubiquitous on this medium. Oh well, such is the way of modern hypersaturated alienation.

RECCOMENDATION:
The agents conducting the survey recommend the following changes to the procedure:

First, single sentences do not satisfy. We understand the collective’s commitment to the aleatoric, but sometimes (but surprisingly infrequently) the randomly selected sentence did not contain or even insinuate anything dirty, absurd, or satanic. If we presented paragraphs, or sections instead, there would be more for the respondents to engage with. We recommend the text be broken into 200 or so numbered pieces which are sure to contain some amount of juiciness and then randomly selected from there.

Second, expanding the search scope. It would be interesting to choose a handful of metropolitan and cultural centers, put the range at 500 miles, and only message the top 10 highest match percentages from each place. Only delve into the less than 95% range for cities that produce results.

Third, streamline the question process, and actually have a thing to sell. Why the fuck aren’t we just self-publishing this goddamn book already? Amazon print on demand is a minimum upfront cost, no-risk option. I don’t think they have community standards, and it’s not like any publisher is ever going to pick this trash up and try to sell it!

CONCLUSION:
You will only succeed if first you try.

For those sick preeverts among us who like to see hardcore porn subtly collaged with their favorite pop star. More to come?

We are again feeling very submissive. After receiving waves of rejection and deafening silence from the dozens of publishers and literary agents we submitted the full text of HETEROPOCALYPSE: RITUAL to, we decided to make sacrifices.

We broke our text. Nothing is sacred. The carefully interwoven stories of the Heteropocalypse have been disentangled, unfurled and forced unnaturally into separate short stories. The disentangling took one thing and turned it into nine.

Those nine things are now being submitted to every literary journal we can find, one at a time. This multiplies our work exponentially, but also the possibilities of a match. When The New Yorker rejects “The Moon is a Thin Balloon” we can send them “A Cup of Sugar” next. If McSweeny’s doesn’t get the off-beat humor of “his cardigan is suddenly uncomfortably warm” they might go for the bizarre treatment of pop culture in “Miley has Invited Billie Rae to Dinner”. We’re sending “A Pegasus Conceived” or “The Last Ritual” to publishers of sci-fi and fantasy, and attempting other genre-focusing choices.

Anyone who wishes to assist with this sisyphean task will be rewarded with sneak previews of the stories. Please contact heteropocalypse@riseup.net if you are interested.

HETEROPOCALYPSE: RITUAL weaves thirteen tales of sex magic, demonic possession, and deviant violence together in a non-linear cut-up style. The apocalypse referred to in the title is not a post-apocalyptic speculation, but rather a pre-apocalyptic manifesto, or perhaps a warning, depending on the reader’s feelings about the world and the idea of it ending. The Heteropocalypse asks: what if the world is prepared to end, not with a bang, nor a whimper, but with a chorus of passionate moans and vulgar rutting grunts?

A second, much longer volume of this work is now emerging from the minds that ushered HETEROPOCALYPSE: RITUAL into the world. We have titled this emerging work HETEROPOCALYPSE: SACRIFICE. That text takes the original characters and multiplies them through a kaleidescope of tangents and deep explorations.  Like a virulent infection, the collective madness that possesses seemingly random people in RITUAL spreads exponentially until it reaches a point of crisis, and subsumes the entire world into a pit of orgiastic Armageddon.