Who Is Delicious Tacos? An Interview With the Internet's Favorite Author

The test of a good book is if readers enjoy it. Fuck The New York Times. I’ll take the opinion of a hundred NEETS, Incels, Simps, and Chads over a magazine run by Columbia Journalism students any day. Literature, art, was never meant to appease the opinions of the literary establishment, at least not good literature anyways. Good literature, like writer Delicious Tacos’ novel Finally, Some Good News, exists outside of the ivory tower—the place where all great works of writing, and writers, go to die. 

Delicious Tacos’ work is designed to be anti-commercial. But still, it sells.

After managing to consistently be in the top 1% of book sales year after year—Delicious Tacos is the king of the underground writing world. That's much better than being the big swinging dick at Simon and Schuster. 

Art by Alizeh Khalifa

I asked Delicious Tacos for an interview. He agreed. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Countere: Are there protests where you are in LA?

Delicious Tacos: My neighbors are completely peaceful. LA is quiet. Riots in one area don’t mean it's going to be materially different in another and a gun is nice to have in your house during these times—but it won’t help in the middle of those crowds, because there are so many other people with guns. I don't think my Ruger 10/22 can get me out of a horde of thousands of people.

It also doesn’t seem that many people are randomly getting killed during these protests. [The riots] are mostly people milling around, watching tear gas go off. People are down there to be part of it. It's historic. I feel it too. It feels like I’m missing a party. 

Some of the protests got wild. What are your thoughts on the matter?

The right will say Antifa is behind it. The left will say it’s the Proud Boys or whoever the fuck is out now. Each side will blame one another for the damage, then after a long online debate, each side will hold the other responsible. The reality is people have been quarantined for 3 months now. This is what happens when you lock people down this long—they have been living in a state of panic and fear and now want to cut loose. 

What do I feel? It's hard to feel sympathy for the shareholders of Gucci. But of course, it's a giant pain in the ass for the managers of the stores and sucks for a lot of people...but shit happens.

[How to Defend Yourself in a Riot]

I think what began as a racial justice movement now evolved to be a class struggle as well. 

Sure. But this whole “war” felt online the past 4 years—now it’s real life. What happens next, who the fuck knows? Is Black Lives Matter the Black Panthers or are they an organization of mercenary people looking to enrich themselves and get TV deals out of this? What keeps America stable is having two sides fighting and it will always be a place of two sides fighting.

Savage Spear of the Unicorn by Delicious Tacos.

Do you think English departments are dropping the ball on approaching literature?

Do they really approach literature anymore or is it just mid-century French philosophy? I think every class is 90% Foucault and three Black Panther women's essays. They don't really read literature anymore. It's completely lost. But I don't bemoan this because I don't write shit that should be taught in an English class anyway.

Fewer people will read the classics of Western Literature but at least there will be people reading with their own interpretations because it's fun—not because they are forced to do it. The books will be read in a context that isn't a prison; they will be read as they were meant to read. So let the Marxists have their classes and homework essays on Foucault.

Has 2020 been good for you given the political and social strife? Are you noticing more sales during this time of global angst?

[Laughs] What will happen is someone who does what I do in a more commercial way will go mainstream and become the new Tucker Max. But me? I don't know. I think I'm a little too niche. My old shit still feels current but maybe there is nothing timely about any of this: young men are always frustrated, people hate their jobs, people are always horny. There is something universal about it. Literature is capturing something that continues to exist across society.

How has your writing schedule changed as you have progressed over the last eight years? 

It's gotten good over time. I started posting on delicioustacos.com in 2012 but before that in 2011 wrote every day. The goal was to post every day for a year and I had another blog with posts I could cannibalize if I wasn’t feeling it for a day. I thought of myself as a lazy person but in reality, I wasn’t; I was working twelve hours a day. In retrospect, I kept to my schedule of writing before work because I need to write when I'm cogent and especially in the morning when I’m sober. Now in my old age, I’m a slacker about it. But then, I would type for a certain amount of time.

When you’re trying to post every day it's like having a late-night talk show. But if you don't have the inspiration that day, you need to pull from the world. Personally, I think topical writers are hacks and have nothing to contribute. But in the early days, I was one too. I did it too when I was blogging. 

If I’m working on a good short story, part of a novel, or good blog post, it won't just be a short time in the morning. It usually becomes a whole day on a Sunday banging it out over 4 to 6 hours of intensive writing and then 4 to 6 hours of intensive editing and sometimes it will take several days just to get one novel chapter done. 

The things I've done that were really good took a lot of dedicated work. 

You were a “secretary,” you say in one of your posts. What was that like?

Well, a Hollywood assistant, which meant I worked at a talent agency and for some production companies. The actual hours are long. You're expected to read multiple scripts every week and sometimes multiple books every week. In order to advance your career, you have to socialize and get drinks with people. So, it’s a real slog and I was writing on top of it but it didn't hurt my writing that much. But I had long periods of idleness and I kept writing the same amount regardless of my work schedule. 

What are you doing now for work?

I have a different job now that is a true 9-5 week job. So, it's mercifully better. I don't work on the weekend. Don't have to read shitty young adult books on the weekends either. I’m not spending as much time on productive work but really, it's a blessing.

What led you to start the agency gig 12 years ago?

Well, I moved to LA with a woman. At the time I had a vague idea of being a writer, or I knew my identity was a writer, so I thought I’d be a screenwriter and learn how the business worked. I wasn’t writing anything so I had to have some work that gave me an identity and was cool. I thought I had to be a part of something cool, and the Hollywood producer track is cool in most people's eyes. It was interesting. I used to love movies, but I hate them now after working there. 

But you do learn everything about them and how stories are built and broken and there is a lot of fascinating shit going around and gossip. All the Harvey Weinstein shit was known behind the scenes, so there was never a dull moment. 

The Pussy by Delicious Tacos.

Sounds like it was a boot camp for your artistic work.

Well, I was writing very anti-commercial stuff as a palette cleanser for trying to make the most commercial worst horse shit available. In my day job, I was reading generic sellout shit—people who had nothing to say just dying to write things and begging for an opportunity to do it all day. And having to read that shit, it created an inner backlash that made me want to write the opposite of that: shit that was very true and was written with no regard as to if an agent would pick it up. I also wanted my work to be unfilmable.

What I did absorb from the experience was the importance of the three-act structure. When I went to write my novel I used the three-act story structure when I had to crack a complex scene. I instinctually went back to it and it was extremely helpful. You can subvert tropes, or use tropes, drag out an act—but a scene does have to go somewhere. Every chapter of [my novel] goes somewhere.

[Scott McClanahan: The Last Great American Author]

You’ve said that you don’t want writing to be monetized. Was that sarcastic—and what do you think now that you’re in the top 1% of sales?

I used to feel that way until my writing started selling well. Now. I think writing should be as monetized, but I don't want my stuff behind a paywall. 

I will say it is gratifying now that my books pay a 2nd salary and it's a good feeling that helps me become a less miserable person, but I did this for 10 years before I started selling books and before I asked anyone for money.

People who approach this as a business opportunity will fail because writing is the least successful economic activity in the world and after doing it for 15 years it just started to pay a salary but not enough to live on yet—and I’m on my 4th book.

The publishing world is outdated.

I used to laugh at it when I had to read the announcements of Publishers Weekly every week for my job. Every agent is desperate to sell the rights to every book because that’s how they make money; no one is making a living from selling books. Selling 10,000 books is considered a huge success and that means a writer making 10 grand off a book is a huge success. It's just untenable. The publishing industry is bloated and it’s all dumb—it’s not even for big money. If you’re going to sell out, sell out hard so you can get rich and do what you want to do but then again, who knows. I don’t want to trash [book deals] too hard. The reason I don’t have one is that no one has asked—not that I don't want one.

You say people should be rich. Should writers have a second job, or stay broke and have it motivate their writing?

Now I have a good job and I have been saving money, so I’m fine now. I've got money but I’ve been broke, and neither affects my writing in any way. It affects the subject matter of my writing but not my desire to write and I don’t think external pressure to make money from a book is a good thing. I don’t think it helps anyone’s art. I don’t buy the idea of Dostoevsky chaining himself to the desk saying he needs to write a hit.

You need your art to be free from money considerations. Someone feeling money pressure and thinks the way to get out is by writing a book is probably too stupid to be a writer because writing a book is a terrible way to make money. And that’s from someone who is in the top 10% of salaries which is still in the ballpark of minimum wages.

So what made you choose the name Delicious Tacos? What is the role of an “author's” name?

Yeah, Delicious Tacos…what was I thinking? Here's what happened. Back in 2010, I was making an OkCupid profile— it was the new dating site—and I was hungover. 

I wanted a burrito and OkCupid made me choose a username so I called myself ‘delicious tacos.’ They used to have a blog built into your profile so I would start posting to be more attractive on OkCupid. It's a good name. It’s impossible to misspell. No one had it, there was no restaurant with the name and everyone liked it. It had no political connotation but yes, it is strange.

Would I write after my real name? I don’t know. I’ve been writing under Delicious Tacos for so long—that's where my audience knows to go and it's not bad, I'm not ashamed. But if I’m ever fully financially independent then sure, I will allow my face to be public and let people Google my real name and see everything I’ve said about myself is essentially true. However, until then it’s not up to me, this affects other people, and as far as fake names go, I’m blessed I happened to pick a good one.

Finally, Some Good News by Delicious Tacos.

Do you use any other drugs besides alcohol? I’m a fan of pot but don’t really drink. What else do you experiment with?

Well, I am a recovering alcoholic and drug user. Today I’m 6 years sober in AA and that's another good reason to have a fake name—I don’t think I violate the tradition. But have I done other drugs? Please. I’ve done more LSD than the Beatles, more amounts of anything you can think of, but I'm sober now, but at the end of my getting high, alcohol became the one that replaced everything. And I used to write drunk and I thought “if being sober made me a worse writer I’d drink again” but all my best writing has happened sober and it helps me become a more skilled writer. 

What is the difference between a blog and a short story? Can you break it down for me? 

I modeled my collections after Notes Of A Dirty Old Man by Bukowski. He had a weekly column in a paper in LA and most of it was a slice of life with the occasional fictional story. 

The blogs have a structure too: a beginning, middle, and end. They also need a punchline, a reason to exist. But the difference between my blogs and fiction is that my blogs are memoiristic essays and my fiction is written in the third person and less related to my life—but sometimes, for narrative convenience, the characters have the same details of my life. 

What are your thoughts on the contemporary scene of blogging?

I want to support people trying to do what I do—and not to jerk myself off—but there aren't many people who are good still doing it. Now back in the day, people would blog to get famous or make money. I started my site when that whole era was ending but funny enough, my thought when I started my blog was to get some success. But my blog quickly became a way of expressing myself. 

The written word has such a low barrier to entry. I don't follow the scene because I only want to read shit that I can aspire to and no blogger is better than me. I may be an insect in the canon of literature but as a blog, mine is the best in the world. 

Who do you read?

I read Michel Houellebecq. He does the Stephen King trick where the narrator is a lot like him and he adds fantastical elements. But the story always is grounded in reality. 

Michel Houellebecq is the best living writer but I read Vonnegut, Dideon, the usual suspects, Raymond Carver who is a genius, Nikolai Gogol, and I like some early Dostoevsky. The reason I put out my books is because the best writings are always heavy and I wanted to write something that could be read on the toilet—something that wasn’t a homework assignment and was fun to read. Whatever you think of Bukowski, his work isn't a chore and it's fun to read. You dont want to be too stupid or belaboredly intellectual, you need to be reasonably smart but also accessible and real. 

You can buy Delicious Tacos books on Amazon and follow him on Twitter.