WELCOME TO THE 9 STORY HOTEL PROJECT
A Mostly Oral History (Through the Lens of Emil Ottoman) Pt. 1
(Colllage of every character image, photo, and most story images ever used for The Nine Story Hotel Project, Emil Ottoman, intro image for an Oral History of the 9 Story Hotel, 2025)
SOME IDEAS MAY ACTUALLY BE JUST A BIT AHEAD OF THEIR TIME UNTIL NOW
This is going to be an image heavy post. I’m putting it together myself as the Editor and one of the co-founders of the 9 Story Hotel.
Some ideas might actually be just five minutes ahead of their time, and the hotel may have been one of them.
In the Beginning There Was Locals
Wait, no, before that.
In the Beginning There Was Will Christopher Baer
Will Christopher fuckin’ Baer. Will Christopher Baer, Craig Clevenger, and Stephen Graham Jones used to share a forum together called the Velvet. A whole generation of crime, noir, horror, weird, and otherwise young writers looking to transgress against… anything at the time, came up on these forums. Clevenger was active. Jones popped in every once in a while. I didn’t know it but Blake Butler who I met on the internet years later was active. I just lurked.
The Velvet was a special place. Devoted to writing and exploring the dark corners of fiction, the weird bloody underside of what was quickly becoming “transgressive fiction” as genre marker in the early ‘00s, as driven by Chuck Palahniuk’s website (then called affectionately just The Cult) and its writing forums, which eventually spun off into Litreactor, the Velvet was an entirely different beast.
You can check the wayback machine and find it if you know how, find some real good essays and discussions about the ins and outs of writing, but the core point is the Velvet was a place for like minded people to come together and just bullshit and write. It produced an anthology eventually: Warmed and Bound, published by Velvet Books, now incredibly hard to find. I have a copy that came from a lady in California last year still wrapped in plastic from when it was delivered.
But before you know the Velvet you need to know Craig Clevenger, who wrote The Contortionist’s Handbook, who was friends with Will Baer around the time, who was running wild around the bay area like a madman, and to know Will Christopher Baer, you have to know Kiss Me Judas and Phineas Poe, a cult classic trilogy and some of the best noir of the new millennium. Currently hard to find decent copies of, I’m trying to get him to collab to get them back in print properly.
And you have to know that by cult author, I mean this trilogy, especially the first book, Kiss Me Judas, was some people’s Bible. They’d read it 10-20 times, could quote it like Shakespeare. I read it once. Second book gave me a panic attack. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t part of the firmament of where I come from, but it wasn’t my Bible. Eventually this worked strangely in my favor.
But to introduce my friend Chris, who I call my brother and my family, and whose seen my house an hugged my mom, I’ll let Clevenger do the heavy lifting, since he did it a long time ago, and wrote it out better than me.
Have you read that? Do you have an idea of what’s going on? Are you confused. That’s all okay.
Chris wrote a trilogy that stands up and runs you dry. Leaves you shaking. He switched publishers when the third book in the trilogy was coming out, Hell’s Half Acre, the middle book having been Penny Dreadful (predating the television show of the same name by quite a while.) The switch from Viking and Penguin to a SF medium press named MacAdam Cage turned out to be the end of a lot. The publisher shuttered, taking all their titles down with them. One of the last books they put out that I can think of is the softcover Phineas Poe Trilogy omnibus (the definitive version according to Chris) and Clevenger’s brilliant second novel Dermaphoria.
That softcover omnibus in good condition will run you over a hundred bucks at any bookseller site on the web. I have two copies, one I bought at a ridiculous price, still in its wrapping, and one gifted to me and my fiancee by Chris when we visited him last year. Dermaphoria is still available in hardcover on Amazon, I’d suggest going and getting a copy.
To say that a cult fanbase was clamoring for Chris’s next novel would be an understatement. And thus with a few ungodly well written excerpts appeared a listing for a book called Godspeed.
Godspeed was bought and put up for preorder before it was finished. If you check its Amazon page or Goodreads page, the reviews read like missing persons reports. Will Christophe Baer disappeared. But I’ll let him tell you that story below, as it’s not mine to tell.
He disappeared for 11 years.
And I’d put good money down on that book at B. Dalton, which doesn’t even exist anymore.
Then in middle 2023 I catch wind, see a Will Baer posting noir cyberpunk photos on an IG account. Find the Substack shortly after. It’s around the holidays 2023. My best friend has died, Chris throws up a post on IG telling anyone who wants a Kiss Me Judas sticker to hit him up. I do. Tell him how my mom was a fan, read his novels like they should properly be read, while riding the bus.
And I forget about it.
Good bit later, in December, before Christmas, I get an envelope. Hand written. Real address. It’s the stickers. I hit him up on IG because he’s been disappeared 11 years, I can’t even remember Phineas Poe or Kiss Me Judas aside from they were amazing books. He’s no longer someone I’m a fan of, he’s just a human, he’s a peer. I aged up into the game and lo, there I am talking to one of the formative voices of my early stylistic development as a writer. We bullshit, he’s starting a site, trying to get something like the Velvet back going. My knowledge is encyclopedic of that era in that end of literature, I was like, 16-17 and lurking, too scared to post my shitty scribbles. Now I have chops, we’re talking turkey. He says he’s about to throw a workshop together, which is another story entirely but I say fuck yes, I’m in.
I join a lotta workshops.
He finds a newer social platform called Locals, and we all join up. Get the old gang back together as it were, plus me, the invisible man. Me and him talk too much too fast and exchange numbers because fuck why not just text?
Turns out we’d been riding similar paths a long time.
In the organizing and bullshitting on locals (
, and will be our primary players in the history, even though Clev is more like a chair emeritus, reluctantly, and we just won’t let the lad out.) this came about one evening.
(If you ever see me end an email or missive with “fade” well, that’s where it comes from)
Now, you could call the above group a little… excitable. But we loved the idea.
And then this happened.
It was quickly apparent that as the archivist, I would take it upon myself to keep the bible.
In the meantime, Edith, C.J., Chris, Wrong Dimension, Ute, and notably me, were already chewing up the scenery. I’d decided to bring in my own characters, but I didn’t realize what this would lead to.
Details were hammered out, roughly, but Chris’s word was where the buck stopped.
And then the characters started to drop.
Rogues, villains, bastards. Balthazar was one Chris wanted to write, by his own admission, but I accidentally got to him first in my cold open.
Perhaps my greatest achievement in a project is the voice and mannerisms of Arthur Pinch. See, somehow my happy ass got first words out the gate, first 12-20k in an absolute nightmare flurry, which means I accidentally set the tone for the lobby, the front desk, Arthur Pinch’s voice, Balthazar’s appearance and sudden disappearance, a lot of scene setting. You can read the unabridged original on my Substack below
or the elegant intro to the hotel that Chris edited it down to below, at the Hotel’s Substack
The Heavy’s How You Like me Now is still stuck in my head. Edith had come up with a character named Sultana and elaborate bit of worldbuilding involving sex cults and Russian whores with penchants for sledgehammers.
added a story to the early goings as a NAME AUTHOR, a one off that’s fantastic, you should read it so bad I’m going to embed it below.This was amazing because the main pov character in this piece, the ragamuffin psycho Moira, between three authors, Edith, Ute and Wallwork, developed a completely natural unassisted character arc from shit beginning to triumphant end.
Have you ever tried to get writers to work together, let alone keep shit straight between things they’re ALL working on at the same time? Yeah, good fucking luck.
These early posts came out in fits and spits, a week or two apart, the intro in middle January, the Viscera January 31, The Grim Fairy Tale in early February.
Meanwhile
C.J. Stockton had grabbed the voice of Althea so completely and suffers from such amazing graphomania that they were producing enough Althea stories starting as her as an orphan in a haunted hotel (or maybe she’s just insane) that it was impossible to deny C.J. owned the voice, the character, and was the authority on all things Althea.
Shit, more than once Chris has said the story of the Nine probably revolves around Althea. She IS the main character. Maybe.
Every Althea story is so clean and in voice I barely ever had to edit a piece for pub, they came out whole.
meanwhile we were working out the logistics of all this on Locals and launching the Substack
C.J. took the image above and the image below and made them PART of Althea’s character in a brilliant way.
We were feeling a group vibe. I took the Russians and became the expert on Pinch and Balthazar somehow. Chris came up with new ideas and new cast to populate the hotel. I worked on first one series bible, then another. Wrong Dimension owned the voice of Malick the Plumber. Edith wrote Moira to a T, even if the character annoys her. Now she’s finally with her original characters, Sultana and a Russian Sociopath named Amata. Ute started writing True Grit, a story that played into the first Malick short and took the voice of Arthur Pinch’s cousin, the insane was veteran Griffin, meanwhile C.J. and Ute were developing a lore between Griffin and Althea, and me and Chris were sending each other manic texts until 3 in the morning some days.
Meanwhile things were congealing at speed.
We were working out how the logistics would flow, but they came on their own with little guidance. They self assembled out of sheer force of will and excitement for the project.
The six Rules of the Hotel were established as law. These are the rules by which the logic of the hotel operates. They’re the heart of the question and answer to every story. And really, as Clev pointed out at one point, they’re also just fundamental storytelling and good practice. (Clevenger’s insights are always worth reading, just so you know.)
If in doubt, if stuck on a story in the hotel, ALWAYS come back to the six rules. They’re what came down from the mount with the Prophet. Those are the operating rules of the hotel in total.
And since other people were more interested in a print anthology than a project on Substack, I went as extra as I usually do. (The hotel is mapped in my brain. I drew it out, I have it mapped. I know where various characters live or stay or prowl. It’s all in the Series Bible)
A Discord was created and curated. Authors were solicited. Rough drafts of phenomenal pieces lie dormant on my HD waiting for updates that are a year coming.
But this all happened so fast it overwhelmed all of us.
Life started to happen.
Chris had to go do his own thing for a while.
And for some stupid fuckin’ reason, I guess we vibe like that, he trusts me, he’s a really goof friend, we both had been scheming privately over the project nearly every night for months, but for whatever reason he left my dumb ass with the keys to the kingdom of the Nine Story Hotel.
And it’s 12:42, this is going to be a 2 parter. Tomorrow there will be the meat of the project, the proposal, the question, and I’ll set out on a grand plan. Because seeing what I’ve seen now, I know that this project was both ahead of its time AND would be impossible without a platform like Substack.
We were just a little early to the game.
Watch out for part two.
I hope your interest is at least piqued, especially if you’re one of the very talented and ambitious writers subscribed to me.
The second half of this will drop tomorrow, but there will be no email. Just a post. Email fatigue is real and I don’t want to clutter your inbox, especially with extra longreads.
Checkout is 1pm sharp. Because we’re civilized. No exceptions. Payment in cash or gold only.
Kiss Me Judas...wow...been a day or two...excellent
I have to read this when I’ve had more caffeine and on my laptop