God, can you believe there’s an update?
Well, he lives.
A voice calling from the void, and a mind to listen and a body to write.
A lot, if not most of my writing over the last year-plus has been done on my typewriter, The Dream Machine, or by hand, and I’ve really neglected the ol’ laptop here. By extension, I’ve also neglected my little corner of the Internet. Of course, there are more reasons than just being busy writing in another medium, but everyone has a life and everyone has problems and everyone has things that keep them from doing what they’d rather be doing and no one wants the details. I guess in 2022 I should be hustling on the side hustle to make the side hustle the hustle and lever the current hustle into a side hustle or non-hustle. In a broader sense, I guess work doesn’t get done unless the work gets doing, right? When I was young, my father—like many fathers, I’m sure—would say idle hands are the devil’s (devils’?) workshop; he also told me there is no rest for the wicked, so I don’t know. Whatever the case might be, here I am and here we are.
As I mentioned, the last while—let’s say six months to a year—have seen a lot of writing done the Old Fashioned Way and I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve had the chance to write a lot, and the result of the daily effort is a few little projects I’m proud of. The work is in the work or something.
Oh, and the works, you ask? Why of course I’ll share. So kind of you to ask. The titles? Here:
Coffee and Yogurt
Notebook Blues
an as-yet-to-be-named space collection
The first two I did by hand—Coffee and Yogurt on a big ol’ flipbook of lined paper, and Notebook Blues in the beautiful Confidant hardcover notebook from Baronfig—and the latter on the Dream Machine. Notebook Blues feels like it will have a lot of misses, and a lot of writing to write and a lot of hacking away at the foliage of the mind and the spirit. I think there’s going to be some good coming from it, but I don’t know how much. I’m really proud of the space collection, and I’m in the midst of the editing process there; it feels like a lot of work digging through Plague Isolation and Plague Trauma; on that same note, last night I was speaking with my partner about a favourite tv show of ours, Trying, and I asked her if 2020 was Year 1 of Plague and I was struck by how enveloping the first few years of Plague have really been, so much so to the point that the years don’t seem to matter anymore.
In a similar vein to the above works, Coffee and Yogurt feels good; I feel proud of it and am figuring out how to best birth it into the world. There’s something that feels very heavy metal about it all. I didn’t put dates on anything to start, though I have a rough idea about when I first opened the notepad up, and I made sure to note the day I finished; my brother died in May, so I have a landmark in the middle there to kind of parse out general timelines. It was fascinating to re-read everything and think about the mood and the time and the date and the place and the space and the things I would have been feeling in and around the writing of the poems. There are dreams I remember, there are experiences I can still feel, and there a feelings I am still feeling. Not too get too expositional about Coffee and Yogurt and the writing process behind it—we all have better things to do than write and read about that—but the editing process gave me a lot of time to think about some of the ideas and the concepts and the imagery and themes I was working with along the way. Some of the writing centred about monsters—hunting vampires, living as a vampire, howling at the moon, all that fun stuff—and let me re-live some of the really cool, fun, Monster Squad-vibe experiences I remember having as a youth.
LIVING AS A VAMPIRE. Wow. You caught that, too, huh? I am too full of grave romance, and that’s probably a good time to check out.
