This is the page where we post what we collect: communiques from the multiverse.
When the tape hiss drips down the AM radio at 3 AM; when you find another frequency pressed between the pages; when the flood forecast gives way to a number station that’s been dead for a decade. That’s a passageway to endless iterations of you and me and every fool we know. Welcome to the multiverse. It’s a grey place.
Train wrecks and prismatic kicks. The echo of a collapsed possibility: my own big ass nose came to me in a dream and dragged me to the end of time. Packed ash and pools of light. Big Bird with the same sad failure eyes and sad slouching mumble fuck. What follows is what we saw together, and what I could glean from reading between the pages of my worst worn books.
Forgive the aphasia, ticks and that repetitive twitch. When you “fall through” you leak the good stuff.
Time travel takes a physical toll. There’s a cognitive cost.
More to come.
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I shouldn’t have to say this, but the work on this page is fiction. Any resemblance to anyone (be it historical or public figures or your dog Biscuits who is indeed the ‘goodest boy’) is purely coincidental.
Content Warnings:
Some of the fiction on this page deals with people who are suicidal. It attempts to do so frankly and in context honestly (in that fiction is a lie that stumbles toward something true). If you don’t know what that feels like, you likely will some day. As long as you’re not a fascist? I hope you decide to stay among the living for at least a while longer. And I don’t know you, but I know the world is some bit better with you in it than without you. Please stick around.
There’s some blasphemy here, but blasphemy requires “taking things very seriously” (and not at all). I pray to a god I’m not sure exists. I’ll find out what’s what when I’m dust (again). I also don’t care if offend you on the grounds of your faith. There is nothing on this Earth that is further from being a ‘me’ problem. I respect your right to believe what you will–that part is sacred. I don’t have respect for specific sky magic and I don’t need to to be a decent human, thanks. If we’re being judged the sky magic is infinitely less important in the here and now as the how we treat the rest of creation (and one another).
There’s some language and weed consumption by fictitious characters (who are grown-ass ancient beings). If you smoke weed (or swing the doors of perception wide in any way), be grown, and have the decency to act like somebody raised you right and not drive or operate heavy machines or do shit that endangers people while high (you know this, my fellow stoner, but squares gonna be square).
Everything written here is the product of the author: Adam Mitchell. Twitter: @twitchell_adam
UPDATES/NEWS:
10-DEC-2024: That’s a good place of rest for chap 9. We’re gonna call it and press the action in 10. Look, I don’t write to a page or word limit and I refuse to do so, but 10 pages or so is usually a nice chapter nugget so that’s an informal unit of chapter. I like it for what it forces you to mytho-biblically condense. Not gonna lie, there’s delight in being like “aww but that scene would be cool to imagine!” yeah but I don’t feel like writing it and it doesn’t advance the text’s aesthetic mission so no. It’s about pacing here, right? Todd and You-You stormed the bunker. We’re expecting resolution (and you’ll have it, reader). In the capitol? I got a little narrative payoff for you. Got some “bringin’ it to a place of rest” for ya. I’m sayin it can be done in one chapter. I am one chapter away from the fifth novella I wrote after that year I didn’t die. That’s pretty cool. Thanks for reading.
9-DEC-2024: Aww man. We’re almost done with Episode/Chapter 9 of Ignatius (see nested links at the top of the page for our delightful novella(s)). The story: No, everybody in the Capitol will not be eaten by Puffins. Maybe just a few Consortium folks. As a treat. The velvet counter-coup commences almost 40 years later on Ignatius, lead by a marching band. We’re almost to Ithaca.
7-DEC-2024: A date that don’t really live in infamy no more because time doesn’t heal all wounds but it distances every kind of hurt. Here’s what’s going on in the Exile-verse: we’re gonna finish Ignatius. Chapter 9 got a little bit more to do, and I’m writing when I got the juice to do so. After, I’m going to do two things: 1) deep-sketch Morningstar on paper (we’re going to go hard opposite of Ignatius and its celebration of my island bullshitters). 2) While I’m doing that I’ll work on the “audiobook” for the trilogy: Dolores / Foundry / Endling(s). It’ll be on youtube. I don’t make money doing this and I don’t make much money. If I ever get to the “feed myself doing this” phase it’ll be bad biz but the right artistic choice for my set. If I can collaborate and save enough (ha!) to properly compensate a visual artist and get a little bound and partially illustrated thing of Dolores self-published I’ll sell it (and keep the story free to read). It’s a “tip your writer” thing, and I know I’m not likely to make money off it. But look man, catering to the whims of a paying audience murders the weird in art. Some weird don’t need to be there. A lot of the weird must be present and art, high or low wrastlin’ or opera, is going to make you fight with it. “Content” just slides down your throat. I don’t wanna make content, and I’m not ever going to make money because of that. I don’t fuckin’ care.
6-DEC-2024: Midnight Rider by the Alman brothers is one hell of a song. One more silver dollar. Don’t let ’em get ya. Join me in prayer if prayer is your way: god, come on home. Whatever we did, we don’t remember but we’re sorry. God, come on home. We don’t remember what you did, but we forgive you anyway. God, wherever the fuck you got off to, guide his feet. Keep his eye sharp and aim true. Befuddle the snitches and the jackbooted servants of evil men. Amen.
2-DEC-2024: “I’m a punk-ass bitch if I don’t write today.” Said it to myself at work today, so now it’s a rule and I have to write. I don’t make the rules (except that I do make them because this is my creative project and my website and yadda-so-on-and-forth). I just need the ‘-mine’ man–that sweet sweet dopamine. Writing like the Ignatians tell stories (bullshitting) is a fun exercise that accomplishes 2 things: 1) hits the anti-aesthetic goal for the Ignatius as book of making the narrative arc mushroom-decompose as you read it (hopefully without punishing you with joyless shit like a lot of post-modern and meta-fic did back in the day, the fucking experiment should still be fun to read), 2)makes me ‘work without a net’ and show my process in real time in a way that motivates me to finish this book (and never fuckin do such an exercise again unless it’s person to person collaborative writing… that’s different). Ok. Writing time. Finish the book. Write an after action post about book. Banish all of these posts under ‘updates’ to archives for posterity. Start new book: the one where Lucifer is the most reliable narrator you’ll encounter.
25-NOV-2024: Reader, I deceived you. I lied you you, rube. Mine is a villainous laugh. Break? Ha. I am writing right now. Every time I post about taking a break I piss myself off and end up logged right the fug back in and rolling my face on the keyboard. Gonna roll with my new creative constraint for as much of Ignatius as I can: it’s a story about bullshitters and needs to be bullshitted out. So I’m going to do that. No more “parking lot” page where we write and edit. I’m doing it on the site in real time and posting/editing as I go.
25-NOV-2024: Ignatius is in its “last third lull” where I get tired and take some kind of break-unbreak in the last 3 chapters or so. It’s happened with every other novella thus far, and I’m not worried bout it preventing completion. I’m worried about getting through the week. End of Ignatius is coming. Next project, code-named Lexicon, is already percolating in my brain. Notes have been taken on pieces of paper like we did it in the olden times. It’s the one about god and Lucifer’s breakup (they’re all the one about god and Lucifer’s breakup). Be kind to yourself. Hydrate. Be kind to others, but take no shit.
22-NOV-2024: Look, there have been a few times when I’ve been extra toasted while writing. This has lead to an evening of writing on the in-process draft. So real-time posting my draft process in motion and telling the story in real time. I do not like that, but I guess I’m doing that for Ignatius. Not ‘set pieces’ (things that have to happen for the narrative to work in the way I have laid out), but everything else. It’s dopamine trickery, writing exhilaration motivation: “aww shit dawg someone could be watching me work.” Even when I’m doing a ‘one draft and go’ exercise (because there you’re fixing and hacking and editing in motion). It’s one thing to do it, another to risk someone watching you do it. I am saved by my extremely tiny readership. Dear Reader, I do adore you. Thank you.
21-NOV-2024: Divorce is final. We are free of each other. I shall stop moping and start writing some time soon. Any minute now. Yup. Any old minute. …
18-NOV-2024: Yeah, I was trying to take a weekend break to sit here and rot. Figured I’d pop back up ready to write today. That is not the case. I have to go to a hearing to sign papers for my not-contested or controversial divorce this week, and I want to mope until that’s over. So I’m going to mope until that’s over. Apologies for apologizing because I’m not sorry. See you Friday, and happy American Thanksgiving in advance. Peace on Earth and Mercy mild and all that good shit, and NO fuggin’ x-mas music until after American (NOT Canadian) Thanksgiving. Xmas music is fucking awful (all of it).
15-NOV-2024: Rolling Chapter update for Iggy 8. It’s a proper chapter nugget now. We’re rolling. It’s a romp to the end. It is now my intention to play video games until I sleep.
13-NOV-2024: The next novella is fighting for attention in some sub-basement below a maintenance crawl-space in my brain (back by the x-mas decorations). Warhol protocol: “every picture is the only picture…” except no picture can ever truly be the “only” or your only picture (and every picture we’ve ever painted was product of the one’s we’d seen and read and heard which does not diminish the magic of creativity one lil bitty bit). So we’re going to circle back to the rupture, the rift, the breakup (relationship) that broke the universe(one) into a multiverse(many) and started the first war. Ignatius is fun, and my baby, and super serious business until it’s won and done and we get my boy and his squad to Ithaca. But when I’m done (its fuggin comin), I’m gonna do my one-trick I do really well (hopefully with some new wrinkles): zipper plot with a meta-story and one down on an iteration of Earth. Kinda my thing. Cosmology above and comedy of errors below. I find it delightful, and I hope you do as well.
11-NOV-2024: Ignatius 7: Sanguine is done and up. Gotta’ simmer the story down here along that auto-antonym trajectory from sanguine(bloody) to sanguine(peaceful). Gotta’ have the party rest while forces far greater than they move mighty as they are nigh-imperceptible. Iggy 8 has a lil’ bitty bit more of a teaser that’ll remind you what those forces are.
11-NOV-2024: Long time ago, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the month the same, the guns fell silent on the largest war in human history. The butchery stopped, and the war was referred to for a bit as the last one we’d ever fight, naively and also bravely (back when the species as a whole had a lot more of an aspirational trajectory and capacity to dream and imagine). Yeah, wanted to have a lot more writing done, but wouldn’t you know it–depression is a fickle bitch. I’ll say this, I made a week’s worth of dinner, and you’re boy gonna be able to make himself eat this week. Writing when I can. I’m trying. I fucking hate it here, where ‘here’ is Earth(REDACTED).
8-NOV-2024: Dear Reader, I sit before the keyboard and I’m just rolling my face back and forth upon it with great vigor to bring you the highest quality, most absolutely delicious narrative cakes I can bake with this sad bastard brain, these wits I’ve bent on the cold rocks of life, and what whimsy I can wring from myself like the last scrap of cactus for a thousand miles.
5-NOV-20244: Whelp. Glad I took the day off pre-emptively. I’m gonna go for a long walk and be sad. I’m gonna continue to live hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck surrounded by other working stiffs who need to keep re-learning the lesson “Just cause a slumlord promises to make things ok, doesn’t mean he can or will. In fact, he gonna fuck ya.” In any case, I’m here until I’m not. I’ll keep writing you bed-time stories for grown people about grief time and the worlds that almost ended (or ended outright and kept going). And I’ll keep letting you read them for free. And if I get good enough, I’ll keep the words free and put out lightly illustrated bound things as a treat so friends of Dolores can keep that thing on them.
5-NOV-2024: There’s another little partial chapter update for Iggy 7. Rolling updates are the challenge I set for myself. Ignatius 7 is a recollection chapter. Ignatians are bullshitters. So I gotta bullshit. I get one draft, and I’m ok with what I got and where it’s going. “Narrative now” is always a set piece (my plan for the story). I can’t get much done today with election news. So before I go be anxious, here’s a little narrative chicken nugget. You’re welcome. Hydrate. Keep your head up and your stick on the ice, eh? Hydrate? Be kind to yourself. Practice peace.
4-NOV-2024: I lied. I’m writing. I’m writing so fuckin’ hard write now. Just rollin’ my face on the keyboard, though it feel like there be razors in my guts.
4-NOV-2024: Yeah I ain’t writing today. Prolly not tomorrow either. Look man, I don’t think Ronald Turd is going to win his second term, but the fact that a man who did the capital-T-Treason is on the ballot is pretty fucked, and I’m gonna be concerned with that man until time does its work and drags his sundowning ass back to hell. “But you’re a socialist.” Yup. “Why you give a fuck about treason?” I don’t. I give a fuck about public servants honoring the commitments they make. If you want to run the government, you don’t get to rally a mob and send them to do violence to congress (which is exactly what Turd did on January 6) and then be like “JUST KIDDING GUUUUUUYS!” Yeah, I dunno man. I’m a white guy and we’re supposed to like him? (If we’re fuckin stupid as he is). Was a first gen college student. Drowning in debt from that life cul-de-sac. Don’t regret it. I use my education every day. It’s the thing that lets me distinguish between potable thought and ideological poison. Look, world is not doing ok. There’s this whole WW2.5 thing going on, don’t give power to the man most likely to start WW3 (on the backfoot) with his fucking slumlord incompetence.
31-OCT-2024: Happy Halloween with the understanding that spooky season is not tied to any one day. I’m uh gonna change the site I think. Update rants are gonna go to a trashcan page for posterity (for my own edification or keeping receipts and to keep the front page a little more crisp looking, I really hate using the word crisp as a descriptor for anything other than passing in sporting events and then only as if I am doing so ironically. Reader, it’s not ironic. I appreciate a crisply delivered pass). Iggy 7 is coming. Looking for the name of the next novella. It’s percolating. If you’re reading along with Ignatius and you’re like “fuggin fungal zombies, again?” Look, this is a different kind of fungus, and my murder Puffins are their own kind of Zeke. It’s not about the mushroom hive mind trying to conquer worlds. It’s about the full circuit and what precisely that mushroom found and experienced when it sought to incorporate the Puffin subspecies whose existing gut fauna produce LSD.
29-OCT-2024: Holy shit its done. Ignatius 6 is done and up. We know the big bad and we got 4 chapters to get You-You to a place or maybe state of being called Ithaca. It’s comin.
29-OCT-2024: I broke the “no takebacksies” rule (in spirit, not letter). I added one word to Ignatius chapter 1. I always reserve the right to hot edit those little dingleberry typos that persist in all my babies. But when I write a check on the page (promise a thing) I gotta cash the check (even and especially when I do not). This ain’t “Where’s Weirdo”, the added word is “nearly.” And believe me friend-o, Ignatius is a much better book with that one word than it otherwise would’ve been. That said, one of my things I do is write myself into corners that I planned on burrowing into. So “No Takebacksies” is still the rule, the one I will do my utmost to honor in letter and spirit (except when I fuggin’ don’t).
28-OCT-2024: Iggy 6 is mostly done? (Mostly) But Quality Control (Molly and Cooper, my cats) had the following comments on it: MOOOOOOOW. I think that means take your time and polish it? I really just need a lil’ break. I gotta white knuckle it to my paycheck. Election is next week. Yup, I’m an American (in case my troubled relationship with the metric system didn’t already tell you). I don’t tell people who to vote for, but Trump’s a fascist and if you hand one of those subhuman monsters power willingly? You’re a fucking idiot. Yeah, I’m a socialist. Nope. The Donkeys are not socialists, they’re just the option of the two available least likely to propose hunting the poor for sport. So I’ll be voting Democrat in a ‘heroic’ (read: Weimar Republic) effort to kick the can for four more years while we figure out how to organize against the -ism behind that fuckin’ gilded Turd slumlord piece of shit. Last, no matter how much what passes for the left in my country might want to make it so, this election is not a referendum on the genocide my country’s ally is actively perpetrating (but you should never shut up about it, and yeah, we should cut off armaments. If you want to behave as mass murdering animals do? Arm yourselves, that’s your stated defense policy is it not? “Self sufficiency.” Cute).
18-OCT-2024: Chapter 5 is up. Ignatius 6 teaser is a wee bit longer. Working on it in bigger chunks once I get some rest and chores in this weekend. Baking these cakes. More to come. I like the project again. Woo. I fuckin hated it during chapter five. Could ya tell? I love it again.
16-OCT-2024: Another little bitty update to Episode 5. Look, all I know is that I am tired and desire a snack. Also, I’m going to aim to push out chapter/episode 6 in bigger chunks (it’s a set piece in the narrative, Holmes, I am committed to certain things happening). The Ignatian crisis is a little “that one time” narrative annex where I invite you to head-cannon it’s resolution (if you wish).
10-OCT-2024: Here’s what’s happening. Iggy 5 is getting little kick the can chapter nuggets every whenever-I-finish them. That’s kind of writing this thing butt-nekked 1-draft-and-go. I dunno how I feel about that, except that I think it’s exhilarating as a mechanism for getting from where we are in the story to the nodes-I-know. Ithaca (ending) is not coming “out of my ass” and will be drafted to my extremely high (heh) standards. This is what life on less caffeine/nicotine is like–seeking that reward of ‘pulling it off’ because the caffeine/nicotine doses we (the royal we) want ain’t happening no more (because they are not healthy for my middle aged ass). So yeah. Rosa is going to tell us about the time the Cold War came stomping through Southern Agricultural District Float Farm G4. And I’m going to relay her story to you (I’ll do my best, but nobody tells it like you, darlin’) in true Ignatian fashion: as a bed-time story. On days when I can write, and at the points in the story where I’m writing rolling-chapters, I’ll put up little narrative nuggets. Little story dino-nuggies for my imagined audience. Ignatians are god’s own bullshitters (especially the Americans among them, or at least the Americans among them make that claim). I’ll try to do them justice.
8-OCT-2024: Oh man. Iggy-5 (Enterprise) is probably going to get a baby update tonight. It violates the Warhol Protocols of “every picture is the only picture” (but also fuck it), but I’m thinking of the thing after Ignatius. That helps me focus on this in an odd way. I’m gettin really weird w it (in terms of mental tricks for managing focus and attention). Life with normal people caffeine levels is becoming nice. Shit just takes longer, and I gotta plan sideways or the task won’t get done.
5-OCT-2024: Woo. On to Iggy 5. This episode to the end, Rosa’s kitchen gets a lot of love. If I did my job, the whole ‘visiting over coffee/soup/weed’ vibes of (rural) Ignatian culture have been established. This is the first novella where we don’t jump to EOT. The observer/reader is locked “in frame” (on one iteration of Earth). The Consortium is not. And if you know my cosmology? There are swift (in a sense) and brutal consequences for trying to tunnel sideways through the multiverse with fascistic intent. More than that, the rest of the book is the run toward Ithaca–toward home. And the woman that occupies Anticlea/Penelope roll (who spent decades unwinding the tapestry every night) carries the story (because she always fucking did). There’s that mytho-Spartan line about bringing a shield home or coming back upon it that people invested in butchness and masculinity and warrior shit like to reach for. And I’m telling you it’s not a butch hardass line so much as a plea or prayer. I don’t know if this genre has the capacity to get at that. But here we are.
30-SEPT-2024: Interstitial space references all kinds of fringe-science woo-woo deus-ex-machina short cuts through time and space, yes. But interstitial space also references the spaces between worlds and chapters and readers. You notice how most of the story here happened before or after or between chapters? Yeah, the space most-interstitial is the one between text and you and other reader where you re-tell this thing. Told y’all. My babies are many things, but they’re bed-time stories first and foremost.
30-SEPT-2024: Shakespeare is an ocean that will drown you. Shakespeare is like jazz–a body of knowledge better known to a great multitude than it will ever be to you. Jazz is lovely to listen to when one is in a Sentimental Mood, and Billy Wigglesticks is awesome to read. At the risk of someone in elbow patches smashing through my wall like the Kool-Aid man to fight me, I’m going to use Shakespeare to make a point about the institution of marriage.
Read Romeo and Juliet like a groundling. Not those kinda important people in the balcony at the globe (or the truly important people who have the theatre come to them). Nope. You are a peasant, and the play is a comedy that’s tragic. Love is for rutting peasants. It’s for the ones who wear rags “and leave their children blind.” Yeah that’s Leer, but roll w me. Marriage is for property and determining inheritence. And if there’s a serious business message in the play: love is dangerous and has no business anywhere marriage. That’s it. The thing we mis-tell as a love story isn’t a love story: its a cautionary tale to witless peasants and naive folk w middle-class “new man” aspirations about how dangerous love is in the marriage game. Marriage isn’t about love and never has been. Love was a peasant’s privilege. And I’m here trying to do the simplest kind of divorce on Earth–the kind where you aren’t fighting over property (cause there isn’t any), and there aren’t any children (just our respective cats). I’m butting my head against a stupid fucking legal structure built around property that I don’t have and we never acquired. I just want to be free of this person (and I presume she wishes to be free of me). Marriage has absolutely nothing to do with love is what I’m sayin’ (and it’s a pretty wretched institution, though many individual marriages are lovely I guess). I think I’m going to write now.
26-SEPT-2024: More of Iggy 4 is up. It’s an odd one. We’re doing island lore/history/historicity, and there’s more to come. Here’s what I’m gonna do, if the rhythm I’m in is the one I stay in: rolling chapters. I think that shits on the reading experience if episodic is your vibe, and I’m sorry for that (sincerely). But lemme give you the sales pitch, the old razzle-fuckin-dazzle: Delores is my baby. That trilogy was what I wanted to accomplish with my sad bastard fictions. Epitaph was victory lapping though I did feel like the hemorrhaging biodiesel while I was writing it (ope! Gave away my cameo). Ignatius is a setting I really love from apocrypha I want to explore, and weeks where I am struggling with writing or things other? I’ll drop what I can as I can. I can feel the typos I won’t see until I make my phone read it to me aloud. May I find them before they petrify into “well I gotta leave it” (like misspelling Carole King’s name, I’m sorry that’s my momma’s music, you don’t disrespect, but I’ve seen the typo so many times that I can’t bear to change it because I feel like a flaw “set” or “cured” in anything should remain?)
Hey. If I may be so bold: can somebody, someday laser etch the Dolores trilogy into a 5-D crystal? Forever storage and my baby lives forever in the story. You’d be writing the last word. Just sayin… Goodnight. Godspeed. Hydrate.
24-SEPT-2024: I like where Iggy 4 is going. It’s comin’ (when, I know not). I’m trying to consume normal human being amounts of caffeine and nicotine. I am that person who makes you think the venn diagram for ADHD and the -tism might actually be a circle. Consequently, I feel stupid and slow and like my brain is trying to eat itself. All good, fam. I gotta learn how to write like this. So, if there’s anything you like in Ignatius that has brought you joy? Thank you. You honor me. And I will do my best to delight you again, but I can’t do what I’ve done for all the writing on this site: act like I have no tomorrow. Yeah, the work is ‘laugh-at-the-devil’ fatalism. But full disclosure, I didn’t think I would live through Epitaph or any of the discreet texts that came before it. So yeah. I should probably act like someone who doesn’t want to die because I don’t. Sleep. Water. All that good shit that you should definitely consume and give to yourself as well. You don’t earn rest. You don’t earn hydration. You don’t earn the right to live. The Protestant Work Ethic is anti-intellectual cancer. It’s absolute fucking irredeemable garbage pushed by the same. You deserve your needs met because you are a human who is alive.
22-SEPT-2024: Baby teasers up and done for Iggy. They’re rough, raw. Not likely to be edited. They’re thumb tacks on a map. No more. No less. Ithaca does not get a teaser (cause I said so). If you’re trying to give ’em the old ‘razzle dazzle’, you don’t give away the ending (even in a genre like low-fi where the what takes backseat to the ‘how’ of it). More to come. Drink some water today, eh?
22-SEPT-2024: Trying to get some/most/all of the remaining chapter teasers for Ignatius up. It’s a weird fuggin place to be creatively. “Give the people what they want!” Yes and no. There is the escapism-as-art industry that straddles multiple mediums–including printed word and what used to be traditional publishing. And there’s the “I paid good money for…” expectation that I am very much about disabusing my readers of–because you ain’t paid me and I do not owe you. Does that piss you off? Good 🙂 If you stayed anyway, you are of my tribe and you are stubborn enough to learn. If you get offended at people who say “the customer is never right and most often a dickhead who knows nothing” I am not your guy and you should leave and never come back and never speak of my work again. If you refute and rebuke the notion that “everything is a transaction”, this work was made for you.
21-SEPT-2024: My ride lives. I not writing this weekend. I am resting and un-clenching. “But did you die?” No, but my car was Schrödinger’s transportation: either going to ‘ding’ me and make me start from 0 financially again (no worries will just kick the can of a new car and dental or medical care down the road a few years), or completely destroy my ability to feed and shelter myself. It takes a lot of energy to be a game facer. I don’t mask the -tism any more. I kinda sing out what is interesting about me and what is odd. And I am of every part of me and thus proud to be it, but I now get to hear stories about people’s non-verbal child relatives in comparison to myself. I get to hear that people like me are “like big children” from people who have only ever demonstrated they’re terrible at being adults. I get compassion too. More than a man has a right to expect. Thank you. Energy, I don’t have a ton of it. And I’ll be damned if the last decade of my life hasn’t felt like being exhaustion hunted in the way our ancestors used to run down real big and delicious game. And I’ll also be damned if I don’t walk toward the end of my life (may it be many days from today) with clothes un-crinkled and “a 20 dollar gold piece in my watch chain, so you can let all the boys know I died standing pat.”
20-SEPT-2024: Blocking for Iggy 4 is set (but not in stone, never firm and promised). Writing itch is taking backseat to that frustration anger at my machine betraying me (as she occasionally does). I got this old car. And the one truth in my fictions is that this Forge Motor Company product has indeed gone faster than C–than the speed of light (with the caveat that some super scientists have slowed light to less than 100 mph in super-cooled lab conditions). She’s also a capricious minor deity that threatens to eat my meager earnings and my ability to feed myself. See, I need the thing to get to work, and to do so long enough for me to save enough money to purchase a new car (itself already old and haunted by a gremlin). The car would be old enough to drink if it were a human (and I am absolutely certain she would if she could, heavily). I’m broke, and when you are paycheck to paycheck permanent everything that happens to you is your fault. It doesn’t matter if it is or isn’t. It’s your fault. That’s the the party line in this time and place and on this iteration of Earth (which party? All of them). This society and this economy don’t have to be this way. It’s a choice. Anyway. More writing to come, just let me get the wheels that carry me to my job tended to.
18-SEPT-2024: Wee. I can’t see. I mean I can, I’m just peaking around a visual distortion. I got migraine eye, and I’m trying to write and half-assed job hunt. I should really just go back to bed. Might poke at the chapter teasers today and Iggy 4. Will probably accomplish exactly nothing. I am very tired of treading water in a life and job where that is all that is possible. I hope you are doing better than that, and I hope your life is always better than that, Reader. Be kind to yourself, that you might be kind to others. Let cruel people drown. Sorry. I think that needs to be said sometimes.
17-SEPT-2024: Story time. No that one, it’s coming. Iggy 4. Laid out the blocking last night (and accidentally had it posted to the website as I was working…wasn’t a “let the audience watch you write” exercise, though that would be novel if I had a big enough audience, it’s just that I was roasted and the weed was good and I thought I was writing in a hold-for-editing space instead of the actual live web page).
Anyway, story time, I’m engaging in a job hunt. I would like to be pleasantly surprised by my current workplace, but I’m not holding out hope. That’s going to slow me down writing wise. This is 21st century manufacturing, and you aren’t disposable, but know you always look that way from on high. So boogie if you got to. Also, remembering how fucking awful job hunting is. I’m gonna try and hope this shit improves.
12-SEPT-2024: Ignatius 3 is done and up. Whew. Iggy 4 is the one about the Consortium: the wicked men in tight pants that seem to walk through walls and always show up at worst times in the worst places–those assholes. Plan for the rest of the novella is this: the chapter title is the outline. I have several perfectly good outlines that I have decided to destroy. I’m trying to smoke less and drink less caffeine which makes me feel slow and stupid. Shaking myself up a little bit is a way of upping and lowering the stakes of a project for me, and I think it works for this particular lil’ book. It’s a bedtime story, and we’ll sketch it out and see what happens. I hope you like some portion of the ride. Hydrate. Be kind to yourself so you might be kind to others. Don’t let the Puffins get you.
11-SEPT-2024: Sweet baby Hephaestus, the blocking for Ignatius–whole damn rest of the novella conceived-three-conceived (again and again-again) in my stupid head. It’s up. No take-backsies. There’s a few short teasers for the next few chapters (with a bit more to come as I got the gas in my literafigurative tank to make that happen). More to come. Sorry for being a grumpy dick on here. That’s no bueno man, you can’t ask the people to read your stories and then be a grumpy asshole. But like, imagine me as a green felt man that looks like he’s made out of marijuana and lives in a trash can on a street on a public broadcasting show beloved by everyone with a soul. That’s the vibe I’m aiming for when I can’t Ehor. Stay hydrated and feed your soul (especially in stupid scary no good times).
9-SEPT-2024: It’s coming. The end of Ignatius 3 and beyond. I wanna cheat out and get a solid teaser for the next chapter done. No timeline. I’m not doing that any more for this book. I’m hurting. Struggling physically in a way that makes my 9-5, which only ever pays almost enough to live (I think they all do that), a lot more energy expensive to get through day to day. So I’m going at the pace I can. If you’re a person of good will and that bums you out, I’m sorry and I promise to try my best to keep the stories coming. If you’re an asshole who demands content on a schedule? You don’t exist to me.
5-SEPT-2024: No the chapter’s not done. Yes, I feel “daddy need to make the content” pressure. No I am not ashamed. You get what you pay for, and I’m writing you stories for free, so your ass can wait. That was mean, and I’m sorry (but not really). I’m actually not nice. Not even remotely. I’m polite out in the world. Whole other topic of discussion. This is about the ’tism and my mom being one of those “nobody labels my baby” types in the 1980’s and my dad being a “oh shit if something wrong with him something wrong with my dick” kinda guy. So I’m not autistic, except oh yes the fuck I am. Fast forward to masking through an attempted career in higher ed. then secondary ed, a pandemic, and my ass crumbling like a house of fucking cards. Then add the scene to the montage where you try to let people know what to expect in a new career, and perfectly smart people without book learning who ought to know better have a “oh, my non-verbal 7 year old relative who cannot make eye contact is autistic and you don’t seem like him.” And while I want to praise your ability to identify differences, I also need you to understand the spectrum is not deep, but broad and vast. What’s different about my tribe today (as opposed to earlier points in history): we live full lives. Not a value judgement, but one of duration. I’m saying historically adults on the spectrum have a terrifyingly high suicide rate. And I’m not trying to be mean, but y’all are why. So when I get that “you ain’t welcome here” attitude from neurotypical, basic, petty ass people? My response will only ever be: I’ll be here when you’re not. Not said, but done, all politely/passive aggressively (as is my people’s way).
3-SEPT-2024: Still hanging at a not-posted chapter 3. Or is it episode 3? Who knows or gives a fuck. It’s a grimy time of year. More work comin’. Life goals: if there’s anyone who has enjoyed any of this, it would be nice to have a conversation and a libation (on me). I’m on twitter and blue sky and FB, but lockdown so eff off on that one. Keep your head up. Hydrate. Be kind to yourself for the simple reason that no one else is obligated too, and the ones who are stupid-and-petty will be vicious as par for the course.
30-AUG-2024: Happy second Labor Day. May Day is Labor Day, but if my country wants this “we gotta distinguish ourselves from the Bolshies” first Cold War relic? I’ll take the day off. Say it with me: every fucking day is Labor Day. And Labor is entitled to all it creates. I’m gonna get down to business at some point this weekend and hammer out the rest of Episode 3 of Ignatius. Long week. Had to do this industry re-cert. Weird weeks are not good writing weeks. Here’s what’s happening with the rest of Ignatius: I’m going to write it ‘butt naked’, in that I’m scrapping my outline. I’m keeping it. It’s just a physical copy. But we’re going to go episode by episode and invent the plan as we go because I find that to be fun. If I’m being honest, even the most planned of the 4 other novellas has at least 2 chapters per book where I did that. Dare you to guess which ones. I will not ever confirm or deny the corect-ness of said guesses. Happy workin’ folks xmas. Remember kids, rentiers are parasites, and capitalism is a fucking disease.
29-AUG-2024: Woke up to my ancient PS4 trying to catch on fire. It did not. Cats and me are safe, and I’m going in to work late because an industry re-certification. I am an hourly worker with a late bed time this week. When I return home, I will perform the electronics inspection autopsy that I am qualified and certified to perform on my old consumer electronic device. No more Rocket League I guess. Still working on Ignatius 3 at the pace I got in me. Mama Rosa deserves my best. She’s the whole fuckin show. Ulysses? He’s nobody. No-bah-dee.
26-AUG-2024: Just logged in to ‘poke the writing’ and almost finished Ignatius 3. Updated the teaser because that scene where Rosa peeps the chicken thief gotta pop a little better, and I believe it does. I’m broken record tired, but more so this week. It’s “being on” the socially engaged human for long periods of time that I just do not have a lot of energy for. I have a get-set-and-go job that’s about body calm and concentration. And I could find those if Lavos was mid-pocalypse. I spent a lot of time in the classroom in a previous life where the totality of life had burned me out, and so I gotta be in classes being an engaged and eager learning being, and my whole nervous system says ‘no’ to that loudly when I get home.
20-AUG-2024: Proper teaser for Ignatius 3 is up. Back on track and re-settled on the ending of the whole book. No, it’s not on the website (the good stuff, proper progress notes, is on paper and in my brain meats, only ever). My, that’s a hard sentence to transition from. In any case, baking these cakes. August has been a pain in my ass. I want my productive madman writing pace back. I’m gonna hydrate and sleep. You should be kind to yourself too.
19-AUG-2024: I’m writing about Mama Rosa, and I want to take a moment to apologize to the actual Puffins of planet Earth. Lovely little birds. Adorable critters, just the bees knees. My Puffins? Ignatian Puffins are little feathered velociraptor nightmares. Eff them.
17-AUG-2024: Writing constipation is a thing. A real thing. It’s passed (maybe). Ignatius 3 teaser is up. It’s Momma Rosa’s chapter (one of them). She loves her fuckup son, Ulysses. And to be fair to You-You, if the guy hadn’t been given a hero’s name, he might seem a bit more remarkable. But what can you do? They’re hunkered down at grandma’s float farm in a stilt-village immediately post-coup. They worked for the old regime. Wasn’t safe to do things like, I dunno, submit your child’s birth cert to a record’s office. Dad, Stefan, played a dirty trick: just called the baby Ulysses again and again again, not so much to the child, but to everyone in town–every friend, frienemy, cousin and kindred. Name stuck.
13-AUG-2024: Got a bunch of proof-I’m-broke docs to the right sources and handled my chores. I can continue to write here shortly. Woo. Ignatius 3, probably no teaser. Coming when I got it in me to bake these cakes.
12-AUG-2024: I turn 40 in two days and I’m fucking tired. And the Department of Ed. in these United States of mine is not even letting people log in to manage existing IBR plans. Let me tell you about the thing past anxiety. Anxiety is cute squirrel. Doom is a different thing. Doom is the thing you feel when the thread that holds the sword of Damocles snaps. Everything I eat has no flavor. I shit razors. And all of life is waiting for the shoe to drop. If I lose IBR, I cannot live. I can’t live under these conditions. I can’t do anything creative under these conditions. I can wait for the stroke of a judge’s pen to determine if I am the drowned or the saved. And I resent every little piss pants piece of shit who tried to make debt forgiveness a “moral hazard” issue. It’s not immoral to owe money. It’s immoral to treat debtors like servants or slaves or criminals. If there’s a god, I say this with confidence: those who want debtors squeezed disgust that being. I’m taking a break. I also know what kind of person I am, one with an off switch. So I’m planning “over the horizon” things that I will have to persist and continue to exist for. Dolores. I wanna get some illustrations going (nothin too crazy this is entirely self funded and it takes me forever to scrape cash together) and put a self published bound copy of Dolores, Foundry, Endlings (my trilogy) up for sale. My website ticker is wildly inaccurate, and I don’t think I have the audience to justify this as a business decisions (fuck those, I don’t do those anyway), but as a “see the thing in physical print with a treat for the fan(s)” (all two of ya, god bless ya). But yeah, if you’ve enjoyed anything I’ve written and you wanna come say so on twitter? If you know anyone who does visual art work on commission? Now would be a hell of a time to come holler at me on twitter. Not expected, but your boy could use the lift right now. Keep your heads up and your sticks on the ice, eh? Also, hydrate.
8-AUG-2024: Ignatius 2 is up, and we’re moving along. No teaser for 3 immediately this time. Forgive me, it’s just me, and I gotta do a bunch of extra responsible adult chores this month. Puffin facts until I’m deep enough into the chapter. Puffin facts will go into an appendix if need be. That sounds like a lot of work so probably not, but we can dream right? Good night/morning. Be kind to yourself today, eh? Life is heavy, even and especially when it’s not.
5-AUG-2024: I am working slowly and re-working. It does occur to this author that he wrote checks in Ignatius 1, large and ambitious ones that he must cash (lest he brand himself a punk ass). I’ll rise to the occasion (or fuck up trying to), but I gotta get some shit done this week. Like grown up chore handling that I am bad at. I turn 40 soon and I feel so much older than that number I sincerely did not expect to live to. I’m grateful, but sleepy. The work continues: Ignatius 2 is coming.
1-AUG-2024: Ignatius 2 rough cut is done. I gotta pretty it up a little bit. Gotta expand and expound. Gotta give ’em the old razzle dazzle. It’s coming.
29-JULY-2024: Ignatius 2: Prospero Syndrome. It’s like Stockholm but not at all. Teaser is up. We’re going back to go forward. And you love flashbacks. You know you do. Don’t even lie to me.
25-JULY-2024: Ignatius 1: You Can’t go Home is up and live. I got more to tell you about my island and my guy Ulysses.
23-JULY 2024: Edit: Fuck breaks. Every day is a writing day.
Yeah, I need a fuckin’ break. I get overwhelmed easy these days, and it’s a busy ‘get your life in order’ season. So I’m going to try to do that and not obsess over my puffins (watch me fail). Let me tell you a story: long time ago (last year actually), I talked some shit online about my student loans and what living under the sword of Damocles does to a person: makes you want to die. And a shitty person doing the sociopathic thing they do where they hurt you but pretend like they’re the good guy, the helper: “Oh my god I’m concerned for him!” They called the police and I got wellness checked. That was two deputies playing the “lets not ask him his name directly” game, and the whole damn conversation was me trying to be just my most polite self while the ‘back’ guy (the one not taking lead) stood with his body angled and his hand on his gun (even when, especially when he was smiling). Look, they were professional and polite and kind (and thank you for that, on a human level). And a cop can be all 3 of those and still decide to kill you. Cops don’t do mental health work, and if you press them into that service? They will serve the public poorly for (at least) two reasons: good faith reason is that everything looks like a nail to a man who thinks himself a hammer. Bad faith reason: they do not want to fucking deal with people’s mental health and they are armed. Sonya Massey should be alive is what I’m saying.
22-JULY 2024: Dan Landers. He’s my guy, fictional conservative politician \ pro-wrestling promoter \ mega church pastor. And he’s likely to be some combination of the three (to varying degrees of success) on all Earths with a hex-designation in my multiverse. I wrote that the weekend before the convention, and I was not expecting the pro-wrestling politics thing to be so reality-relevant. Anyway, puffins. St. Ignatius and the Puffins. I’m not micro posting. Chapters in nuggets? Fuck no. If I didn’t have a 9 to 5 to do? That would be a hell of a fun challenge and would be like writing a story in entirely lyrics/poetic fashion. Like, I don’t have two jobs in me and that’s a second job (for free). No thank you. We’re keeping it episodic. No idea when the first full episode of Ignatius is coming. I said I was going to change the website again. I lied. Reader, I lied to you. I will not change the website’s appearance or text. Actually, it’s worse: I may or I may not change the appearance of this website at a time and date of my choosing/unchoosing. Ignatius 1: You Can’t Go Home Again is coming.
22-JULY-2024: I don’t want to go to work today, me and everybody else. But I will build things, and on my breaks I shall think of puffins and the shit going down elsewhere/when on the island nation of St. Ignatius. Gotta go solder to pay the bills (almost). I’m gonna build things today, literally and figuratively.
20-JULY-2024: This is Exile. This site. My multiverse. My cosmology. It’s pastiche. A quilt composed of every other text (in the broadest sense) I’ve ever loved. But these are my characters and this work is the substance of my life. I’ve spent just about 40 years on this Earth. And this work here on this sight is the product. Sad? Maybe. But I like what I do. Every text humans have ever made is the recombination of the ingredients they encountered in life. So here’s the deal, pastiche is not an excuse to ‘bite’ work. And if you draw inspiration from this? You owe me a solid, the same I try to do for the texts I reference. Nod toward what you drew from (especially if you try to make money off that inspiration, you POS). It’s called homage, and it honors the inspiration. Biters try to hide what they take so they might take credit for anything novel. That’s a chickenshit way to make art (especially if you are trying to make money off your work, you punk-ass unimaginative thief). Also, AI is trash and if you feed my work to an AI for any reason? When this life is done. I will haunt you. Moving forward, I’m not racing biters. I’m going to describe the history of St. Ignatius from the point of view of someone returning home for a funeral and other Ignatians at a few points in its history. I’m’uh’tell you about the puffins and the cold war and the peculiarities of the place that made it impossible for assholes in imperial metropoles to subdue. And maybe a story rises from that. Maybe it don’t.
18-JULY-2024: I have ‘project hangover’, and I got it bad. Ignatius is the new thing. I’m working on it slowly. Everything on this site I’ve written so far is an exercise in semi-deliberately writing oneself into a corner. Ignatius is the next project that is an effort to do something a bit different. Everything here will remain set in the same multiverse and cosmology and is bound to what came before it. Staying episodic and low-fi (it’s baroque minimalism, pastiche, it moves with haste (if not always purpose), it aims for the emotional truth of the plot more than any kind of realism because “there’s nothing less real than realism”). But I owe the island(s) of St. Ignatius a second look. It’s a setting I visited in the apocrypha texts, the ‘one-draft-and-go’ stuff. I want to explore the place. Island nation with a peculiar geometry and a cruel history. Place is infested with puffins, a vicious little cousin of the common penguin-looking bird you know on your world. We live in shitty times, and I’m not trying to go happy and optimistic. I’m trying to allow a sober hope to breathe in a setting that tends toward the apocalyptic. Really hard to do in 2024.
16-JULY-2024: Epitaph 9 ‘Slouching Toward Something’ is done and up. The old machine and Jonah’s respective epitaphs are complete. I think it has its moments. Parson kept a world from being turned into potential energy to feed another (a thing a corrupt machine has presumably done before). She found a purpose and reason to continue (and may she do so again and again again). And Molly is lounging in a cat bed in my home being absolutely adorable (and likely dreaming of world conquest). Next book: Ignatius. I won’t ruin it for you, but I’m giving that island, the people who endure it, and the vile little sub-species of puffin that infests the place the book two of the three deserve.