I’ve put a lot of work into what is currently thirty chapters of an entire novel and while I haven’t had the time or energy to work on it since I chose to stop updating with new chapters every Saturday (or as close to every Saturday as I could get) due to WordPress dot com deciding to sell the work of its users to a company making plagiarism machines, I’m still proud of the work I’ve done. Maybe someday, when I’m more confident in my ability to protect my work as a citizen of the United States of America, I’ll go back to posting it, but until something gets done at the federal level about all these junky, shitty, and downright artless plagiarism machines, I’m disinclined to provide them with new material to scrape off the internet. But, it’s too late for these thirty chapters and I’ll continue working on the novel someday. At which point I will at least post them behind a wall of some kind (to keep out the bots) so people can continue reading and I can feel like I’ve finished something for once in my life. Someday.
Old Writing
Today’s Focus Is On The Voice Of The Author!
It has been a while since I’ve posted any new poetry, but I got in the habit of recording myself reading it after talking to my friend (and editor) about how different it feels to read a poem and to hear the author speak it. After all, the author can lend a cadence and tone to the poem that the words alone might not. Formatting is fun and you can usually suggest a lot of that stuff with the right formatting, but it is ultimately up to the reader to determine if they’ll follow the conventions of the author’s home accent and primary language or if they’ll tread off the beaten path and hear the line breaks or commas in their own unique way. Since I had a bunch of recording equipment and a little bit of experience doing rough sound editing (both from my theater facilities job in college and from recording an online D&D campaign I ran for a couple years so I wouldn’t have to take notes by hand), I decided I might as well record myself reading my poetry. Plus, reading it aloud and hearing it read back to me was a great way to find lines that weren’t working. Anyway, I hope you at least mildly enjoy the sound of my voice and some decent poetry along with it.
Today’s Focus Is On Podcasts!
I haven’t written about many podcasts (something I’m sure to rectify in the future, given that I was positive I’d written about more than four of them), but I’m incredibly fond of the ones I HAVE written about, enough so that you should go read about them right now! There’s not a lot there and it won’t take you long, but that’s okay! That’ll leave you more time to listen to two of my favorite podcasts, A More Civilized Age and Friends At The Table! There’s plenty of both for you to listen to, so you better get started!
Today’s Focus Is On Grief!
I’ll be completely honest: it feels weird to put an exclamation point at the end of that title, but I think some of my best blog writing and poetry has been about grief in the myriad shapes and forms I’ve experienced it over the last five or so years. It is a very relatable emotion since everyone loses someone eventually and while I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest I’ve tread new ground in my reflections on grief, I would suggest that this expansive emotional experience is the one I’ve developed the most healthy relationship with. While I’m recommending pretty much everything under the tag if you’re up for some writing about the various forms of grief and how we process it, often through the lens of my experiences, I’d recommend one post in particular: Grief And Personal Revisionist History. I wrote this post on the day of the previous monarch of England passed away (and, coincidentally, exactly one year to the day before I’d be attending my grandmother’s funeral) and is probably the best thing I’ve written about grief in general and how an unhealthy relationship to it and loss can warp our views of the people who have passed.
The past decade has been full of grief for a lot of people, as we’ve seen drastic changes in our country–often to the detriment of people who are already treated as less-than–as we’ve lost (and continue to lose) millions of people to a pandemic that capitalist society has deemed the acceptable price of continuing to do business, as I’ve lost the one person that made putting up with my biological family worth the effort, as I’ve grappled with my decision to separate myself from all but two members of my biological family, and as we’ve all struggled to grapple with the trauma of the last four years specifically. There’s so much to process, so much to grieve… It’s no wonder that this tag includes some of my most-read posts. If you wind up reading, I hope it brings you some solace, comfort, or food for thought.
Today’s Focus Is Creative Non-Fiction!
To start off the time that I’ll be fully away from home (rather than just preparing to leave it), I thought I’d recommend my Creative Non-Fiction category. This link also include a a sub-category I call “descriptive,” which are just bits of writing focused on describing something rather than telling a story. The descriptive bits often include stories, but not always. Sometimes I just had an experience I wanted to share or a moment I wanted to capture and the main vehicle for me doing that is via the written word. There’s plenty of 2018 and 2017 stuff that I did not look at very closely because it pains me to spend too much time contemplating my old writing, so I can’t say how good any of that is. The rest is decent, though, so I hope you enjoy yourself!