Archive

Here’s the record for me and the little fae light guys at the EOT archives of old updates to the front page. This is an effort to keep the front page of the website “crisp” and, I dare say clean:

THUS BEGINS THE UPDATES/NEWS ROLLING ARCHIVE:

4-FEB-2025: The next thing has a title. Wonders abound. I like my one word titles. Yeah well that answers the question I had “The Elysian” or just “Elysian.” The thing is called Elysian (reader, I lied to you, its actually called Unanimity).

3-FEB-2025: I get overly excited. Swear oaths and shit excited. I’m grateful to the handful of you who have read my work, but I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with this website. I would like to have a beer or a cup of coffee w someone who read this stuff (even if you hate read it). I would like to stop finding blurbs for AI written rip-off stories someone tried to sell on Amazon or some other digital-pulp shit-chute. But beggars can’t be choosers and plagiarism is what chickenshits do so here we are. Might take the site down and just dump whatever I write in the google drive (that whomever has the shared link can access). In any case, if you’ve liked any of this, now would be one hell of a time to come find me and lemme know. Not about me. It’s about the words and the work.

1-FEB-2025: Project Metropolis begins, and this is where I make my statement of ethos for this upcoming text (what it is all about and what I am all about while I author it). All the updates/news shit that was here before has been relocated/banished to the “archives” link (see above).

Yes, this next episodic novella is gonna have an actual title. No, that title will not be “Metropolis.” But the “focus image” I’m using to start the project is from Fritz Lang’s beautiful flick. The image of that big ol’ brutalist block poking at the clouds like too-eager D. Bi-plane crawling across the sky. Automobiles racing to deposit people at places and everything in the shot is in a big damn hurry to stand eternally. This is the world wrought by single most marvelous of the many inventions that poured out of the mind of one Thaddeus M. MacGuffin: the mechanical brain.

That’s the world we’re going to visit. It’s an Earth with a hexadecimal designation–because in this multiverse I depict for thee, we exist in metastasized space-time marked and tracked by a hexadecimal memory address known only to Archives and the Machine that does god’s work in their absence. Yes, this piece of work takes place in the same setting as everything else on this site, and yes it is bound the narrative choices and cosmological events I’ve already written. All of these texts are one text in the same setting.

Once we arrive, once I start writing this thing, we’ll walk through the story an episode/chapter at a time. We won’t use AI because we don’t use AI here to make art. That’s fucking abomination. “But AI artists come up with prompts…” No, “AI artists” are not artists. That’s not art. Prompting a chat bot to plagiarize for you isn’t art. Fuck off if you want to argue otherwise. You don’t have to like or respect what I (or anyone else) do/does. But “AI artist” is some fuckin’ clown show bullshit. No human should waste their time reading anything another living critter couldn’t be bothered to write.

The aesthetic here is ‘baroque minimalism’ or Zamyatin’s sketch from a moving car. Also, yes I am a socialist. Yes, our choices as a species are thus: socialism or barbarism. No, there is not a third fucking option. Frederic Jameson was a shit-stain of a man, but he was on point with “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (and no I do not give one single solitary fuck about the misquote, I got the flavor of that line right). I’m writing about life and it’s desire-in-the-doing to overflow and overgrow that which confines it: the fence and the hedge row and the gardener’s glove (and the sovereign fist inside the glove).

May the multiverse always metastasize, wild and free, forever and ever amen. May we exceed god’s half-assed ability to govern. Always and forever, amen.

30-JAN-2025: Sweet Jesus, the nic-cravings was unkind today. And then I had to do the most minor chore after work (which of course became complicated). The details, the facts, aren’t relevant. The flavor of the story is: the volume on everything irritating was very loud today, and when I had to go into a convenience store to ‘break’ a dollar into some quarters yadda yadda, I did not ask for a pack of 20 American Class A Cigarettes. Nope. And that’s a nice feeling. We’re getting there. Your boy smoked like a chimney from the age of 25 to 40, so you’ll forgive the depth of his commitment to that particular form of soft suicide. Man, if Waluigi happened to turn a bunch of tobacco execs into puddles? I would be pleased. Don’t give a fuck if my personal babysitter fed reads that. Hi, Barney Fief. In actual news: we have a first scene sketch for the new book. Again, I’m working entirely on paper like we did back in the day. I’m also just about half way through the audiobook for Foundry. It’s comin.

28-JAN-2025: Alright. We (royal we) had a setback quitting cigs this weekend. We back on it, and cravings ain’t shit. Got a plot map and rough blocking for the new book. Did it by hand on paper cause that’s how we work here. Yeah for convenience sake, I work on the website when a text is in-process, but I don’t leave ‘the precious’ dangling on the website when I’m not working a book. I just don’t. Here is one thing I do: keep the desktop on my work computer set thematically so I might contemplate what the sub-basement of my brain is composing while I do my 9-to-5 and solder and assemble the stuff and things. Well, for Ignatius it was a Puffin (the nice normal docile kind). For Morningstar it was a picture of Venus looming over the horizon, being a morning star. Now, we don’t yet have a title, but we got that shot of the big beautiful brutalist brick in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as the wallpaper on that computer. There’s a lil’ crumb for ya.

25-JAN-2025: I know my next project. Fuck yeah. Slept on it. Had the tickle-itch of an idea last night and talked it out w a friend. That shit came and found me in my dream. I’m having wild (but absolutely lovely) nic-withdrawal dreams. So here’s what we (me and my cats) are gonna do: continue to dream at EOT and I’m uh get that pen in my hand and keep that composition notebook close to sketch out a couple iterations of a plot-map. I’m gonna make myself take a different and specific-to-text approach to the next one (which is actually what I’ve done with all the writing above, even the one-draft-and-go apocrypha). Yeah. Now? We’re focused on getting the cig out my hand and keeping it out. There will be setbacks. I will fucking quit.

24-JAN-2025: What’s’ a phase 2 Novella? I don’t know even know, bro. No one knows what it means, ‘but it’s fuckin’ provocative and adds an air / aura / fart-cloud of mystery. Just fuckin w you, I need space at the top of the website to put up more projects. Morningstar is a phase 2 novella, it just gets to sit there all proud like Lucy on deck, first thing your ass see on this here website because I’m proud of it. It’s good fuckin’ work. I’m a chapter into Foundry’s audio book. Wanna do a couple more this weekend. I dunno. I also want to start something new, but I do believe I need to be a bit further into quitting cigs. I also wanna have some fucking idea what I’m starting. It can be a scene or a little vignette or a poem or something anything, but that give me a vector a trajectory a path for the narrative/un-narrative to walk. So yeah. Til I find that, I guess I’m just scribbling. Reader, if you know me really well, you’ll know this is a peak-Mitchell moment. You might remark “Yeah, that’s how that he do sometimes.” You see, I don’t miss feeling like I was about to die or off myself most of the time, but boy howdy was I creatively productive with a passionate desperation and wild abandon during that last-several-years portion of my life. Now, I’m not a fan of “suffering builds character” because suffering does not build character and the people who spew that shit are broken sadists who want to watch or inflict suffering. Suffering doesn’t make good art either. Creativity of all sorts comes from a place of surplus. And if you don’t have surplus time or resources and defy and create anyway? Awesome, except you’re robbing yourself of heartbeats and breaths breathed down the line quite often because you can’t push past limitations and deprivations forever. No one can. I’m saying I’m looking for the way I write when I don’t feel like I have to get it out before I die. There’s a way I can write and enjoy it and do what I do without feeling that, and it might take me a minute to find. I’m fine with that because this is my time, and I can do literally whatever the fuck I want with it.

23-JAN-2025: I’m in the Morningstar afterglow. I’m real proud of it, and I really hope you like it. Taste the language, baby. Now I’m gonna be organizationally anxious. I might re-menu the site to put the Dolores trilogy and the stand alone novellas (and whatever kind of goblin-text Morningstar is) as their own thing. What’s next? Fucked if I know, waiting for inspiration to strike me? Got a ton of good texts to get to (movies and some books). I’ll wanna holler back at those, and in the doing I’ll find a new portion of my pastiche-multiverse to explore-re-explore. I hope you like that too. I also started the audiobook for Foundry this morning (on a day that was trying to be no good and ultra shitty). So fuck yeah. These are dark times. Hydrate. Be kind to yourself and care for people where and when you can. Do not do or condone or speak support (even and especially with silence) for banal-evil bullshit.

22-JAN-2025: Morningstar is done and up and I don’t know what to call it. I think its 30 some pages? So long episodic short story or very short novella? Or poem that takes breaks from being a poem? It’s a sci fi gremlin built kinda like a bible-book myth? I am proud of it. I hope you like it or at least enjoy hating it. Next thing might be longer? I have no idea what the next thing is, I had a bad idea but I have mercifully scrapped it. Gonna take a break and circle back to do the poor man’s audiobook for Foundry and Endling(s). Dolores is already up on Youtube. Link is somewhere in here or you can just search “mitchell dolores audiobook” on Youtube. There ya go.

21-JAN-2025: 0 cigs smoked. Weee. Lot of coffee drank. Lots of flop-sweating, but I’ll live. Took more notes for the end of Morningstar. It’s gettin’ there. It’s comin. But here’s the thing, it’s absolutely miserable cold out right now where I am at. Miserable in the way that kills broke folks who are unlucky and/or are not careful, so I’m a little preoccupied. If I were a bettin’ man or cared to guess? I’ll be workin’ on this by end of week and will likely get the ending of Morningstar posted this coming weekend? No promises .

19-JAN-2025: I’m good. I’m good. Yeah man. 0 cigs smoked. Patch on my arm. Drove to get provisions. Drove right past one of the places I used to buy my smokes without a single itch to go get my legal-but-disastrous cigarette addiction itch scratched. Yesterday I got the rough blocking for the last chapter of Morningstar done while I smoked goodbye cigs. Today, I feel as slow and stupid as I predicted I would. So we’re just gonna have to wait together, reader. Sorry. Money and health made me do it, made me quit. I love smoking, and that’s the fuckin rub: loving something that kills you. Don’t do that. Yes, I know I sound silly talking about cigs almost like they’re the heavier substances that eat people. I am not suggesting they are, but I know for fact that people get off those big nasty poisons (and some never go back). If you gotta get free of that? I wish you strength (or better yet the wisdom to see that you are already strong enough and whole enough to get that poison the fuck out of your hand then your home then your life). Be kind to yourself. Be kind to people. Be cruel to those inanimate things that try to drown you in this life.

18-JAN-2025: I gotta get as much of the last bit of Morningstar done today, and I’m not worried bout that. I got my jaws locked on this text and I ain’t lettin’ go (cause I can’t / won’t / don’t want to). I’m also looking at one pack of smokes and a box of nic patches. I’m gonna take a break-actual-break when I finish. I don’t mind editing and polishing w out a cig in my hand, the thing-itself though? The scribbling-fugue where you fall into it? Yeah, that’s gonna elude me without smokes until I find it again. So. Goals: finish Morningstar this weekend (or get real nice and close). Then I will go back and do the audiobooks for Foundry and Endling(s) and get them up on youtube so the whole Dolores trilogy will be up. My brain will however continue to feel like its trying to knife fight the rest of me.

17-JAN-2025: Reader I lied, its ready. Did the out-loud read through and re-touched and hot edited. There’s gonna be a typo or 50 that leap up to great me tomorrow, but hey man let’s do this. Morningstar 5 is up and live. Ending coming soon as I write it.

17-JAN-2025: Whew. Morningstar 5 rough is done. I’m gonna sleep on it and give it some love and maybe cheat out on chapter 6 before I go live (episodic don’t mean unplanned it just means we kick the plan aside a lot for good and ill). It’s comin. Morningstar is a fun exercise in “half brief and twice strong.” From Dolores to today, I am giving myself not much more than 100 pages to work with (which is exactly why i let myself go baroque overboard with the words sometimes). I tried to mytho-biblically language a lot more in less than half the space. Let’s see what I got when I’m done. I’m a sleepy D00d. We’re gonna go through the shittiest parts of not smoking cigarettes this weekend in this house. That’s the not-royal we. That’s me. I’m gonna do that. I’m uh be sad.

15-JAN-2025: Throne of Blood. Kurosawa. 1957. Need to see it. This is me at peek popcorn brain cause I know I’ll re-read this a million times and lists don’t do shit if you lose the lists you make constantly. My brain on this here nicotine step down is givin’ me hard times, but the writing helps me order thought. And I work in a calm 9-5 where I got the tools and time to check re-check my work and do it right. Fortunate in those regards, cause I imagine this is what it feels like for a lot of y’all out in the world when you go on or get ADHD meds adjusted or switch script? I don’t presume to know what you’re feeling, it just feels like stories I’ve heard. The good news is that I’m writing the very brutal and most metal portion of this little song called Morningstar right now. I don’t know how good I am at cosmic/body horror, but maaaaaan is it fun to dip into. Talking to a friend who called the climax of the book plan what it was: the climax. I’m over here plotting and scheming to write off a cliff and into a coma, but she right. Morningstar is gonna be “Bible brief.” Look, I’m hostile to the version of christianity I was raised in, but I like that book (and know it at least as well as anybody trying to weaponize scripture). One of my favorite things is how Jesus or Samson or somebody has a whole decade of life in a verse or a line. Pacing. Biblical time dilation. Whatever you wanna call it. Is awesome aesthetically. I hope I wield it well. More comin’

13-JAN-2025: Oh man. I’m writing Morningstar 5 lil bits at a time here. Reader, we’re at the stage where I’m still smoking and them withdrawals are starting to bite. Fucking eh. Do not start smoking. Just fucking don’t. Let Phil and RJ fuckin’ starve and let the humble backy farmers of the world grow weed or food (IDGAF).

12-JAN-2025: I had myself a lovely little weekend amidst these dark times, and I encourage you to savor the good where you find it. I would like offer chapter/episode 4 of my current novella Morningstar for your reading consideration. Links above. More coming.

12-JAN-2025: Hi. I’m alive and writing. Morningstar 4 is up. We’re doing the Circle Liturgical. It’s a “biblical” chapter which means we’re working in god’s time frame and I can and will compress gleefully. Go back to Genesis, you got two creation stories wrapped around each other. When evil people tell you they get to interpret religious texts for you because they’re “dangerous” that’s the sort of thing they do not want you to note and start to question and pick at. When snake oil preachers and prosperity gospel pieces of shit try to get between you and your faith, they’re trying to keep you nice and fuckin’ stupid so you see your faith as validating the world as it exists. So they can burn and pillage and loot the Earth the meek are meant to inherit. Remember kids, Samson picked up a donkey’s jawbone and slew a couple hundred bad dudes and it gets maybe a few sentences in the good book. Second half of Morningstar 4 is coming. When? I know not.

7-JAN-2025: I can write without a cigarette in my hand, I just want my caffeine and nicotine cause that what brain like, right? Well, yeah nah we’re gonna do less of that and none of that. So I’m uh go slower. Morningstar 4 is coming. The EOT ones take longer to percolate. I dunno, d00d. Way it is. Chapter comin.

5-JAN-2025: Its been a hell of a weekend. I think that “the fractal” in my cosmology is a good heuristic for thinking of any kind of totality. I believe, for real and true, that self similarity in complex systems that cannot necessarily be conceived or encompassed as-a-whole is one of those things we see as “rhyme” in history or over time or across distance. I think we see people again and again-again in life, and though they be unique we see as much what and whom we want or need to see as what is actually-and-objectively before us. And when we couldn’t help before, sometimes we want to help now (and sometimes even in ways that are impossible or self-injurious). Many hands make any labor lighter, and I do believe the things we fail to do for one another in the day-to-day are things that need the resources of the many and properly crafted and maintained institutions to deliver. Working on Morningstar 4. It’s a comin. Gonna break it down for ya. Gonna take you back to the EOT and my cosmology. Will you walk the circle liturgical with me if I ask real nice?

2-JAN-2025. Yeah, nah. It’s done. I’m glad I made myself wait and read re-read, and I’m glad I was hesitant to put a chapter up on a Thursday worknight. But I just had me a break (for what little that’s worth: a chapter its worth another chapter). At some point I will indeed record the youtube free-to-listen/read audio book of Foundry and Endling (s) (doin the whole Dolores Trilogy, weee). Happy Fuckin’ New Years (again).

2-JAN-2025: Morningstar 3 rough-cut is done. Depending on how much time and effort and energy I have in general and can aim at it it could be up in next couple days or like 10 months, I don’t fuggin know. I got hit by a truck called 2020 and time hasn’t been much of a friend since. Happy New Year they tell me. Eat the rich. Om nom nom.

31-DEC-2024: Happy New Years. It’s a writing day and we’re going to Wisconsin in 2020, Milwaukee thereabouts, to tell you a little bit about a lady I know: Ethel Mason. She worked for man named Jeffe Abraxos (say the first name like you say boss in Spanish, there ya go). As always, any resemblance to figures living or dead in the real world is purely coincidental. Absolutely and purely coincidental. Morningstar 3 is coming whenever the fuck I finish it.

29-DEC-2024: Hey, here’s a trigger warning specific to Morningstar 2. My STASI guy is gonna have a bad time. Sorry to spoil, but if you have encountered my work you know he gonna have a bad time and the ‘how’ of it is what you’re here for. Well, it get a little sexual because the man is a literal surveillance pervert. STASI man is going to say no and and be in a position where he has no power. That might be hard to read. So I’m letting you know and will do so when I drop links.

27-DEC-2024: I’m supposed to be doing the youtube audiobook for Foundry and taking my time with Morningstar. In reality, I am working on Morningstar and enjoying some time off for the holiday and being lazy as a motherfucker ought to with some time off. “What is art?” I know what it is. Rhetorical question. It’s worth asking. I have a definition (socially constructed and inherited to some degree to be sure). And I’m offering my answer to the question in episodic sci-fi answer nuggets. It’s less important to answer the question “right” as it is to keep asking it. And sometimes in history, when things are boring or constipated or in crisis or flux you get answers like surrealism or dada that really push some fuckin’ boundaries. But the thing you really gotta learn to do is this: apply the logic of the question elsewhere. What is work? Ask it like a child, deliberately. And answer the same (not seeking the whole but brick-by-brick pieces of it) and answer it enough and you get a picture of what work means from/at different points in a given historical snap shot of the pol-econ. Methods methodology and practices. Once I knew a shit-stain teacher who taught a really important class, and I wish the man hadn’t been an unimaginative sadist because the bottom feeding method of assembling questions for research purposes (that he stole or inherited but did not invent) is rather lovely and powerful and important. Sadists shouldn’t be teachers. They make educating impossible and drive other teachers out of the profession, but societies that are their authoritarian/surveillance death throes really get infected with prison guard/cop mentality (whatever job one does).

26-DEC-2024: I’m liking a series of vignettes for Morningstar. We’re going to East Berlin first. Why? Cause I feel like it, and the STASI signifies. Sometimes in sci-fi you go forward to say something about the now, and sometimes you go backward to a set of idiots so stupid they’ll always signify. East Germany’s all-seeing-eye secret police are the example of authoritarian-buffoonism supreme that make every kind of surveillance pervert look as foolish as they ought to by comparison. So we go to East Berlin for Morningstar Chapter 2. It’s coming. I know not when (but your boy has some days off for these holidays and new year, so lets fuckin get it (where ‘it’ is writing getting done)). You like those nested parentheticals, don’t you? Yeah. English is a “sewer drain” language and a colonial tongue that stole a bunch of shit. The only rule that matters outside of trying to make it sound pretty (for vanity’s sake mostly) is make what you write/say intelligible (if only to a few).

25-DEC-2024: “Mr. Mitchell has ODD it seems.” My response to the team teacher: “Yeah, Mr. Mitchell doesn’t believe oppositional defiance disorder is a thing. It’s called being stubborn. Citizens in a democracy who are literate should be stubborn.” Yeah seriously though, ODD is only a disorder in an authoritarian fucking nightmare state. In a healthy functioning society it’s called being stubborn. I guess this is a book about authorship and authority and whose work “it” is where “it” is the universe. It’s Lucifer’s. People who identify with or make excuses for authority? You disgust me. And I guess some books are books and shibboleths. Lolita is one. Nabokov is a hell of a writer, and that book one hell of a shibboleth, and if you do not identify with the titular character? You done fucked up. You are fucked up. See to that, by any means necessary. Morningstar asks if you identify with the landlord or the tenant. The only correct answer is tenant. Only and ever. Eat the fucking rich.

25-DEC-2024: Merry Christmas Pottersfield. Peace on Earth and Mercy Mild (the exact opposite of the technical definition of mercy for those interested).

24-DEC-2024: Morningstar 1 is done. Yup. That’s the way this one gonna be. It’s not all meta-biblical. It’s a zipper plot that zig zags from EOT(end of time) meta to in-frame (action set on a world in time). But here’s where we are: Lucifer was the first consciousness god created (accidentally). And here’s the thing about the rest of creation. Job right? You know why god and Lucy split. Yeah that was the last straw. It started much earlier. God couldn’t make meaning. Lucifer could. God didn’t write creation. Oh, god owned the building and the IP and made the physical law. Lucifer wrote any meaningful part of the text, and god took credit. For, “lucy couldn’t have accomplished anything if I hadn’t accidentally made him.” God’s a factory owner or a rentier here or a venture capitalist. Those roles and people are scum. We don’t much care for them in this cosmology. We also don’t care for pre-revolutionary Russian literature in this household its boring and brooding and little Lord Byrons confuse that for depth. Actually fuck all national-literatures (and all nationalist use of literature art and text). It’s all part of the tapestry of man, and if you’re invested in nationalist and ethno-nationalist projects of any kind? I hope all you hold dear turns to ash before you. Amen.

23-DEC-2024: “Blasphemy requires taking things very seriously” and I take the depth of obsession of fanatics (though they will call it faith) very seriously. Goals: we (royal we, authorial we) are trying to write a book first and foremost that would make any member of the church (racist rapture cult) I was raised in pitch such a little hissy fit that they fainted like they fell out in church (but in the bad way :). Next, we’re trying to contribute in some small way to advancing low-fi as aesthetic on the page. I’m making a case that Evgeny Zamyatin’s vibes in “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters” are good for what one is trying to do. Google the essay. It’s from A Soviet Heretic but it’s floating around the general web. Go fucking read it. Do it. Google a fucking essay and read it. Yes, people write essays and there’s good stuff in them. No, they aren’t school torture devices. They’re used as torture devices in shitty curriculum that makes people feel stupid and hate literacy (by design). The paragraph where he talks about compressing “into a single second” what was a whole minute. That’s the stuff. The shit about Russian/Soviet literature was him trying to advocate for a new artistic movement under Stalin. Yeah. That ended in exile. Zamyatin’s my guy. Told Stalin to go fuck himself and lived to tell the tale. Problem is he didn’t give anti-commies a tugger in exile, so none of those shitheels told the story.

23-DEC-2024: Ring them bells that still can ring. I got one more day of work before a lil’ bitty holiday break. Let’s get this shit over with, so I can write that sexy devil (he’s not the devil).

20-DEC-2024: Announcing Exile-Coin. It’s a new innovation in crypto. See, you give Sadam Twitchell all your fuckin money (great businessman, I know the guy, we go way back), then he gonna run off into the multiverse and leave you to twist. Fuck I said the quiet part out loud. Never mind. There will never be an “Exile-coin.” Oh I read some sour-grapes pisspants shit from a content creator implying that those of us who make art and don’t charge for it are undercutting working artists who have to sell their work to live. To that author I want to say: go fuck yourself. Seriously, go fuck yourself and make your content and leave us alone. First, it doesn’t always come from a place of economic privilege. Sometimes, its generosity of spirit. In a world that makes sociopaths and little Eichmans, generosity of spirit (a profoundly human thing) can be hard to read or understand. I am broke as fuck. I am not gonna live a long life. I can either wait to make my art the way some rando bourgie fuck wants and die waiting for eyeballs. Or I can do it my way and fight to earn an audience. Fuck your way. My house. My rules. I want to make money off this some day, but what I’m going to do is this: earn my audience first (the people who know what I do, what they like, and what they are going to get from me). As for working artists selling their sweat and imagination? Pay them. Pay them well. Don’t you dare ever, not one fuckin’ time, question the price (I promise you, it’s already too low). I don’t give two shits what people who do “content” or “influence” think about a goddamn thing. Not now. Not ever. Cheers. Enjoy the free to read stories. Please give me some money when I offer a product (if you got some scratch and like what I do). Thank you.

17-DEC-2024: I’m working on teaser material for Morningstar. Here are the self-imposed rules for the text: no-takebacksies is still in effect. That matters because the teaser material I post initially might show up elsewhere/when in the story. It’s not necessarily the starting point. I’m not real-timing or one-drafting any portion of it. It’s mine and I’m taking the time I want to get what I want and need on the page. I dig Lucifer-flavored rebels. To frame it in terms of the religious stuff I was mis-raised on: Lucifer, being divine, does what Abraham should have–said no to the Author of All. I like that a lot. Defiant in the right, to the end (whatever end that may be) is a thing I got a soft spot for. Being defiant in the right is not a wrong or a disorder.

16-DEC-2024: Dear reader, I give you the ‘audiobook’ (me reading on youtube) of Dolores. Going to do the trilogy: Dolores / Foundry / Endling(s) hopefully by xmas. So you can start the year with a free audiobook near-apocalypse. Look at me, givin’ gifts.

15-DEC-2024: “All Hail King Gilla” that fucking King Gizzard metal album is awesome. I do that, my neurotype tribe does that: get told about a thing we know we’ll like and drag our feet forever before encountering the art object. That album features in the playlist for Moringstar. Most of the jams are instrumentals. It’s about establishing the vibe. Here’s where we are with that book, the ‘why’ of it and the ‘how.’ Before I was an overtaxed teacher I was a working stiff lay-minister’s son. No, do not “awww!” at that. Fuck that rapture cult. E.P. Thompson wrote this big fuckin dirt dry book about the making of the brit working class. Methodism was radical as fuck for a minute (I know, right?). Looks for a hot historical second like liberation theology by that account, Within a generation or two it goes from “god wants you to be free and equal” to “god said shovel shit for your betters, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die” (so standard Christianity in capitalist country horse shit).

I got beef with the way theology gets twisted to ideological poison. I am not invested in getting the theology “right” (it’s all sky magic to me baby). I’m invested in humanity self-consciously teaching itself to act right (without being duped). You’ll see what that means a few centuries from now. In the Dolores trilogy, we were going after sacrificial love, how its beautiful if its not coerced, but isn’t that just the thing? You all just love putting your children and others up on that altar. And you think you’re god-the-father offering the christ when you sacrifice others, but you’re really just Abraham about to stab Isaac in a fever dream. And the book of Job doesn’t teach patience, but that a capricious god can’t and doesn’t care to differentiate between the people precious to you and a replacement family.

Here’s the premise: god came here (where here is the universe that metastasized multi-versal) a refugee fleeing somewhere else and some others. Lucifer Morningstar was the first, the first thing the Author fashioned, and was there giving notes over their shoulder as god wrote the wrest of everything. The two divines had a falling out and god went on a walkabout, and Lucifer set off to see the text as the ones that live the text do. That’s the book. That’s Morningstar. Here I’m trying to attack the notion of the “personal relationship with god” because it’s stupid and narcissistic. Look, your right to your religion is sacred, the content of those beliefs is not. And a grain of sand on a beach with more beaches (worlds) than grains of sand on Earth’s most modest beach calling god up to have a chat is absurd. It’s beautiful to think god loves you, it’s sociopathic narcissism to think god’s gonna help your sports bets go the way they need to.

Rant done. I’m gonna go record the first chapter of the Dolores audiobook. Youtube link to come (prolly going to get the whole book done before I post it)? Hydrate. Be nice to yourself and other living critters.

13-DEC-2024: Ignatius is done and up (links to each novella at the top of the page). There will be hot edits but no takebacksies. Next project Morningstar. It’s coming. Opposite of Ignatius. I take my time and it goes up when its ready. Episodic? Yes. But I get to take my time cause I say so. In the mean time I’m-a-gonna do the free audiobook of the Dolores Trilogy on Youtube. Woo. Maybe one more post about what I like and don’t about Ignatius and the experience, then I’m going to banish all updates to the archives for posterity and start a fresh home-page slate for the next project(s). Thats what we do here. Thanks for reading and be nice to yourself and hydrate and rest and all that good stuff.

12-DEC-20244: We are spittin’ distance from done w the book Ignatius is almost there. Just gotta wrap it up and give it the prologue treatment. Prologue haters, I see you and with books bible thick and dust dry? Fuck yeah, I don’t give a fuck about your prologue. I thought the book was done thirty pages ago. If you think that about my work? I done fucked up, or I am not your cup of tea. Epilogues and Prologues (named or unnamed) are absolutely essential to Low-fi as-genre as I conceive of it. In any case, it’s coming. Not tonight, got other commitments. But soon: Ignatius will be done, Morningstar will have a nice teaser by xmas (hopefully, I am not promising shit), and I can start the Dolores poor-man’s-audio-book (for the youtubes).

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.

14-JULY-2024: Epitaph 8 ‘Tough Ghost’ is done-and-up. It’s the penultimate. One more. Gotta tell ya what happens to Jonah’s World(s).

13-JULY-2024: Epitaph 8 ‘Tough Ghost’ is actually done, and I’m taking my time because it’s hot and I’m lazy and emulating my cats on this Saturday. I have this bad habit of wanting to caffeinate and plow like I’m grading a pile of papers or still a young graduate student or some shit that I have not been in some time. And I like to stop and smell the roses because I feel older than I am. Month our from 40 years on this ball of dirt, and I’d like to savor the time. So I’m slow-cooking my work. Epitaph 8, still aiming for end of weekend so I can polish it and make sure it aims into 9 (ending proper). The circle liturgical matters here to me as does the spirograph ending up somewhere other than where it started.

11-JULY-2024: Technically I’m still taking a day off if I just type up the stuff I composed on my smoke break at work.

11-JULY-2024: Epitaph’s blocking is done. Torching the plan for a text half way through? I highly recommend it. High-pressure way to get to what you really wanted to say and do. Epitaph 8 and maybe-an-epilogue are coming. Aiming for this weekend (or end of)? There’s that great scene in Chrono Trigger where the heroes go to the ruined future and (try to) help. They say something to the effect of “you know so you all can be healthy…” “Heal-thy?” Yeah, healthy people take breaks and don’t try to work themselves to death. They rest. They loafe and lean and “invite the soul” while inspecting spears of summer grass. Do like Papa Walt told you and chill. That’s what I’m gonna do today. If you’re waiting? Man, that just tickles me. Thank you for givin’ a hoot, eh? I appreciate you. And I feel like I owe you the quality that comes with eating and hydration and proper rest breaks. Parson is wittier than me, and if I’m gonna write her right? I’m’uh’need a day to collect myself (i.e. be lazy and play video games).

9-JULY-2024: Epitaph 8 is actually ‘Tough Ghost, and 9 will be something (or maybe an epilogue). This chapter is rough cut and now that I typed that watch it fall apart and restart a bunch of times. In any case. It’s coming. End of the book is comin.’

6-JULY-2024: Epitaph 8: ‘Slouching Toward Something’ is coming. I’m taking my time this weekend. We’re two (maybe 3 but I doubt it) chapters out from the end of Epitaph. I feel kinda good about this one, and I think I like the change to the cosmology I’m making at the end of it. You reader, you probably know the ‘what’ of the ending as well as I do at this point, but if you are here reading this thing? First: Thank you from the bottom of my shriveled little heart (you should share these stories with a friend, a weird friend). Second: you’re probably the kind of person who knows that the “how of it” is always more interesting than what happens. Thanks for reading. It’s a big multiverse, and there’s an ever-proliferating number of stories to tell. Free to read forever. I will never use AI. I write about AI. And I take a post-humanist approach to it: “sentience is an embodied concept” (I think that’s Lackhoff, but it’s not a unique sentiment). What I’m saying is: a brain-in-a-jar is what any kind of sentient or semi-sentient AI would be, and that without the metronome-circuit (heart and lungs) and a ‘leaking creaking’ body that makes demands of us and tethers us to something we call the real, that brain would be born mad (or go mad quite quickly). I think if we’re made “in gods image”? That’s the single greatest reason to urgently re-think our desire for artificial intelligence. But that’s an amps-to-11 extreme scenario. The real of it? Our broken approximation of cunning (not intellect, never intellect) that we call AI will continue to do what it does: aggregate, guess-and-check-group-think at high speed and ever greater scale. And it won’t do much more than fail spectacularly while driving down people’s wages and doing some enclosure-ing and “primitive accumulation”-ing of people’s ideas. I guess what I’m saying is: fuck AI.

3-JULY-2024: Epitaph 7 ‘No Mulligans’ is up and live. My actual cat Molly was very into my using her as a character. Editing out-loud is a me thing, and if I ever accidentally write anything pretty or that has any music in it, that’s probably why. So that meant saying “Molly” in a very “dramatic reading” kind of way more often than I normally do as I read-and-re-worked the chapter. That meant a lof of a tiny spicy cat leaping at me and climbing up to perch on me. I’m saying it was the best week ever. Molly in reality is quite spicy, and I’m sure she’d be brilliant in the strategic realm (if fate gave her the chance). But is she murderous? Nope. She’s definitely not laying low until the heat dies down on a parallel Earth. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Turns out god’s machine is the big bad that did the hubris. Let’s see what happens: Epitaph 8 “Oh shit it needs a name” is coming soon.

1-JULY-2024: Epitaph 7 ‘No Mulligans.’ Is rough rough done (and that’s a lie because it’s gonna be pages past pages longer and I’m cutting a chunk). I am just tired and exhausted and everything is taking so much longer than it used to. I’m not really an old timer, I’m a month out from my 40th. But goddamn. It’s a short work week, with a weird island of a day off. Regardless of how my afterwork ‘roll-face-on-keyboard’ sessions go, I’ll get some proper writing (read: singing Sinatra with Cooper and Molly, both of whom are cats) done then.

25-JUNE-2024: Epitaph 6 ‘Clever Girl’ is up. Chapter 7: “No Mulligans” is coming. I’m’uh’finish this one soon or die trying. You reader, I think that you should be kind to yourself so that you might be kind to others. I also think that I am so very tired. From the EOT to thee, where and whenever that be.

24-JUNE-2024: Took a break this weekend because I can and I felt like it. Back to it. Fuck I’m broke. And no my day job does not pay a great living. It pays almost enough to live, which is better than a lot of people. Not where this is going. I’m just using that to say this: I’m still glad I didn’t try to sell Dolores-and-friends. First, everybody deserves the free-est access to stories. Good ones. Well, ones that are trying to do good things mightily. Second, “I like it but what if…” No. “People want escapism in dark times…” No the fuck they don’t. Well, they do, but ‘escapism’ has never meant what you were taught to think it means. In other news, Epitaph ends with a (hopefully) major change to the cosmology I write and work in. When that happens, whenever we make a mighty change in the cosmology? We’re going to change the site’s front page. And there’s a chance for a little collaborative poetry (something in the spirit of a Renga). I’ll lay down a line, and if people want to contribute? They’re welcome to (will give credit to your name/handle/whatever I know you as). We’ll see.

23-JUNE-2024: Let’s play a game. It’s called can you find all the easter eggs in these texts that point to the source-inspiration? Because I can’t find them all, and I wrote this mess. Here’s a moment that gave me chills: somebody posted a clip from Fallen(1998) (a slow-burn brilliant scary movie 3 years after my ur-text video game: Chrono Trigger). I saw that movie as a young dude in its moments (and it temporarily ruined an Irma Thomas song in the same way Reservoir Dogs ruined a song). Fast forward 20-something-years, and Irma is in my heavy rotation alongside the video game music and soundtracks I’m playing in the background while I write Dolores. If you’ve got the time, go watch that flick and find the “what does it all mean?” conversation and you’ll find the seed of inspiration for my breezy little novella (though I knew it not). And that’s what we’re always drawing from when we tell stories: the Jungian collective-semi-conscious network of narrative nuggets that belong to all humanity (the real and honest library of babel). But that’s just it, that’s my AI beef. AI as it stands is an aggregator. It takes humanity’s collective heritage (the bounty of stories and art owned by the whole human race) and it builds a fence around it even as it mangles what it aggregates. It’s about capitalist enclosure. It’s about building tech-bro fences around things that belong to all of us.

20-JUNE-2024: Epitaph 5 “The Cat that Would Conquer the World” is up, and I’d like to thank my co-author Molly the goblin-ass kitten for her assistance. Chapter 6 “Clever Girl” and Chapter 7 “Shit-where’d-that-post-it-go” is in process. So yeah, Epitaph feels good. It’s fun. It’s weird. It’s a breezy little snack, if I do say so myself. And it’s a transitional text for my goofy ass little cosmology. Epitaph is the one about skinny-lil-Jonah; epitaph is the one about my Parson. As below, so above: something stinky going on with god’s mediocre machine. The Preacher that dodged the pillar of salt will no doubt endeavor to figure it out.

14-JUNE-2024: Epitaph 4 “Jonah Steals an MRI Machine” is up. “The Cat that Would Conquer the World” is coming (as is the intersection of the Parson and Jonah’s narratives, or maybe that already happened and you just didn’t notice dear reader). I’m baking these cakes. More to come. Trying to write this novella in 1/3 and take a short-break chunks. We’ll see if I stick to that.

11-JUNE-2024: Epitaph 3 is up. I’m so effin tired. Next several chapters are blocked and partially scribbled. First third of the new breezy lil low-fi novella Epitaph is done. Posted here. Free to read. Aiming to honor the exile-aesthetic law of liturgical repetition and self-reference in my cyclical multiverse while still advancing the plot (and by the end of this text) advancing the cosmology. The goal is to work (roughly) in thirds. I need a baby break. I won’t honor that, I’m in a groove and I want/need to keep working on Epitaph. I’m also very good at burning out. So yeah. Baby break. More to come. When? I know not.

6-JUNE-2024(Edit: i effed up the date I think this was posted on June 9 or 10?): Epitaph 2: The consolation of Jonah is up and live. I like my little dying dickhead scientist. I know him a little better than you. Not an A series. He doesn’t look like me. He can math way better. He really does mean well, and in his prime I think he would have handled his interlocuter a little better. Lady Philosophy they ain’t, nah mean? Planned to get chapters 2 and 3 up at the same time. I didn’t wanna leave it on a bleak note, but meh we do what we can do when we can do it in this house. Some days I feel burnout-free. I feel my oats. And I do things like start a new book and outline it. Next week? I wanna crawl into a dune to desiccate. Is what it is. More to come. Remember, kids: all narrators are unreliable, especially the reliable ones.

4-JUNE-2024: Epitaph one is up and live. It’s just a lil’ prologue snack while I bake the rest of these cakes. Episodic and odd from some other iteration of me in the multiverse to you. Next chapter is rough roughed. Third chapter is blocked, and in surprisingly good shape conceptually for my having utterly torched my plan for the story already. We’re writing this thing, so help me the mediocre machine that does god’s work in their unending absence.

3-JUNE-2024: Epitaph rough-rough’s for epilogue and first chapter done. Finish and edit. No idea how long that will take but maybe end of the week/weekend. I dunno man, I’m just rolling my face on the keyboard screaming “sing in me muse that I might tell the story of the fuckup that faired better than me in all things.”

2-JUNE-2024: Happy Pride. That’s cool. Be cool to people. Except bigots. Be shitty to them if they can’t act right. I am really tired. And I am trying to get Epitaph ready. I also really love Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism and “Exiting the Vampire Castle”). I also don’t love how people parade dead people around. I feel doomed. So if I don’t finish Epitaph and someone tries to? No. They do not have my permission. If someone tries to post-facto take credit for Dolores? No they didn’t. I did all this alone in really shitty isolation. And I could see people reading it, I could see evidence it had been read, but I couldn’t get any feedback. Couldn’t find anyone to have a conversation about it. It’s vain, I know. It’s silly. I guess that’s the cost of doing something free? The presumption that it took no effort or wasn’t worth anything (or obviously you would’ve charged for it) and must not have meant anything to the person who lived its making. I seriously had a few “yo, my broke ass will pay you and then buy you a beer or coffee to tell me what you thought.” Nothing. Which is it’s own answer. Meh. I hate that scene in Back to the Future where they give a white boy credit for inspiring Chuck Berry. That is some Regan era nightmare shit. But I’m going to steal that line: “Your kids are gonna love it.” If I get any of Epitaph up, and if it’s not done. Nobody has my permission to finish it (because nobody helped in the first place, and I wouldn’t have let anyone). You can write the rest in your head and tell it as a bed time story. No-take-backsies though.

31-MAY-2024: So, I’m really trying to at least get the start of Epitaph up, the consolation of Jonah(hex-i-can’t-remember) and the prologue (the Parson of apocrypha). I’m struggling. It’s not the writing. It’s me. Health, right? Yeah people who say “health is wealth” should shut the fuck up. Not trying to be mean, but that’s a “chicken-egg.” Maintaining health costs money, and they’re just saying what some influencer or boss said that sounded cool and “hard workey.” So no, health is not wealth. Health, every sense of the word, suffers most mightily when one doesn’t have wealth. So there’s that. But yeah, book is coming. And I can’t shake feeling doomed. Axe bout to fall doomed. Sword of Damocles doom. It’s dumb and a byproduct of living life like a clenched fist for too long. But here’s the deal. If I may be so bold, and if I’m not around any more and anyone tries to claim the Dolores trilogy? Don’t let ’em. I did it alone. No AI. It’s pastiche. It’s the Pokey Little Puppy’s quilt put back together, little threads of everything I’ve ever loved. It’s new-not-new, but in that way that every other story you’ve ever heard isn’t new. Kinda bummed. I see that people have read it, but no one really wants to talk to me about it. *shrug* what can one do? In any case. Be kind to yourself and anyone who isn’t hurting anyone else. Keep your head up and stick on the ice.

29-MAY-2024: Break over. I’m going at a more human pace now. Epitaph. It’s the new project. First two chapters are rough cut done but need a lotta love. I’m thinking shorter chapters for a quicker turn around. Same multi-verse. Dolores was Dee’s book. Foundry is Jane and Glenn’s. Endling(s) belongs to Blue. This book belongs to my Parson. A series Universalist Unitarian minister “from a world where the you-you’s are a low key big deal.” Things in her US on her world go theocratic quite quickly, and she boogies to the EOT. She’s the founder and the Shepard of the Church Ethereal. It’s aeons past aeons later, and she’s hurting. That’s when beings at the EOT long to go’on pil-greh-mah-jes. The meta-book is her journey to the archives for inspiration and a failed draft of the sermon she’s trying to write. We’ll see if any of the above sticks. Here’s the deal: I’ll draft it to my satisfaction (but really nothing’s getting more than 2), but the thing is going to be episodic and as in-rhythm as I can make it (as a bed time story ought to be). No take backsies. No matter how much I might regret a narrative choice later? If I put it on the site, It’s canon. It’s always free to read. Though maybe someday if more than five or six of you like this stuff I might find a way to produce a nice little bound book with even fewer typos and some visual artistic interpretations of this multiverse (or pomegranate if you prefer). So you know, you could give me money and I could give you a thing you can’t get by coming to the website. Base commerce is gross, but your comrade gotta eat.

15-MAY-2024: Still on a break I guess? Wrote the intro to a Jonah book (different iteration of Jonah). It’s an outline. It’s too bleak, and I like ’em bleak. I feel doomed. I also own this website for a few more years. The Dolores trilogy will be here even if I’m not. There’s a Google drive with .pdfs of the books and whatever else I put in there. If the link finds its way to you, that’s an implied vouch (you got the link because you aren’t a shitheel). I don’t know what I’m trying to say except thanks to the couple of people who read my shit, and I hope it makes you permanently weird (as any good story should). There will be more writing, though I know not when. I don’t know if that last sentence is a lie or not.

9-APR-2024: Writing, slowly. On Blasphemy: it “requires taking things very seriously” (that’s Hayles). I try to be rational about the fact that I am a superstitious being come from superstitious beings. We’re all children of the Enlightenment and signifying primates who get freaked out about sky magic. We’re both at the same time.

I’m not religious. At all. But I was born into a sect where god was the disciplinary tool, the behavioral cudgel and “always watching” And oh man, the invention of language, of “speaking in tongues” and trying for the most godly display. It was that Reagan Evangelical mess, and I mention Reagan because that’s the moment that form of religiosity metastasized into something that today is so very fascistic.

The thing I take seriously is god-as-weapon or mechanism of social control (think Ideological and/or Repressive State Apparatuses). I’m concerned with god as a tool used by snake oil preachers (don’t care what sect) to keep people in line. I’m concerned with any kind of human who wants power or dominion over other sentient beings.

But I am not a serious man, and damn proud to be the whimsical bitch that I am. I’m not a theologian, and I don’t want to be. But I articulated what I believe in the silliest way possible: a sci-fi trilogy. I think if there’s a god they’re dead or they’ve left us. And if that bothers you, be bothered and go in peace, I guess? More than that, I think the creation has the right and responsibility to interrogate creation and creator. That’s not hubris. It’s defiance. The latter is a good and noble thing in the right contexts (such as this one). God doesn’t give a shit about cursing and mocking church authority or smoking weed or fucking other consenting grown up people. God cares about sadism and slavery and genocide and ecocide (if they are there to give a shit at all). To blaspheme in fiction is, in some small way, an attempt to cast stones at “Earthly authority”: vicious people who use god to justify their shit-ass behavior toward the rest of creation. Beware people who call for submission to god-as-parent–that’s that fascist infantalism of grown-ass-people.

30-MAR-2024: On a break. Taking short story and maybe-next-novella notes on paper to see what sticks or gets me goin’. “Exile” is the cosmology, and I like the multiverse I built. I could (and intend to) spend the rest of my days populating it with worlds and stories about probability collapse-congealing to actual people and things. I started this site and the one-draft-and-go stuff (the apocrypha) as an exercise in “this is better than dying.” The Dolores trilogy is an extension of that and an effort to do a story both episodically and with a ‘no-take-backsies’ rule. It’s a three book bed time story where I plotted major points and forced myself to improvise and write against them (and to live with what I committed to the page). I’m glad I did it. I’m reclusive, and if loneliness can be corrosive, I dig my solitude. I’ve got goodhearted and well-intentioned people who, from arm’s length, are like “ok so what are you going to DO with your writing?” As if this has to be shopped to publishers or self-published to justify the amount of time I spend on it (my god the man eats all his 2nd job/side hustle time with writing sci-fi almost no one reads). I already did something with my writing. I put it up here. There’s also a google drive where I “keep receipts”, and those with the link are always welcome to read whatever I put in there. Everything on this site will always be available and free to read, but never free to steal. It’s pastiche anyway (in the way I would argue every story we tell in modernity always-already is). When I was trying to do academic shit, half-assedly as I did try, I had people I thought were friends steal from me even as they clowned on me. I don’t trust anyone enough to work with them. It is what it is. Human beings are wonderful and terrible in equal measure. Beneath our manufactured nature–beneath all the dumb, superstitious and witless viciousness that social institutions under capitalism cultivate–is the vulnerable, curious signifying mud worthy of love and admiration. I’m likely going to keep “giving it away for free”: my Kilgore Trout-esque search for the latter. And how much I can do to keep people from biting? Eh, I’m not sure. But when you want the genuine article and not some AI-shuffled garbage a human couldn’t be bothered to craft? Come get your low-fi sci-fi from me.

16-MAR-2024: Endling(s) 8 and 9 are live. I guess elements of the ending are indeterminate. I started Dolores in April 2023. The trilogy is three novellas written on the back of the Exile/Apocrypha stuff. They’re not “one draft and go” like Exile was, but the “no take-backsies” was in effect. Everything was episodic and any idea put on paper had to be honored in the text. I love Dolores and Jack and Blue (and all the Spock-to-pusses that doubtless populate the firmament). Writing a Kilgore Trout meets Zamyatin trainwreck low-fi trilogy was a thing I started as an alternative to crawling under the porch and dying. Sorry for the melodrama, but that’s the long and short. Now, I’m going to take a break and fish the infinite typos and do the free-to-hear audiobooks chapter by chapter for Youtube. And maybe this thing gets self-published through a conduit without exclusivity so that if you enjoyed it and want to throw a few dollars in the offering plate (to get a bound book with these words and the work of visual artists actually compensated)? You could. After that? I have a nice little multiverse to play in, and there’s always another story to tell re-tell. Oh yeah, pastiche is art. Frederic Jameson can kiss my ass.

8-MAR-2024: Endling(s) 7 is up and live. We’re almost done one-and-a-half chapters left. I’m taking a bath and willing my beard to re-gro. I’m going to re-play Chrono Trigger maybe, bummed to hear that the dude who did the art for one of the greatest games ever made is no longer with us. Hell of a game. Rocked me as a kid.

7-MAR-2024: Endling(s) 7 is done. Going to do some editing and light work on it tomorrow and get it up this weekend. One or two more chapters left to go.

29-FEB-2024: Endling(s) 7 is coming. Who the fug knows when. I’m going slower because that’s the speed this part of the book goes. I’m crawling into the bathtub like it’s weird sister’s cauldron to soak and write.

23-FEB-2024: Endling(s) 6 is up. The author shall retire to the bathtub like Lebowski. There, I’ll make my phone read the thing aloud and fish typos later. Socialist Cephalopods mount an aid mission. A super-Earth sized hive mind hell ship (All is Gary;Gary is all) is coming for Earth–where they just can’t stop trying to kill Dolores (bless their hearts).

19-FEB-2024: Now I’m taking my time. Endling(s) 6 is half way there. Taking my time to try and shape the ending right. Also, I’m tired.

13-FEB-2024: I lied on the taking my time. Endling(s) 5 is up. Probably going to need some rest. But the table is set for the rest of the story and the grand finale and the end of the trilogy. I love Dee, I don’t want to see the thing done (the story). Time and narrative time are both relentless in equal-and-opposite ways. As always, no-takebacksies is in effect. Narrative decisions are final. More to come.

13-FEB-2024: Endling(s) 5 is done. Editing as I can. Work full time at a job that pays almost enough to live. And if I can get OT I have to. I had this weird moment last night after I finished the chapter, this 32nd wind for thirty seconds. I could smell, like my sharp sense of smell I used to have. It was beautifully quiet except for Sinatra and the cats. That’s a rarity, and I hope that feeling visits you, wherever you are, and lives with you like it loves you. I hope you and that feeling have long, lazy days. I’m the kind of tired when the stupidest shit weighs a ton. I love soldering. I used to teach writing. Now I write in metal. Then I come home and write till I corpse sleep. It’s the kind of tired where that little dopamine burst from “goddamn look at fillet” moment where you’re like “Hephaestus blessed these fuckin’ hands” to the brutal realization it doesn’t matter that Hephaestus blessed these hands if I’m crawling into every fucking paycheck with next to nothing for the rest of my days. Hey man, I’ll have enough in the HSA to see a doctor in 2025 though. This is my year, y’all. It’s everybody’s year. Stay hydrated. Love yourself. Eat the rich. Just fuckin’ gobble them up.

10-FEB-2024: It’s always mid-story when the thing takes on its own momentum and I fall into the process of making it. That seems to be where we are with Endling(s). I love Leonard Cohen, and if I knew you I would make the case that you should too. This is the book that rings what bells can still ring. And the Keppler stuff is “on the nose”, but I’m fine with it because I think some things work, story-wise, by being moved from a familiar setting (Earth) to a purely imagined one (Keppler). Who is the endling is the question supposed to hang over the text? And if I do my job well, you’ll know but doubt the answer till the epilogue’s done. And the religious stuff. I don’t wanna end with “god loves you” or “god has utterly abandoned you” or “so it goes” existentialism (that’s really nihilism). I think I need to reiterate this point: sacrificial love is a wicked and destructive thing. And if you’re the kind that would refuse to put Isaac on the altar because sky magic demanded it? You are of my tribe.

8-FEB-2024: Endlings(4) is up. This one went quick because mid-story is where it gains momentum. He looked upon his works, the cephalopod-dance-battle, and wept for it was good in that deranged way we aim for on this site. Rushed the editing which means I will pay the cost of so many more typos fished out after work and over the weekend. Sisyphus gonna’ Sisyphus. Stay hydrated and treat yourself as a friend.

1-FEB-2024: Endlings(3), did the thing where I make my phone read it to me while I’m working at the job I do to live. Chapter still live, but with at least 70% fewer typos. Who has two thumbs and a broken brain that’s getting it’s editing capacity back? Perhaps but probably not this guy. Endling(s) 4 and beyond is coming just as soon as I can bake those cakes. I know the ending. I don’t like my ending (but it’s right for book and trilogy). It’s either going to take more than 10 chapters or just perhaps longer chapters to do the thing, and this is because I’m going to continue to fight with the ending I wrote (on paper and only on paper). You got three planets, and now HVAC is involved. And if low-fi is about the blurry sketch as you pass the thing? (It is). Some things still deserve to be slow cooked–given the time and space they need.

31-JAN-2024: Endlings(3) is up. So fucking tired. We’re into the meat of the story. Every time I edited the damn thing, I extended. We’re gonna continue to get weird with it. I wrote the ending on a scrap of paper in my home. I’m arguing against it and fighting it and I want to tie in and proper-say-goodbye to some characters from Exile (the one draft apocrypha shit). I’m sure it’s got typos in it. I do editing passes when I get stuck and fish them out and make new ones. And its fucking awful. Ever since I stopped teaching? My brain refuses to “grade” writing and editing is exponentially harder. And some of the typos? Like misspelling Carole King’s name in the Exile stuff? I dunno man, at this point I’ve made note of it so many times, I can’t bear to change the error :/ In any case, gripe about the typos, but if you get really huffy? Hon, it’s free to read and I’m a one man band w a working stiff gig. I’ll get ’em eventually (or I won’t). I don’t always pull off the “patter dialogue” (Who the fuck is talking to whooooooom?!?! Dude, read it out loud). But I’m trying to build in the “pedagogical element” by which a book teaches you how it wants to be read. I dunno if I’m a good enough writer to pull that off. You decide. Typos aside, I hope you enjoy my baby, weirdo. Be kind to yourself. Even tardigrades need to hydrate. More to come (I hope).

28-JAN-2024: Endlings(3) is pretty much done and just needs some editing love. Lost a whole weekend of writing to exhaustion and bad physical and mental health. I’m not ok, and I don’t know that I’m going to ever be again. It’s ok. It’s not, but I can’t do anything about it. Hey man, I have a HSA (healthcare savings account). So if I live a few more years? I might get to see a doctor once or twice. The key is deciding whether it’s the MD or a shrink or if I just save the cash and go to the dentist. Choices, y’all. Here’s the other thing because I feel doomed and morbid: if I die? If Endlings(3) is not done? You do not have my permission to finish it. Leave it undone or I haunt you. You also do not ever have my permission to put my words through AI for any reason. That shit is fucking creative abomination. No human should ever waste time on words another human couldn’t be bothered to think or dream or write. AI exists to eliminate toil. The people who want to automate creativity? They’re subhuman garbage who want to steal creativity because god didn’t bless them with an inner light and they’re bitter about it.

18-JAN-2024: Endling(s) 2 is up. Fuck this week. Chapter 3 will likely take a bit longer. Also working on the youtube audiobooks for Dolores and Foundry. Those might be a while too. I move at the speed I’m capable of: the speed of a motherfucker who gets paid almost enough to live and whose body has decided it doesn’t like him any more.

18-JAN-2024: Had a really rough week physically. Endling(s) 2 has been ‘done’ for days, but it needs a little more love and life is kicking my ass. I’m a one man band, and I’m proud of that. But that means months of fishing typos and rough edges and rough cuts that give you splinters. I’m also working on the poor man’s audio book (it’ll be on youtube chapter by chapter) for Dolores and Foundry (and as I finish it, Endling(s)). So yeah, Endling(s). Here’s the arc (without spoiling it): Dolores on a changed Earth dealing with how little the rich folks and the ones who wanna rule have changed. Keppler 22B and isolationist cephalopods and their campaign of terror and sabotage and their desire to militarize-remilitarize. And then there’s Gliese. Poor little bug bastards. Gary is about to fuck their shit up in all kinds of ways. This one has a happy ending. I swear it.

2-JAN-2024: So that was fuggin quick. It was closer than I thought. Tomorrow I will doubtless have like a billion tally marks on my post-it note after work from where I listened while working and heard typos :/. Here’s to hoping the post-it makes it home with me on the first try.

2-JAN-2024: Hey, I’m alive and Endling(s) chapter one is coming as soon as I am done-done with it. There’s a chunk that needs to be “half brief and twice strong.” I finished it a week or two ago and felt like dog shit and exhaustion slept through my week off work.

10-NOV-2023: Foundry(9) live and up. Book is done. Whew. One more to go for the trilogy. Truth and Reconciliation on Earth and Jackboot’s revenge. “Dee3” cannot be the title. Soon. Whenever I can start it. Need rest.

8-NOV-2023: Foundry(9) (and thus the ‘book’) are done. I’m just editing and arguing with myself over the ending. I get more than 1 draft on the Dolores trilogy, but “no-takebacksies” is in full-fuggin-effect. It’ll be up when it’s right. Probably this weekend. Life makes demands. I’m probably jinxing it, but life is (for the first time in a long time) not actively trying to kick me in the head. In any case, the end of Jack and Glenn’s story is coming. Soon as my exhausted ass can make that happen.

25-OCT-2023: Foundry(8) live and up. We’ve got a chapter and (maybe-likely-most-definitely) an epilogue to go (gotta wrap things all nice and neat). I am tired, permanently exhausted. But I’m scraping by. And there’s a bit of a light on the horizon. I’m going to try to make hay while the sun shines as the shit-cliche goes. Hay here is: write Kilgore Trout low-fi sci fi and put it out to the world free to read. Thanks to the handful of you who read this. I appreciate you.

7-OCT-2023: Foundry(7) is up, and its a lil snack with maybe more exegesis than I’d like, but no-takebacksies is no-takebacksies. We’re rapidly approaching the end. Narrative synchronicity: a sick kid demanded that ‘good guys’ not only survive but thrive. And some years later, they would. Just as the Judge said they would. Rules of reality and physical law be damned. The ‘how’ of it in these last few chapters is the interesting bit. Foundry has a few more chapters/episodes to go. And then we’re off to “Dee-3” to finish the trilogy and finish the story of the half a water bear who tried to save the world

20-SEPT-2023: Foundry(6) is up. It’s long as fuck. I got stuck in this shame-loop of feeling guilty for taking too long and adding to it. I broke it and fixed it a few times over, but I like where I’m going. We all know Abel is Skynet, but the personal ‘how’ of it (flavor not fact) is what I want to privilege (and what this aesthetic says matters more). Lets see how this ends. Foundry(7) starts with the miracle of the Squattersville evacuation and the misadventures of Jack and Mal (and the Judge’s fate).

19-SEPT-2023: Spitting distance from done with Foundry(6), and I think I fixed the book (not that it was more broken than expected). But here’s the thing about writing in the apocalyptic vein: let the light in, do it whimsically. I’m not saying I succeed, but the attempt to approach apocalypse armed with whimsy is necessary. I also fixed, shuffled, re-sorted the menu above. Exile was written in 1/1.5 drafts, ‘no-takebacksies’, and I’m really proud of the first two books (Cassius and the Witch needs an epilogue/ending). Dolores and Foundry are the things that carry the spirit, but are a little less make it up on the spot. Audibles? Oh hell yes, I’ll change my mind on what the text is and where it’s going. I’ve buried ten versions of all the Dolores stuff, and I’m sure I’ll burn ten drafts of Foundry before it’s done. But they’re my babies, for good and ill, and this site leads with them. The Exile stuff is apocrypha, my Kilgore Trout Silmarillion. I’m glad I wrote them. Foundry(6) trying for this weekend. No promises. I got the sciatica, and it’s trying to kill me.

20-SEPT-2023: Foundry(6) is coming. Unsure when. Hoped to have it finished this weekend, but I needed rest. Badly. Working. A lot. As much as I can. Gotta try and make money and move the debt sword of Damocles a few inches higher that I may live-long-term (in so much as one can plan such things). Foundry is a different book than Dolores. Dee is the Wizard of Oz in a dystopian fever dream. And Foundry has to put flesh on the dream’s bones (Earth(0x7C0)). That’s a tough task for low-fi and for me as a writer. The book is about Jack and Jane and Glenn. I have that on repeat in my head, and I think I’m staying true to it? It’s a letter to an imagined reader: “Oh, so you like Dolores? Let me show you more of that world that was about to burn down.” It’s Jack and Jane and Glenn’s book, but the story I’ve advanced the most is god’s and Eye’s out on the scorched plane at the End of Time. I think I am ok with that.

20-AUG-2023: Foundry(5) is live and if life is grimy? It’s good to be on the green side of the dirt “with the sun on our faces.” Is it not? I’m wearing a new pair of spectacles, and I’m gonna fly close to the sun in terms of being saccharine: some days are so beautiful I wish I could I save them. The light falls right on all things and they please my eye. And those days hurt in their own way. Life is grimy, but the act(s) of living mundane/mighty and all points between are good.

10-AUG-2023: Still stuck on Foundry(5). It’s coming? In cosmic terms? Quite soon. Human lifespan? I dunno, Holmes. I’m working for the weekend (which is when I intend to get some writing done). I did the 180. I got a hell of a good job at the time I needed it most. Much as writing (silly as that might be) is crucial to my survival (even if all I ever do is “give it away” free to read)? I gotta buy bread and pay a landlord. That, and I take my craftsmanship seriously. I’m a weirdo, I have to take that seriously and demonstrate competence as a worker (only way a weirdo like me might be seen as a serious person. Side note, why is that desirable?). In any case, the thing that pays my bills (hopefully?) is the thing that I have to lead with so I can keep writing. Tillie Olsen? Tell Me a Riddle. She’s worth a read. She’s a clinic on pacing and on the details that matter/don’t. She’s a worker writer. That doesn’t usually mean prolific. I want to leave more than three novellas (there’s a book after Dolores and Foundry). So I’m going to fight and scrap to function, to keep the debt SoD(Sword of Damocles) from falling, and to take decent enough care of myself to do more than simply survive. I’ll write no matter what. There won’t be shit in it worth reading if I can’t maintain brain. Godspeed, and sorry for rant.

27-JUL-2023: Foundry(4) is up. Woo. More to come. We’re half way there. We are not living on a prayer. The rest of the novella that is the prequel to Dolores will come at (hopefully) regular intervals that allow me to balance work and life. We’ll see what looks like, eh?

27-JUL-2023: Got a job. Working on Chapter 4 of foundry. Have a ton of notes and re-drafts to sort. Prequels are a nightmare, but here we are “no takebacksies.” (if I post it, it’s canon). Dolores, Jack? It’s her book, and she deserves something decent (and she is a fellow A-series mortal, we gotta stick together in this soul-sick multiverse). So yeah, real world good news: gainful employment. Jack, Jane Eyre and her golem friend and the fed-who-is-not-a-fed and their Kilgore Trout trainwreck adventure will continue. When? I’m workin on it.

18-JUL-2023: Chapter 4 delayed again. Apologies. I’m closing in on a job, but I have to lock it down. Keep it. Get paid. I’ve got provisions to limp to a paycheck. I’m not on “half rations” and won’t have to be, but a full day’s work and writing afterward burns a lot of calories, and I don’t know that I’m gonna be able to eat enough. Not to be bleak, but that’s where I’m at. I’m hand writing, editing, trying to make myself get my living outline on paper. I hope it makes a better book. So while I go and dog-sit my writing assistant this evening, I’ll try to keep the book moving forward.

15-JUL-2023: Chapter 4 of Foundry is half done, and I’m really exhausted. I have about 1 week to land a job, or there’s not way I even white knuckle it another month. This site is paid up and mine through Spring. And I’d like to say that living under a bridge I’d find a way to write and put it up here, but I don’t know. I have people in my life, I don’t have anyone with the capacity to honestly help. If you can help keep a roof over one or both of my cats’ heads? Please find me on the internet (my twitter is on this site).

2-JUL-2023: Chapter 3 of Foundry is done. I wish “updates every Sunday” was viable with my life right now, but I have to get gainful employment. Now. Or I’m effed. “Why not monetize…” the experimental text that a handful of people have read? Would love to in a way that’s not shitty to my audience (if I ever get a larger one) and not shitty to the work or myself. I’ve written about a lot of miracles, mundane and monumental, and I could use one or more to continue living and writing. I have more practical things, and if “I shouldn’t waste time on making shit when I need to focus on survival.” Survival’s not a thing worth doing if the food you eat turns to ash in your mouth, and if you’re at a job that’s designed to starve you to death or drive you mad by paying you only-ever-almost-enough to live.

24-JUN: Chapter 2 of Foundry is live, the thing’s outlined and coming together. And I would really like to get a job or find a pile of money somewhere so I don’t starve to death before finishing it. Things are getting bleak in ‘pay bills so you can live’ terms and barring a miracle, I’m not gonna finish this stuff so. I hope somebody somewhere, somewhen enjoys it. I’m trying to write Foundry in the evening to keep myself sane and mentally alive enough to find a job in the day.

18-JUN: The first chunk of Foundry is up. Whatever else this novella does, it brackets Dolores (probably heavier on the pre- than the post). It’s going to be free to read and no-takebacksies like Dolores. Life makes demands, and I gotta get a job so I don’t starve, so it’s going to take as long as it takes. Hope you like it, even if it’s a hate-read (especially if it’s a hate read).

4-JUN-2023: Project Foundry is a prequel/sequel to Dolores. It’s going to bracket the novella I’m proud of. I’m struggling to write and to do a lot of things. Imagining this book is an effort to persevere, and if I get to write it? That will be a life affirming thing. And if the mess of accident and Deus ex Machina’s I’ve written has been useful to anybody? That’s just the bee’s knees. I wish more than anything that I had the money and time to just write and give it away for free. In any case, I’m gonna crawl toward the pre-sequel to Dolores. It’s called Foundry. It’s coming, hopefully.

23-MAY-2023: Project Foundry begins. I’m broke. I’m struggling. I don’t know if I can or will finish it or anything else. But there’s something after Dolores: Project Foundry. We wander after our absent god. Where are you author?

15-MAY-2023: The site no longer looks like a Pip-boy. This bums me out, but hear tell it’s good for readability. There are other books, ones where worlds do not necessarily burn, books where the A-series demi-mortals do things useful, where people find peace in a very chaotic multiverse. There’s a book where the sacred geometry begins to reveal itself. But I have to find a job here right quick so I don’t starve. While I fail to do that, I’m going to update the glossary lexicon section over the coming days maybe. Hey. Thanks for reading. And you should go holler about the writers strike. They’re trying to feed themselves with words, and they’re workers. You should see yourself as a worker, not a boss, if I may be so bold, dear reader. Solidarity forever, eh?

14-MAY-2023: I think Dolores is lovely and I’m proud of it. If anyone ends up liking it, you are of my tribe (and take care of yourself, we need extra self-maintenance). Also, do me a favor. My name is Adam Mitchell. If I’m gone, and anyone ends up liking it? Do not let them put their name on it or steal it. This is mine, my work, and I wrote every motherfucking awful/beautiful word. Thanks, though no one has finished reading the book. It’s a shame I think you’d really like it (in a this is deliciously bad, sort of way).

11-MAY-2023: Dolores is finished. Chapters 9 and the Epilogue. Free to read. Maybe I’ll do something more with it some day if anyone ends up wanting it. In the meantime, thanks for reading it, even if (especially if) it was a “hate read.”

8-MAY-2023: Chapter 8 of Dolores is up and ready to read. Ok seriously I have to do other things now. The text was at a point where if I stopped I’d lose the thread. The ending’s already a shape in my head and it’s coming. Two maybe three more chapter chunks. More to come when I get a steady job.

7-MAY-2023: Chapter 7 of Dolores is up and free to read. Solidarity with the people who get paid to write striking for a living wage and some decent conditions/bennies. Really, solidarity with anyone fighting for their dignity and a living. Speaking of which (making living not dignity, I have limited goals). I have to find a job urgently. Cats to feed. The pace of of this episodic romp will likely slow. Enjoy 7 though, the plot is really getting nice and thick, and we’re learning who a few of these people are. Really a smashing chapter with some lovely pacing.

1-MAY-2023: Chapter 6 of Dolores is up and readable. Happy May Day. The chapter will get even more readable as I fish out the typos I thought I caught. Onward to Peoria. Onward to destiny.

29-APR-2023: Chapter 5 of Dolores is up and ready to read. More to come. Don’t you dare eyeball my whimsy.

27-APR-2023: Chapter 4 of Dolores is up and ready to read. More to come.

25-APR-2035: Chapter 3 of Dolores was released on this day in 2023. Thanks for the handful of readers who ever followed the story to its end.

22-APR-2032/23: Chapter 2 of Dolores is up. It’s been a weird few weeks. More to come.

18-APR-2023: Dolores is here. The Exile trilogy was a self-bet one-draft-go project where the exercise ws to just keep it going (to write into a corner and then escape–or at least write all the way into that corner and live there). Dolores is something a little different. This is another novella in the same multiverse with an ending I already know. How we shall arrive? I have no freaking clue except to say that we will get there episodically–Dolores, Jonah, the narrator and a planet full of signifying mud. Destiny is calling emo farm lady, pick up the phone.

20-MAR-2023: Chapter 6 of Cassius and the Witch is done and up. Job hunting and insomnia. Maybe 1-2 more chapters in this thing. And if the job hunt doesn’t materialize? This site might go away, but I’ll repost this and whatever comes next elsewhere.

17-MAR-2023: Chapter 5 of Cassius and the Witch done and up. Still job hunting. Book and trilogy coming to a close. If job hunt doesn’t bear fruit, I’m going to have to move all of exile elsewhere soon (to a free platform). Will try to give lead time on here in the updates section, and will definitely post the new platform at my twitter (see bottom of page). Thanks for reading and hope you enjoy it. Looking forward to seeing how the book ends (and to doing other things in this universe). I really want to give my characters a “you’ve earned some rest” ending (at least the ones I love).

7-MAR-2023: Chapter 4 of Cassius and the Witch is done. I like where it’s going. More to come. Job hunting. Likely to slow me down.

12-FEB-2023: Chapter 3 of Cassius and the Witch is up. Found the story and will to write again, so this thing continues. More to come in the next month or so. I’m off to commune with a heating pad.

9-JAN-2023: I lied, the third book wasn’t up, but it is now. Two chapters. The first two. More to come. It’s the new cosmology and the end of exile. Cassius and the Witch. Don’t tell a friend. Life is demanding more time, aiming for a chapter every month or two. Draft. Play. Post. No take-backsies. Enjoy the trainwreck, and to the handful who have, thank you for getting caught in the strange for a while.

6-DEC-2022: Thus begins the one true Third Arc. Book 3: Cassius and the Witch. The first chapter is up. It’s 4 in the morning and I have a car with no headlights to tend to. And I have jobs to apply to. I also have a book to continue writing. I hope somebody digs this thing. More to come. Probably the end of these characters primary story. But there’s a ton that happened off stage thus far, and there are a lot of stories left to tell in this setting.

3-NOV-2022: Made the site less aggressively awful for screen readers. There’s a third book, less about Locusts and more about the new cosmology. It’s probably going to come a little slower, but until a thing called Exile (The whole project) is done? The 1 draft raw rule stands: I draft it one time and post it, if an ide gets a sentence it lives in the world (endless editing passes for stupid typos I thought I caught. Welcome to the typo factory, reader). If you read this, thank you. Share it with other weirdos. Spread the gospel of the church ethereal.

29-OCT-2022: Part 6 of Sisyphus and Prometheus is done and up. Thus ends the true second arc. That’s all for the main story folks. But if you noticed, some luminous beings are still alive, and they need a purpose outside of time (less they sublimate into ash). Going to step back and get real life in order (or try). The plan is to find some way to see these words in print, because I want to. Off chance you’d like that, drop me a line on Twitter if you’re a stranger (elsewhere if you know me). The hope is to have a much expanded lexicon/glossary and some not-shitty (so like not done by me) illustrations (if I can find someone willing).

10-OCT-2022: Part 5 of Sisyphus and Prometheus is up (yeah that’s what S&P means, sweet Easter Egg). The true second arc is almost done. When that sixth part is coming? Not sure, pretty tired from the recursive loop shorts.

8-OCT-2022: Part 4 of the second novella is up. You might have noticed that it’s shorter. Three and 4 are one text broken in half because life just made hard to get a higher volume text up in one piece. I’m trying to get what I can done and written and up while I can still write. I have the same soul sickness as my protagonist, and I am very tired. And I work full time at a job that doesn’t pay enough to live. I don’t know what I wanted to say when I began this post any more than I know what I want to say in the book(s) (that’s a lie). I guess I wanted to contemplate grief and life in the aftermath. To show the work of grieving (though it will be damn near indecipherable). If you’ve ready any of this mess and enjoyed it? Thank you. Even if you read it and hated it. Thank you. It is my love letter to a video game from 1995, the thing that made me a reader, and all the other books I found and read with hunger and a ruthlessness after. I can’t sit still long enough to engage with much these days. I can recall all the glorious stories I have read and produce a collage, a pastiche reflection of what was best in them (to me). I pray two things: that I live long enough (and that I keep a roof over my head). To finish the third book, and that it does something and anything good for anyone who reads it. Amen.

5-OCT-2022: Part 3 of the second novella is up. It’s short, but dipping into the past after part 3 for too long felt lazy.

22-SEP-2022: The first part of the second novella is up. I don’t know who is supposed to be Sisyphus and who is Prometheus, but it’s up and as Kilgore Trout semi-coherent as ever. Amen. More to come. Aiming for a chapter per month (ha!).

19-SEP-2022: The first part/episode of the second novella is about done being written/transmitted/transmuted/transliterated/translated (amen). It’s coming. Hopefully this weekend.

16-AUG-2022: Ok. Exile, 1-8 is a thing. A novella length thing. And there’s more, but I care about it enough now to take my time with it. There’s more of the Parson re-writing the Bible and A(84) is still trapped in a custodial closet in that Pittsburgh bus station. And I’m taking my sweet time with the translation and transliteration. Amen.

12-JULY-2022: Holy shit. It’s been since May. Ok look, I got in an argument with Flannel Man over a (mis)translation of the Parson’s portion of Exile Pt. 9 (long story…). I’m also getting sued by a POS landlord. Oh and I found a kitten out on the road (All good, she’s in my house, not on the road). Exile part 9 and maybe 10 are coming. I promise. I guess Flannel Man was right: I don’t want it to end.

30-MAY-2022; 30-MAY-2002: Exile Pt. 8 done and up. I already know part 9, but there’s that whole work and sleep stuff one has to do on occasion. In a couple of weeks?