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:

13-MAY-2026: Rogue Planet is gonna get a new title and follow one such little potato shaped space rock. I got the story planned. We’re doin’ things a wee bit different. Reader, thank you for your patience. When I started this site, early stuff I wrote here ran on “well, let’s get this done before we die…” fatalism. Now, I’m trying to delight myself first, you second, and maintain brain/whimsy in dark times. ‘Life affirming’ and all that good stuff.

11-MAY-2026: Sup. I’m resting on a bean bag with a cat on my chest. Cooper. Papa Cooper. Old timer. He purrs and I take comfort in that. I’m about to go to work. 9 to 5 that keep us alive. I am trying to write poetry in that ‘not really trying’ kind of way. 960 moons. I ain’t writing no 960 fuggin poems.

5-MAY-2026: Reader, I did a mistake. There’s a song I really like about pigeons. It’s got a good verse about Da Vinci before it illustrates the problem I created for myself: “it becomes about the flock.” And so I disrespected my subject: the gaggle of moons around the rogue planet. Its a good thing I didn’t really have a good bead on what my subject was/is. I got a tomb moon and the Ozzymandeus ode to the GeaunToord refugee who went there to die. But that’s bleak as fuck. Yes, we do that well, but ya know little seeds of hope. That was what I wanted to try to articulate. But you see, I shotgunned my concept of a rogue planet into a couple hundred imaginary space rocks (to put the thing I am struggling to imagine at even greater-more-diffuse-distance). And I just am not feeling the ‘juice’ as of yet in describing and populating these space rocks with various lichen-life that (if I am fortunate) might delight you. Writing constipation. Reason one-million why we in exile despise AI. Why would a human want to deprive themselves of the battle to pass words and ideas through brain and bowel?

4-MAY-2026: Hey Reader, finally did hot edits on Cancri 9 and 10, so ya know, the typos are gone (mostly).

1-MAY-2026: Happy Labor Day (the real one). All honesty? Every fucking day is labor day, as labor made all and is entitled to all it creates. Speaking of labor, we have moons to describe, “16 times 60” of them. I regret that number, but “no takebacksies.” I am not going to write about that many moons. I am going to go to my 9-5 and try to thrive. You have a good day too. Stay hydrated. Befuddle fash.

27-APRIL-2026: Reader, ask me not why I furrow my brow. I’m getting think-wrinkles for thee. Roman sweat. So much of it while I contemplate words and farts and fart words. It takes time. There’s a lot of poets and very little poetry and we all just fight over it cause no one wants to share (nor should they). Nah there’s plenty, it’s just hard to find and write. Also, It’s hard to maintain whimsy in these times, and I confess I am failing to do so. The Rogue Planet is a brown dwarf that got yeeted from a binary system and took it’s mess of moons with it. I think I know what is on some of those moons, and I almost know what’s worth writing about.

27-APRIL-2026: Rogue Planet has a page and I can see it when I close my eyes: the brown dwarf with the constellation of moon specs swarming it. I can see the furrowed brow plough lines on the moons where they grew food and people and smell the brimstone from the foundry-factory moons. I hear the tomb-silence of sarcophagus moons and smell vacuum. I just don’t wanna write the thing, yet. Onward to mine 9 to 5. Stay hydrated, reader. Befuddle fascist trash.

18-APRIL-2026: Oh man, had a couple of beers and exactly 0 cigarettes and here is where we-royal-we are at, dearest Reader. I don’t have any answers for the pile of problems that is the world in this year of somebody’s lord 2026. But here’s a statement of ethos since I just finished a project: 1) It is my goal to endure these times without becoming a bystander or complicit in evil (I’m a middle aged white dude who lives in the U.S., so my job is this: “bare minimum don’t make it worse”) Also, I’m a socialist (not a good one, I’m bad at being a people). If that bothers you, I’m quite glad. 2) we in Exile, this website and me as a man, do not fuck with AI. Look, code-training machines for the purpose of pattern recognition in pursuit of human interests? Glorious. Depressing wages and trying to ‘cast the poets out of the republic’? Nah. Fuck AI. If a human can’t be bothered to conceive and execute it, it’s not worth your time or mine to read. In the Exile-verse, AI is the villain. Accept no substitutes. 3) I can’t sit my ass down and write a Kilgore Trout style trainwreck without ripping on a cowboy killer (yet). I can do poetry and jagged little vignettes and shit that doesn’t necessarily fit together. So ha. That’s where we’re going. Nothing like following an adorable and accessible and delightful little yarn (Cancri) with poetry. Saying you want to do poetry is like saying you want to pitch a no hitter. Baby, we all wanna shine, but god ain’t as kind as you or I (or any of us) were lead to believe. So I guess I won’t do poetry I’ll try to describe prettily. And if the gods pity me? Somebody’s gods, any that might be left alive or dead-dreaming? Then maybe-just-maybe I might delight somebody someday with a line or two of that good and proper poetry.

17-APRIL-2026: Dearest Reader, I can get beers without getting cigarettes. This is a lovely development. In any case. Rogue Planet. That’s the next thing. It’s what it sounds like a Rogue Planet. And on that planet are some vignettes and prose-ems or poems or prosetry (possibly all fuggin 3). There’s also going to be an e-book of Cancri, but it’s also going to remain on the site free to read. So it’s a ‘give me your money if you’d like’ situation. I am a terrible business man. I could not possibly be more proud of that fact. Be terrible at business. Be proud of that fact.

11-APRIL-2026: Reader, Cancri is done and up. I like my ending. And I like my Parson. She’s a preacher lady who has ironic survivor’s guilt (ironic cause she’s a ghost). She died in detention on a world that went theocratic nightmare. Now/un-now she makes good trouble tipping the scales on worlds that are dip-diving toward something similar. I’m proud of Cancri, real proud. It started when I met the wolf spider (Brunhilde) who lived under my air conditioner this winter. Molly (cat) ate her, unfortunately. But we honor Brunie in prosetry and spider-kind with the whole text. Also, I try to use real exoplanets, and I got real baked and forgot that Cancri 55(e) is a hell world hot house that is Mercury close to its star. I was a couple chapters into the story by then : /. Hence the ecological catastrophe (the mining rig’s engines follow faithfully my hairbrained FTL rules that I refuse to explain). Hope you like it. Next thing: Rogue Planet and maybe hopefully an e-book of Cancri. If I post it free to read it stays thus, but I’m uh pass the plate and if you like the work you can help me make a buck or two to live. Taking a fuckin’ break now.

9-APRIL-2026: Dearest Reader, Cancri 55(e) is done-ish. And if you have done-ished a thing you know that the text is both a sentence away and 10 country light-years away from done. I am gonna be at my 9 to 5 picking spiders out my beard today. You, be awesome at whatever tasks you gotta endure. Hydrate. Be kind and befuddle fascists. I will endeavor to do the same.

7-April-2026: Reader, I wrote two paragraphs today that I do not hate. The best thing about Sisyphus jokes is that you can make them every day (the best thing about sisyphus jokes..(the best thing about…))).

7-APRIL-2026: I am almost done with Cancri. It’s like a sentence a day. I find that frustrating, but here we are.

4-APRIL-2026: Whan that Aprile with his shore-es sote, doth something and so on. It is spring and the critters are itchy. So kings go to war and people go on pil-grim-ahhh-ges. I’m almost done with Cancri. And it’s weird cause I wanna wrap it up right with a nice bow on it. I also want to be weird and experimental and end-beginning it and all sorts of other things I am probably and perhaps not talented enough to accomplish. So fuck it, let’s do this, and may my reach ever exceed my grasp. Also, fuck AI art. If a living thing couldn’t be bothered to make it, the thing isn’t worth a living being’s time. AI created content is Plato’s Republic from an even shittier angle: tech bros can’t cast the poets out so they’ll crowd-them-out shout-them-down with an automated mob. Fuck AI and Clanker slop. If you’ve got something to say? Find a way to say it (even and especially if there are consequences for doing so). Fuck this war that my country chose as well. The US chose this. Keep your head up. Holler. Hydrate. Holler some more. Be kind to others enduring it (it being the fascism).

28-MARCH-2026: No Kings is today, and that’s a good thing. “It’s not a protest, it’s a parade.” You’re goddamn right. We get a parade, bitch. We get to show our elders who aren’t lost to madness that we’re here with them. We get to show the kids that we hear them and they aren’t alone. We go on out there and get our steps in and practice acting right with our comrades and frienemies. We the people go out there and spread the field and remind the STASI (or whatever the fuck our country calls its STASI men) that mass surveillance doesn’t scale up well. We take to the streets to remind the rotting, senile fascist usurper that (unlike he) we can walk (and walk well). Stay hydrated and befuddle fash. “It’s not a protest its a party.” Exactly. We deserve a party. And if anyone uses that idiom taken from a prestige drama about billionaires, that “they are not a serious person…” bullshit? Tell them I said to shut the fuck up.

25-MARCH-2026: Cancri 10 is half done, and this website is going to exist for (at least) another year. Woo. I think I’ve exhausted the model of Exile and how I do/did things: start sketching an almost pocky-clipse and see where it ends as quickly as one can. That’s not even what I’m doing any more, and Cancri is proof. So like maybe we move on to another kind of story? Soon as I can find one. In any case. If I wrote it and put it up on this site? It’s staying free to read (even if it appears as an e-book). Ending/epilogue of Cancri is coming and here’s the bittersweet part I’m trying to capture for the story: Ruth is blind to the electrostatic charge in the atmosphere that tells spiders how and when to fly. She’s blind to woo-woo, but she can see the ways she and her companions are going to be mythologized. I also gotta go do my 9 to 5 too. “I work hard to put kibble in the bowl and to provide a better life for my cats.” Dearest Reader, stay hydrated and be kind to yourself so you might be kind to others.

21-MARCH-2026: Dearest Reader, Cancri 10 has a skeleton. It’s coming along. Thank you for your patience, and I encourage you to hydrate, eat, and maintain whimsy in these dark and stupid times.

18-MARCH-2026: Crawling toward the ending of Cancri. It’s coming. I’m still here. I got close enough to a wild turkey to say “biiiiig stretches” when it flex-flapped its wings. The turkey did not appreciate my comment. I want to hug a turkey. I am aware of the risks.

9-MARCH-2026: I didn’t get writing done this weekend. I did get “playing video games and rotting” done. So there’s that. Cancri 10 is coming (though I know not when).

3-MARCH-2026: It is Spring again “when kings go to war” and I hate that. I also hate my first draft of Cancri 10, so I’m gonna fix that. The probability cone of “suck” or “that’s complete shit” on a creative project (I wanna argue any kind of creative project) is wide and forgiving early and narrows as we make our choices on ‘the page’ or whatever our medium is. I hate my first draft and I’m gonna fix that. Also, fuck fascism, and fuck any notion that dropping bombs on people is helpful or liberatory. It’s not. It’s not a war book, Cancri. Right? And I get a couple pages into the one about how the spiders won when they shouldn’t have. They do. The spiders, the little Cancrins beat the precursor mining wreck. It was always going to happen. It’s the why of it (and what happens next) that’s novel and I’m working on telling you all that, dear Reader. I started writing the ending of a war book and that’s stupid and takes a shit on everything I already wrote, so I have to fix it. I’m trying to get better at endings. Cancri 10 is coming.

28-FEB-2026: Fuck nationalism. I am an American, and accident of birth is not a thing to be proud of (it is taking credit for what ghosts did and that bums me out because it is exceptionally weak and pathetic little pinky-dick ass energy). Here’s the deal, I’m on “Team Human” but I know the language of nationalism and geopolitics and all that happy horse shit that people use to justify murder and warfare and crimes against our own collective humanity. Iran is not a threat to the US or US interests. Iran is a regional threat to a US ally’s interests (not her existence). That’s not adequate justification to attack a people. Furthermore, Iran is a target because they have obsolete air defenses. That’s the secret (that there isn’t one). And my country doesn’t pick on people who have a chance of shooting our airmen down (because we’re chickenshit bullies who do war crimes from the sky). Full stop. Fuck war (all of them) and this impending one in particular.

17-FEB-2026: Typos. Hot editing typos. We’re almost at the end of the text so I gotta circle back and catch as many typos that escaped the net as possible before they just get baked into the text like roaches painted over by landlord’s on the walls of shit apartments. Cancri 8? Yeah. Lost record in the library riot. Cancri 10 exists though. Or at least it will when I write it.

15-FEB-2026: Cancri 9 is up. 8? There isn’t one. That’s the lost grindhouse reel. That’s the chapter that fell into a lacuna (one of them). It’s a lost silver tablet. More to come. Probably a chapter and an epilogue.

11-FEB-2026: Real rough cut of Cancri 9 is done. Little spit-polishing and a few editing passes and such. Soon. Then it’s like a chapter (chapter and a half maybe) and an epilogue and badda-yadda novella bing and done.

5-FEB-2026: Reader, I don’t put people in the work whole in any way other than to honor, and whole real people do not appear. But there’s a couple of moments that are mine and someone else’s. The grandfather in Ignatius that gets a little anecdote was my actual grandfather and Jack’s dad in the Dolores books does my dad’s bedtime story repetitive dad joke. The “Johnny be Good” thing. I prolly botched it in the book. We haven’t talked in forever and I just got real bad news about him, and man young me thought he had hardened his heart to this moment, and that was not the case. And I’m glad for that. A hard heart’s useless. Be kind to yourself. Befuddle fash.

1-FEB-2026: January was a hell of a year. Cancri 9 is about half done. After that, we’re gonna try to get the e-book goin to (it will still stay free to read on the site cause a promise is a promise as long as I can afford to keep this website up).

30-JAN-2026: I am once again “up before the other team” and writing at some ungodly hour because my brain decided to eff my sleep schedule. Polyphasic sleep is where it’s at, but that’s best done (or perhaps only possible) when you aren’t hitched work-or-starve to a time-clock. I think that double time reference does something conceptually: time-clock. That’s the work clock. That’s “time time” the meaningful and authoritative. Fuck that. Nature’s time run on vibes. In any case, go forth Fraggles and rock. Remember, Dozers can only Doze. Fraggles can do whatever the fuck the moment demands (and Dozers are really fucking bitter about it, not the Fraggles fault or prob). Stay warm and hydrated (or if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, stay cool). Be kind to people. Befuddle the fash.

29-JAN-2026: Reader, “It may be the coldest day of the year. What does he think of that? I mean what do I. And if I do. Perhaps I am myself again.” And “Mayakofsky” (spell?) is a hell of a poem and O’Hara is awesome. It is also that time of year, historically coldest stretch where I reside, so it’s a lot. Up early to write today because that’s what the sleep schedule says? We’ll see how that goes. Cancri 9 is coming.

26-JAN-2026: Working on Cancri 9, and it has occurred to me that I don’t know how to pronounce the name of the star Cancri 55 (cause I read it). Reader, I am always open to being pleasantly surprised. Solidarity with the people of Minnesota. It’s cold. I’m tired. I got an old cat laying on my chest, and I’m peeking over him to write this (I just smooched his little cat head). He is purring mightily (thank you for asking). Be kind to yourself. Befuddle fash. Always.

24-JAN-2026: This fascist regime just murdered another person in Minneapolis. It was another summary execution caught on tape. No, there was nothing defensive about it. Moreover, they shot him 2-3 times before one piece of shit mag-dumped in his body. See, that’s that ‘warrior cop’ training that they get when they get the advanced ‘training’ bootlickers are saying is the answer (it is not the answer). The cop who chose to execute a man did so, and he then made as sure as he could there was no one to question he and his’ account of things. The fed did as he was trained (and as “warrior cops” taught by mercenaries / security contractors / some alchy from Israel or South Africa are wont to do). Foucault’s boomerang is comin’ for all of us. Duck. Men with guns and no accountability (no matter what flag, no matter what they call god) act as less than men, as savages, as subhuman garbage. Accountability is the only training that matters. Here that means ICE needs to be abolished.

18-JAN-2026. Reader, Cancri 8 is up and live. Now we nap before the inevitable typo hunt of shame and hot edits all them hot edits. Then we continue on. I would like to tell you more about my Parson because it’s vital that you understand her. Hydrate. Befuddle fash. You know the drill.

16-JAN-2026: Woo. We’re writing. I hate piss trickling chapters. We have established this, Reader. The goal is to get Cancri 8 up this weekend (or soon after). Let’s fuckin go. Hydrate. Be brave. Even (especially) if your leg shakes, nah mean?

15-JAN-2026: Rolled my ankle yesterday on the way home. I am not trying to burn every minute and hour of PTO, but the weather certainly is. Reader, I am pretty bummed. I am also pretty grateful for the people in my community and all the ‘we’re gonna get home and be nice to each other’ capacity to endure shitty weather yesterday. The weather was shit, the people are (as they always are) rad. Some people’s personal/sick/vakay is for vacations. Other people’s time is for enduring the effort to make it to work. Which is a function of social class. If you’re reading this, you already know what I’m saying.

13-JAN-2026: Rest of Cancri 8 mapped. Gimme a moment. Dilla came on and I gotta turn the music down. Then I gotta turn it up when he says ‘turn it up.’ Anyway, rest of this chapter is outlined. Reader, I hate piss trickling chapters bits at a time. As apology, I’m redoubling the effort my tired ass can offer these low-fi bedtime stories for grown people. Chapter 8 is coming. Ruth and Gary and Brunhilde and the race against death.

11-JAN-2026: Reader, Jonathan Ross (ICE agent) is a murderer and a coward. And there’s objective evidence of this. I will not be gaslit by fascist trash or bootlickers. That man murdered Renee Good in cold blood, and he must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Furthermore, ICE must be abolished. Stay hydrated. Befuddle fash. Be kind to humans.

10-JAN-2026: Dearest Reader, everything is hard. I’m piss trickling that chapter. I know not when more will come. Yeah, the spiders beat the machine. They overwhelm it with sheer numbers (duh), but that’s the beginning. I told you, Cancri is not a war book. It’s not about the Von Nueman machine sent to wreck the spiders. It’s not about the fight to bring the precursor mining rig down. It’s about the how and the who inspired the what, and Ruth deserves the right ending. So I give myself permission to take my time. I’m trying. You keep doing that too.

9-JAN-2026: Reader, the great piss-trickle of writing continues. Your boy (me) in exile is about to take a bubble bath. Fuck fascist trash. No rest. No peace. “Obey or die.” No. I reject the premise of the choice. You should too.

8-JAN-2026: There’s more important shit going on (all the time really) than my space spiders right now, but we’re advancing the thing. Look, the fault isn’t in the stars out toward Cancri way, but in the author transliterating the spider story from Lep-Tik to English(ish) (me, I’m the author). This is one of those chapters I’m gonna end up Piss-trickling little paragraphs/pages at a time and I hate doing that but like I’m uh crawlin right now. Hydrate. Be safe. Be brave in whatever way you know how to be. Be kind. Look ’em in the eye (yes, even my tribe can do that).

7-JAN-2026: The United States is a fascist state. Thus far, we as a people have failed to stop the rise of fascism, and that’s a problem whose consequences fall on everyone (potentially). I watched video of a federalized thug shoot a woman point blank in the face in Minn. The officer was not in any danger. He is full on 90 degree oriented toward the woman he murders. That’s indefensible. He was eager to use his authority to take a life. Full stop. There’s no room for interpretation if you’re watching the unobstructed view. Anything else is sophistry. Yeah man, I don’t really fucking feel like writing about space spiders tonight. I’m trying. The writing will come when I can write.

4-JAN-2026: Dearest Reader, hearing aid is coming. And I’m looking forward to it. There was a time in my life when my hearing and its abysmal condition was one of those personal red lines. That is: “when I can’t appreciate music or function day to day… I’ll just punch out.” So getting a job with benefits (shitty benefits to be sure) and finally getting the tool I need to function and hear. It’s a big deal because it’s a big tool (took a lot of my very limited resources to acquire) and it’s a big commitment (i.e. not dying which shouldn’t be a big commitment but is). Yay. But also, most people are either gone or I ran them off. So, not really many people to talk to. There’s you, Reader, but you don’t really talk back. There’s Cooper. Grampa cat. I wanna hear every last bit of his purrs and his melodious meows. I’m pretty isolated and lonely, and that’s not going to change. But maybe I just get to hear the silence better? Maybe I can know its counters better. I will attempt to be ok with that.

2-JAN-2026: “Well fuck, the book is longer than I thought…” Is where we (royal we) in Exile are at with this Cancri shit. I am grumpy, for I do still desire nicotine, and we have stepped the fuck down to a lower dose of nic replacement. Executive functioning (is a term that has always bothered me on a few levels), but that’s my struggle that’s old and new again. Planning over the horizon is a challenge and I gotta figure out how to do it w out my cig crutch. “But there’s meds for…” stay in your fucking lane. If prescriptions are how you manage your attention span? Good for you. If you have an opinion on how I should manage mine? Fuck all the way off. Thanks. But anyway, my grumpy ass is going to continue Cancri. I’m doing that thing: breaking the Warhol rule and thinking of the next thing, and that’s dumb. Need to organize the site. Going to see what putting Dolores and some of the early novellas into one-page format (with pagination) looks like (to de-clutter site). I wanna get that self-published bound copy thing going too. Here’s the challenge though: if you are trying to make a creative project (as opposed to trying to fuck people over to make a buck) it takes time to do things correctly. Here, correct means paying a visual artist for their work (and coming up with a plan for fair compensation if you make more cash than you expected).

28-DEC-2025: Cancri 7 is up. Writing things without cigarettes is a lot easier than it was which is to say its still not very easy. The “virginia woolfe spider” line was not while smoking and it found its place here so that’s a fucking win and I’ll take it. Cancri 8 is coming and I’m not putting a goal on that, and there’s no way in hell I’m finishing Cancri by New Years, that’s not fucking happening. Stay hydrated. Be nice to yourself.

26-DEC-2025: I’m tired and burnt out and exhausted. My car died in the fall. Cat didn’t. Every work day is twelve hours now because I got that rust belt bus line (that I love and am grateful for, but boy howdy do we hate pedestrians in this state because old Hank Forge and his ugly stupid children did). I can’t go at a pace I want. And it’s either going to wreck the work or me. So I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ll be damned if I leave my work for AI-Jackals with austere souls to pick over. Those people are fucking garbage. You’re supposed to laugh at Plato’s hubris. You’re not supposed to think its a good idea to ever cast the poets out of the Republic. It’s a shibboleth argument (like reading Machiavelli w a straight face… that’s proof you failed).

25-DEC-2025: Reader, I’m having a really hard time with the writing and everything that comes with being alive. I know you’re there, as the little website ticker tells me so (and that you keep coming back). Here’s the thing about this site though, it’s not a print book so there’s no revenue-generating reviews for me to farm and this venture, this Exile thing, is a weird duck. I’m cool with that. I’m also kinda writing into the void, and I could use some kinda response. I’m saying it would be good to hear from you if anything I have produced has been any kind of delightful. Thanks.

23-DEC-2025: I don’t mind failing. All the good human things come out of recursive processes, and I’m not racing the steam engine chat-bot abominations. I’m slow-cooking the stories, Reader. My tired ass has righted the chapter so I can continue to write it. It’s coming I’m trying to get Cancri 7 up this week. Bedtime stories for holiday hangover. You know you wanna talk about Dolores and Ignatian Puffins with your weird fam that you blow gauge with. Share my weird stores you glorious little reader goblins, and I promise I’ll work diligently on the box of spiders I’m writing you. Merry Festivus Pottersfield and all the other hoo-villes where human beings live.

20-DEC-2025: Quitting smoking is hard, but I took a walk and ended at the library so we got some flicks now and some books coming. I don’t think I’m writing much this weekend, but I’m going to be feeding my soul good stories: 1) Children of Men (those two long single-shot sequences? Living proof the movie can be better than the book). 2) The Witch (cause Black Philip is my d00d and that’s a proper slow burn ‘you know what’s comin but it don’t matter cause the “how” is so good). 3) Rashomon (cause I need some Kirosawa in my world and everything in the Criterion collection has something beautiful in it you need to see). 4) The Princess Bride (because there is a shortage of perfect movies and stories in the world and it would be a tragedy not to celebrate this one because I can). Stay hydrated. Befuddle fash. Be kind to you (and take no shit).

15-DEC-2025: Cancri 7 eludes and evades me. The words they hide from me. Reader, I beg your patience while I wade into the grass to hit my words with a stick, toss them in a sack like Krampus, and drag them to the page where they belong. I shall sick mine yule cats upon these words to menace them (so that they behave and array themselves prettily and poetically). Them cakes is coming. I got a little vakay-stay-kay comin’ and I intend to make spider silk while the winter sun shines tired. I wanna get you a xmas or your preferred celebration present. It’s spiders. It’s a novella full of space spiders.

11-DEC-2025: Reader, we (royal we) are making progress. Chapter 7 is coming along even quicker than expected.

12-DEC-2025: Reader, it is the mid-chapter duldrums. We’re in the cake mines digging batter from the very veins of narrative Earth. Not really. We-royal-we (me and two cats adding up to three) are about to go get some sleep. Be kind to you. Befuddle fash. AI is trash.

7-DEC-2025: Cancri 7 is 1/3 to 1/2 there whatever the fuck that means. It’s coming. I’m now going to take a nap. Reader, be kind to yourself. You don’t earn rest or food.

6-DEC-2025: Cancri 7 base coat is down. Baking cakes. It’s coming. Merry xmas Pottersfield. It’s time to be a hardass with myself in the realm of cigarettes and nowhere else. Be kind to you so you might transitive property that kindness to the rest of the human tapestry. Here’s the thing, Reader. I pick up bible stories and 90’s JRPGs and build on them with elbow patches stories Bronte and Blake and banned-Soviet magical realism (they’ll tell you that shit is socialist realism and just grey, but they lie Tovarish… the bears talk and the cats pack heat and will gunfight the NKVD and jesus christ lives in a soviet mental institution.. etc. etc.). I pick up all these bricks with which to Kilgore Trout it up and make my katamari art, but I believe what I say: god (intelligence or accident, luck or providence) made the whole human tapestry and that whole garment is sacred. The human tapestry is the mission of the whole human race, and the whole tapestry makes it to the future or none of us deserves to be here. Watch It’s a Wonderful Life if you hate xmas films too, btw. Capra is sacred.

6-DEC-2025: Hey there. I’m writing today. It’s gonna go slow because I wanna use writing as an excuse to keep a cig in my hand at all times. “You should get a diagnosis and medication for ADHD…” you should stay in your fucking lane, Brenda. I ain’t taking amphetamines via prescription or w out it for any reason (because I don’t want to). You regulate your nervous system (hopefully wisely) and I’ll endure mine, thanks. Same thing with the Aut diagnosis. Why in the fuck would I spend (w shitty insurance) several thousand dollars for a rubber stamp that gives someone an excuse to discriminate against me in a way they’re likely to do if I don’t mask (for the short periods of time I am capable of doing so at this stage of life)? I’m off the map. Anyone who is like me is off the map. Welcome to the first moment in history where this many autistic adults, well, live past their suicide date. Sorry to be so blunt about it but I’m not. I’m not sorry at all. We are alive and that’s a good thing, and anyone who wants to make our existence seem like anything but a blessing? Fuck off. If I or my tribe annoy you by simply existing? Good. Die mad about it, fucker. If you are religious? God made us. That’s the only answer you will ever get and the only one you deserve. And because god made us, you will sit your ass down and accept the blessing of our presence (because god says so, your god, not mine). Personally? I think god is dead or has abandoned us so I got no skin in that game (except that I find it delicious to annoy-by-existing).

2-DEC-2025: Baking the last couple of cakes for you reader. It’s a couple more chapters. Ruth needs the right end. This commute is dumb. That last sentence brought to you by some aggressively shitty weather. In any case, I like my town and its people and the people’s taxi is a hell of a place to contemplate and scribble. We’ll get there. I’m all kinds of irritated at me when I think about the last couple chapters of Ignatius. So maybe I don’t rush this one? And honestly there’s no ending that’ll be right so fug it we ball is the only appropriate attitude to have about endings.

30-NOV-2025: Alright, here’s the plan: we’re gonna keep Cancri rolling (royal we: me and my cats). The goal is to be wrapping things up in the new year? Soft deadline. I ain’t trying to die over here. After Cancri, I’m going to try not to just dive into the next thing. I’m going to try to shimmy the website’s look a little. Archives (mine) will still be the rolling scroll of this shit (these blog post rolling updates). Done novellas are going to be condensed into single web pages (it’s getting messy on the back end). Again, I didn’t think I or these stories would still be here when I started. I miss the old iteration of this site: the green and black DOS is back look. But it’s readability and I’m old (41 so not really but shit hurts and my eyes are changing, father time is undefeated). My goal is to be inviting to people here, and if that means changing the wrapping paper? I’ll do it to get eyeballs on my words. No apologies. Suggestions? Something you wanna see here or something you liked? Talk to me. FB is on lockdown. My bluesky contact is above. Stay hydrated. Be good to your people.

30-NOV-2025: Reader, thanks for your patience. I started Cancri shitty in 1995 on Earth. Re-booted the story and started at the Cancrin Calamity (which was a better narrative choice). Ruth and Gary weren’t sposed to make it (I mean look at the size of that fuckin’ Geauntoord Von-Neuman Mining Rig monster). But now. Here. 6 chapters in. I have accepted the fact of their survival (for a little while at least). It’s Ruth’s book. I think I know the ending. The goal is to bake some more narrative treats during the holiday(s) season. I am the socialist grinch dropping free to read bed time stories on you meant to counter the capitalist kitsch we all read and eat. Enjoy. Also, fuck a chatbot (but not literally like the tech bros like to do). Those things are trash (and sentience is an embodied concept as the post-humanist’s say… that is a computer isn’t a brain and consciousness isn’t code… bad metaphors don’t hold water (just the opposite they leak)). Alan Turing was the shit, and AI as we know it is born of (and only of) the type of man who tortured, humiliated, and killed him.

29-NOV-2025: Cancri 6 is a short one and I’m ok with it. I think shorter chapters are good in the story and we don’t write to page or word count here. “This is not a war book.” Ruth’s gonna be their Odysseus, but that’s wrong. That’s what the book’s about, Cancri. You’ll see. Thanks for your patience, Reader. It will be up later today? I keep effin’ with it. Poking at it (the chapter).

24-NOV-2025: Reader, I got some scribbling in on the bus ride home from work. It was lovely (as The People’s Taxi always is). Might change the process and result a bit, and I’m here for it. I’m a nice few pages into Cancri 6, and it’s Ruth’s book so like the whole plan for the thing is shot. Seriously, Ruth and Gary were supposed to get got but they’re adorable so… here we are. I do this every novella: burn the plan down and make a new one half way through. So there’s that. I’m uh try and get this chapter up over Thanksgiving weekend. If you do American thanksgiving? Do me a favor and be like “you should read this weird Exile shit…” but not to the whole fam (just the cool weird cousin you blow gauge with). Stay hydrated. Maintain whimsy and morale so that you may befuddle the fash. *cue benny hill theme *

23-NOV-2025: Hey Reader, it was a shitty writing weekend. My apologies.

22-NOV-2025: Exile is for the people. No Clankers. No bots. No capitalist Kitsch. No fash trash. You will never see a Dolores plastic popcorn bucket topper destined for a landfill. Socialism or barbarism. The future has to obligation to endure our fuckups and we have an obligation to future people to endure the bullshit now. Stay hydrated. You know the rest. It’s a writing day, we early in the chapter I’m sorry to say. I’m tired and I’m trying. You keep doing the same, Reader.

20-NOV-2025: Reader, I’m working on it–both Cancri 6 and a schedule shimmy. I’m adapting. It will probably make me write slower. That’s probably better? This is silly to me, but this is my spider opera in the way that FF6 had an opera in it and was a meta-opera. I just read that sentence back and decided I need to expedite my trip to bed. Be kind to yourself so you can be kind to others. Stay hydrated. Befuddle the fash. More to come.

16-NOV-2025: I don’t like leaving transitional chapters hanging (we’re walking toward the meat of the plot type chapters). But half-way cliff hangers? Back in the day, little me (“orange on a toothpick”, big head on a “wee lil’ pillow”) might’ve cried himself to sleep at the prospect of waiting a whole summer to see if captain Jeen luke space jammies would get rescued from the bad space robots. I’m saying I’m not gonna make you wait a whole season (hopefully) for Cancri 6. I am however trying not to be creatively fatalistic. So I’m gonna provision myself with proper snacks and adapt to a shimmy in my work routine(s) and back burner Cancri while I do that (because I love my space spiders enough to slow cook the work when rushing it would eff it up). I’m trying to bake these narrative cakes, not ruin them. Apologies Reader, and thank you for your patience. You taking care of yourself? You should.

15-NOV-2025: Reader, I got a big sad right now, and I’m trying to find a path forward with it. Writing whimsically about space spiders weathering their end of days (that weren’t the end of days) is a big part of that. But I’m doing triage and seeing that I need to take care of myself consistently so that there may be more writing. I’m tired. And I’m continually disappointed by the kind of people who see things like empathy and good faith as weaknesses. I’m continually broken hearted over every day sadism and sociopathy and other anti-social nonsense. A-social means you’re a misanthrope. Anti-social means you act in ways that make ‘the social’ impossible. The former is curmudgeonly, the latter unsafe.

13-NOV-2025. Hey Reader, I’m working on it. No, not writing. I’m trying to clear some responsibility from my plate so I have space to write words. Here’s the deal, I was really fatalistic when I started this site (didn’t think I’d be here by end of Dolores). And now I’m still here, and taking up space. And I think that’s neat. But in case I keel over or something mid story (any story, Cancri or whatever comes next). Just don’t let anybody shit on my work. Dolores is my baby. I’m Autistic. I’m a socialist. I wrote these words alone and in pretty shitty isolation and de-facto exile. This is bread and roses shit. Every word of it. This is “every part of the human tapestry makes it to the future or none of us deserves to” shit. And if anyone tries to claim mangle my work as anything else? And if I have delighted you at all? Don’t let some fash take my words (without setting them straight). Thanks. I’m trying. More Cancri coming if I can get through this BS.

11-NOV-2025: Reader, more Cancri comes. When? I know not. I gotta go to the 9 to 5 that is my only source of income. We in Exile (royal we) work hard so that our cats might have a better life. Stay hydrated. Be kind, first to yourself so that you may be kind to others. Befuddle fash-trash. Keep your head up and your stick on the ice.

8-NOV-2025: I want it to be known that in reality, I bear no ill will toward the good people of Cleveland or Ohio. But commitment to bit and the apocalyptic dad-joke we in Exile are committed to is this: Cleveland has unexplained and above average odds of gettin it on worlds with apocalyptic/near apocalyptic events. Just math-accident I guess. Can’t be helped if I wanna tell you these stories about these worlds (I do). In any case, Cancri episode 5 is live with more to come. Be kind to yourself so you might be kind to others. Hydrate. Befuddle them that got to be befuddled.

6-NOV-2025: Reader, Cancri 5 is rough cut and getting some love this weekend. This is my prayer, not to forces sacred or profane, but to you my fellow human reading this. We live in dark times and may my baby space spiders and puffins and cephalopeople and shaky jake coffepot robots in the stories above help you maintain whimsy, amen. If nothing else, fuck it, I’m amusing me. Stay hydrated reader. Befuddle fash.

6-NOV-2025: Reader, Cancri 5 rolls along and I’m finally getting traction on the next little chapter-episode of whatever kind of novella this is. Ruth and Gary gotta carry bad news to a people who don’t like bad news (find me one who does, a people who has any number of legs or eyes or arms who likes bad news). I’m letting the parentheticals (nested even) run wild in this text. Though perhaps I shouldn’t. It’s a little spider joke (get it?). Commitment to bit is the substance of all good dad jokes. And though I have no children, only cats, I am of the appropriate age for that kind of wince-cringe humor (and I crave it like one craves a sharp cheese). Hydrate. Eat. Be kind. Do what you can when you can to help others eat. Bread and roses motherfuckers.

31-OCT-2025: Happy Halloween, whether or not you do Halloween or call it thus. Everybody, every kind of person, celebrates the harvest. And everybody tells stories about what’ll get you (for practical survival’s sake and to delight in survival). Enjoy them all. Stay hydrated. Befuddle fascists.

27-OCT-2025: Cancri 4 is done and up. 3 is a transitional episode and I had to get to the meat-substitute of the story. Got 4 in process yesterday and done today (riding a wave of “i like where my story is going”). I’m not working this fast on this book (sorry, can’t) but I do not at all like “piss-trickling” half chapters. It’s undignified. Here’s a statement of ethos on AI and why I do what I do: I have a 9 to five, and I do it to pay the bills. This is a thing I do for me and the handful of people who read and its also a “fuck you” to AI. Here’s what techbros want: to train bots on your shit, build an IP fence around your effort and art, and then charge other people for bot-mangled slurry versions of real human creativity (but without all that human shit like dreaming of being free or living in an even moderately better world). So, with hubris that would be at home in one of my stories, if the bots are gonna steal everyone’s shit (are doing so right now)? Reader, I’ll give you my stories free to read (not to thieve) as an act of faith that you’re better than the tech bro shitbird I’m flipping off right now (the guy trying to depress your wages with his chatbot that is also is girlfriend). It’s not John Henry racing a steam powered anything. It’s a boring middle aged socialist nerd slow cooking prosetry chili. Reader, hydrate. Remember to eat. You know the rest.

25-OCT-2025: Cancri 3 is done and up. Short. It’s a transitional chapter. Sorry Reader, its comin. We’re already baking the next cake. In the realm of life, how you doin? Yeah. It’s grimy out there if you still have a soul. Hydrate so you don’t dydrate. We say a new prayer in this house: “May thy riot gear chip and shatter. May thy Stingray blow up in your face. May that LRAD toy end up microwaving the user. May the tools of oppression blow up in the face of the oppressors. Amen.” We also know in Exile that god’s dead or gone on a timeline too long for us to wait. We answer our own prayers on Earth or they do not get answered. Fascists are cowards. Every last one of them (especially the ones in that STASI surveillance role). Be brave and aggressively whimsical in your defiance of them.

22-OCT-2025: Whew. Cancri Episode 3 (real real) rough cut is done. The thing is coming. I’m slow right now. I am a sad bastard. Reader, I am baking these cakes for you though, and we’re gonna get through some shitty times. Hydrate. Be kind (to yourself and others).

21-OCT-2025: I do this thing where I write out of order and forget that I write out of order and spend days banging my head against walls of words because I forgot that I…write things out of order. Chapter 3 of Cancri 55(e) is mapped in my electrochemical meatball and as soon as I can coax it out I will post in on this site. Thank you for your patience in this matter, Reader. Hydrate. Be kind to yourself. Befuddle fash (as one does). It’s ok to be tired (he said to himself).

20-OCT-2025: Sometimes, it’s a whole night of writing just to make a few paragraphs that aren’t going to be in the thing or anything. Sometimes I’m cool with that, and sometimes I feel like Darwin writing in his journal on that stupid boat writing about all the stupid species and their stupid origins. I’m so fuckin’ tired. Hydrate, Reader. Maintain morale and whimsy and be kind to each other so you might befuddle the fash that bedevil all of us.

18-OCT-2025: Writing goin’ slowly cause I’m going slowly. Protest day, I got places to be. No Kings. No fascist trash. No dictators. The United States will pass Trump and his ilk through its bowels and continue on, a far better place on the other side. Remember kids, STASI men (they’re always STASI men regardless of the flag) are weak (that’s why they admire intellectually and sexually inadequate men like Trump). They’re voyeurs. Authoritarianism is a disease and it hits men, the men with tiniest balls, first and hardest. They’ll growl and spit and posture, but they’re weak. That’s why they need 10k worth of tacticool and body armor to stare down people in inflatable costumes. Stay Hydrated. Look out for your people. And when you spot cops on your side of things? Sing out. Do not shut up. To the pig reading this? You’re on the wrong team.

10-OCT-2025: Cancri 3. I’m scheming it. I did not expect to be so emotionally invested in Ruth the spider. So there’s that. There’s two Archivists, and I’m both of them. The moment you start scribbling a little world detailed enough for just one tiny spider (let alone a whole civilization worth), is the moment you start hating the thing that threatens it: archivist hubris. The one who is actually an expert on Cancrins, on space spiders, is gonna come with the intent of beating the stupid out of the Mad Archivist. That’s the book. The shitty first draft is what I’m writing toward in bedtime story parable. You wanna know why (in this fictitious universe) the Earth had paranoid space spiders spying on us during the Cold War? Shit, to tell you that, I gotta tell you how the space spiders got all traumatized and paranoid. It’s a big-un so get comfy. Hydrate, Reader. Be kind to yourself. Outlive shitty people out of spite (if for no other reason).

9-OCT-2025: Reader, I am now fishing typos out of Cancri 2. I did that thing I did in the old early days of this site: felt so glad to finish a thing in the way I desired that I ran with it. Mad archivist’s overreach is the point of the parable. I take no issue with their choice to do crimes. It’s the cost to the Cancrins that I-as-author have a problem with, and that god-hubris is what the god-abandoned multiverse I write in don’t really like either. Cancri 3 is coming. I’m trying to motivate myself to do necessary life chores, but wouldn’t ya know it? These nightmare times we live in are exhausting. Be kind to yourself that you may be kind to others. Hydrate. Befuddle fascist chukklefuckery at every opportunity.

8-OCT-2025: Done and up. 3 is comin’. Gotta get granular w the implications of the Mad Archivists hubris.

7-OCT-2025: Cancri 2 almost done.

6-OCT-2025: Did a lot of people stuff over the weekend that was not writing. But not surprisingly that makes words come easier. I cannot and will not assess quality of those words, but damnit I’m rolling my face on the keyboard once again. I’m aiming for this coming weekend for Cancri 2 in a completely arbitrary and meaningless deadline. The mission is to get a spider up a spire. Ruth is climbing. Advancing the plot. Tall spire. Might take a while. Hydrate Reader.

2-OCT-2025: Man I’m rambling on about the spider Gallileo, and I can’t tell if it’s another bad idea or the best I’ve ever had. So I’m gonna get a lil more herb and this gummy and let it ride. Cancri 2 is coming. Reader, drink water and be kind to yourself and others so you can befuddle fascist stupidity. Also woe to thee, Cleveland. Condolences to the Gribe.

1-OCT-2025: We’re on track (royal we: me and my cats Cooper and Molly). Alright, every text is a kinda low stakes experiment. For Ignatius, since the people are bullshitters I made myself 1/1.5 draft parts of the text involving Puffins/Ignatians telling stories. In this text, its treating everything as a self contained (if not sufficient) vignette. I want each chapter to pass the Warhol protocol: “Every picture is the only picture…” and still work together and its really not that serious because these are silly little stories and im scribbling. Reader, it is also that serious (and more serious, even). It’s coming. Thanks for your patience.

1-OCT-2025: Sometimes I forget I can just not finish the dead end I started writing down. So I’m doing that and Cancri 2 is coming whenever this spider climbs this tower in this vignette. I dunno, reader. Could be days. Hydrate. Befuddle the fascists (it’s not hard, they’re fuckin’ stupid, every last one). Maintain whimsy (if only for sake of morale).

27-SEPT-2025: “Establish a conspiratorial air” is some might as well be training manual language that people who do work gathering information keep in their pocket. I just took a walk and had a random guy claiming to be a preacher man (who ain’t mention the name of his flock, and boy howdy are clergy always eager and happy to do that) chat me up. I live in the United States, and I don’t know if you know this Reader, but disappear is a verb in this country and they’re snatching people off the street and using a racist immigration crackdown as justification. Now, this fella wanted help making contact with ‘spanish speakers’ in the community, and of course there’s a reason for his urgency (a ready made innocent enough excuse to circle back to his goal: info on where people of a certain set gather). Here’s the deal. Paranoia does the devil’s work for him, but the 21st century is ‘trust but verify’ times. How do you build solidarity when the fash and the good old COINTELPRO playbook has a million ways to poison any sense of community? I’m not being smarmy and offering answer, I’m saying that’s the thing you all out in the world gotta answer. Stay hydrated. Befuddle them fascist turds. Always.

23-SEPT-2025: Chapter or episode 2 is in process. Mad archivist writing some Gee-Tee derelict tech into contact with Cancri to alter time by putting the spiders on the Von Neuman Altar. Gotta see if I can hit the cosmic horror marks. There’s a trick to it that I’m not saying in the clear (and I don’t know if I can accomplish it anyway). I like that I’m populating my little garden. We’ve got the Cephalopeople of Keppler 22 b, the Gliesian bugs, the humans of Earth, fungi moving interstitially through the multiverse like their kin do in our soil. Now, we’ve got the Cancrin Space Spiders and the Gee-tees. Through no fault of my own, there’s now 3 species in the book to say something about humanity.

20-SEPT-2025: If you’re gonna be treated like a threat-pariah by fascist trash you might as well earn their ire. Transgender people are trying to exist. Yesterday, someone in authority in my government (US) did advance the claim that this whole group of people, transgender humans (which cuts across every color/culture/creed) is somehow a threat. Well here’s the deal, accelerationism. The nihilistic desire to see humanity’s end, that’s a thing. Accelerationism is the baby of the tech bros. It’s their money. It’s their backing. It’s Peter Thiel and the boys desire to see society collapse and “rule” the ruins from a yacht in international waters or a spider hole bunker. But those are the guys who bankrolled Trumpism so we won’t be doing anything to hinder their wants or whims. We will, in this country, continue to destroy the economy and human dignity in the interest of making fascists and their most deluded hillbilly lumpenprole fans “happy.” Defy that shit. Defy it however your skillset allows.

19-SEPT-2025: Cancri Episode 1 is up and live. I like it better than before. EOT is the counterweight to the silly little story on the silly little world. Look, end of the day the whole thing is a silly little story. And that’s what humans do: we tell silly little stories. So here’s my next one. Archives at EOT. It’s an unfunny joke I am dad-joke cringe humor committed to that in my fictional multiverse one’s reward for the non-zero lottery of making it to the afterlife (at least as far as these characters know), the reward for living a life in a world that makes you work for understanding? An afterlife more esoteric in the way it hides its answers and time and distance spans that can and will drive you mad. I like that, I guess, yearning on an unfathomable time-span. And I like sci-fi that tries to see humans from the eyes of the other (as doomed an exercise as that is). I’m trying to look at us from a species that’s going to have good reason to be a bit fearful (and defensive if not hostile). Reader, I know what the whole story looks like. Not sure how we get there (because I’m uh try to break it half way through as I tend to do). Stay hydrated. Take care of yourself and be decent to people. Befuddle fash. Those goals are not contradictory but mutually reinforcing.

17-SEPT-2025: Selling my car. She runs but doesn’t drive (so we aren’t selling Vicky for much). She is a car of legend, for real and for true. Best thing Forge Motors ever made (or will). This particular one was both my grandfather’s ride and the car that inspired the 1990-Something-Silver-Forge-Sedan. Ya gotta get superstitious (lest you accidentally become it) when you have an old pay-check eater. So Vicky (the car) has a legend that includes Victoria (the eldritch horror that haunts the ride). Any noise I couldn’t afford to get fixed? Vicky angry. She must be calmed by car shamans. Fluid leaks? She fed. I promise to have Victoria properly exorcised by the time the ride is sold (which is not a legal requirement where I live, I’m just such a nice d00d). Yes Reader, I’m also working on Cancri. It’s comin.

15-SEPT-2025: I’m alive over here. Writing too. Cancri is coming. Wrote the first few paragraphs of the thing, and we’re back at Archives where I think I do some of my best things. Look, the story about the space spider in Cold War cover on Earth at the End of History is still happening (but mostly in the background and relayed by my entirely reliable archivist narrator). Hydrate, Reader. And befuddle fash. I remember a brief stint on the overnight shift at a shit job where the sun coming up had me looking for some old Wizard every shift. Ain’t no wizard coming. The wizard is you. Take heart. Be kind. Fight nihilism (in all its forms).

8-SEPT-2025: Reader, I’m re-setting Cancri. This is the loophole around my ‘no takebacksies’ rule. I get to burn a text-in-process down and start over in another direction. The silly little story I was going to tell is still going to happen in the background. Dez (space spider under cover as human) and Mal (Fed interrogating her)? They ran off in 1995, got to a Cancrin spacecraft and boogied from Earth to do whatever (probably be space roomates). It’s canon in the Exile-Verse. Cancri (the other one) is coming. It might just be a one-chapter thing. It’s about Archives and intelligibility and first contact (cause they all are). It’s not about topping Unanimity. It’s about that text hit a spot I was trying to hit. So Cancri should be about doing something new (not a new version of a story I’ve already done). So I’m gonna try to do that.

8-SEPT-2025: So I took a weekend to fall into a game again: Stellaris. It’s fuckin’ glorious. Yes, you can play the pacifist space vikings in Endless Space as pacifistic as you want (but that game is 4x as fuck). Stellaris though, that’s the game we can play as the UFP (which is really all I want out of a game at this stage in life). I’m also gonna take a break from Cancri. There’s a well-executed bad idea in there, but I don’t care to waste what limited energy I have at the moment searching for decent execution of said idea. Dear Reader, I apologize and beg your patience.

2-SEPT-2025: Well, shit. I wrote a paragraph today. I think it’s a lovely paragraph, for now. I aim for loose non-binding deadlines only ever, and if my words aren’t here. Well, when they come back and when they’re done with their hangover, we will cavort. We’ll get there. Reader, thank you for your patience. Go drink some water and befuddle the fascists. Confound the foe.

1-SEPT-2025: Reader, forgive me. I did not write much this weekend (and I ate the plums you were saving and they were fuggin’ delicious and cold and refreshing). I did however play a lot of video games (a feat I shall reproduce in a moment). Cancri chapter 2 is coming (I know not when). Probably in the next two weeks. Also, The Death of Stalin is a lovely flick whatever your politics (no reason, just dig the movie). Stay hydrated. Befuddle fascists. If prayer is your way? Say a prayer in honor of the great and terrrible mortality that unites prince and pauper, peasant and man vein (oops vain) enough to call himself king.

28-AUG-2025: Cooper does convalesce (lovely word, right?) and I did write today. Cancri 55(e) episode/chapter 2 is coming, though I know not when. I dunno what this new routine is going to do to my approach to life or my writing routine yet. I guess we’re gonna reset. That’s nice for Cancri. I didn’t leave enough time between Unanimity and this. At least life did that for me. I have another tangent idea that maybe I’ll circle back to. It’s a take on the Truman Show where the subject can’t escape literally so easily but can use the megaphone to lead a lot of venture capital off a cliff. It’s’ an exercise in making an existing story more literal and less at the same time. It’s not really a ‘me’ text, but it would be fun/funny to write.

28-AUG-2025: Apologies, but not really, for the pause. Had to get my fuzzy guy through his medical thing. Cooper (Papa Coops) is ok. Thanks doc(s) and other practitioners of feline medicine. Dude is a sweetheart on any old day, but nothing brings out the purrs like the absence of dental pain, nah mean? Tomorrow I go back to work, but my commute is an epic poem. Mass transit is awesome, and I’m grateful to be in one of the rare patches of my country where it functions-actually-functions. But 5 miles will take one hour, so let’s not lose our heads here. I’m saying it’s gonna look to me like when I was last a graduate student and tried to carry my work on my back. This was back when I knew the DMV map because of Fallout 3 and I thought I was going somewhere in life (here, here is where I was going :/ ). I’ll live, and I’m properly motivated to get my ancient car back on her feet again. Vicky is allowed to die when I (and Victoria the thing that haunts the car) allow her to pass on (and not one minute or mile before).

25-AUG-2025: Car just took a shit. Mercifully. In the parking lot where I live. This is the week where the cat has his surgery (and the effort to make the money appear to cover the surgery pays off). I’m grateful to have the vacation time I’m taking now. It’s a poverty staycation. It’s where plan re-plan how I survive the next patch of life. We got busses of the sort you get in the upper midwest. I am lucky that my car did not do what it did on the road, at speed. But I got the kinda luck that tries to kill one in other ways, and that’s not really fun or easy to contend with. So hey, reader, if you’ve enjoyed any of this work? At all? If you’ve drawn any kind of inspiration, when I pass the plate with an illustrated volume? Please buy it. I’m putting the project on pause cause I gotta eat and figure out how to survive my good luck.

23-AUG-2025: I’m not doing very well at being me. I’m gonna burn some extra vacation time this week because I am exhausted from my cat’s health saga. I wanna spend recovery time w him. And this weekend, this time set aside by schedule for rest and recreation, got shit on by fate. Since I have PTO, I don’t have to accept that. So I won’t. Recreation is a literafigurative word and is an absolute human necessity in all times (especially dark times).When I lose that recreation time, or when I see other people’s recreation (and thus dignity) fucked with in any way? It makes me fucking angry. And I’m too broke to ever take a vacation so cat staycations in this little weird town I love are all I do anyway. I’ve also made the determination that I should just mask forever, aut- friendly environment or no. And I’m not explaining that because I don’t have to.

21-AUG-2025: Reader, I’m working on it. Chapter 2 is coming, but we gotta maintain quality control when it comes to these science fictions. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is middle aged and sleepy. I’m baking these cakes when I am not nine to fiving it. Stay hydrated. Befuddle fascists. Don’t let the world take your whimsy without a great deal of effort (make the world work for it is what I’m saying).

20-AUG-2025: It’s a writing night. It’s an “I don’t wanna” night. Reader, I’m fighting with it because I need the right MacGuffin for the other spider (the one that did most them murders). I have the right MacGuffin. It’s a phrase: “the end of history…” that needs to be literalized (attached to an object of pursuit in the narrative world). It shall be. But it’s fuggin irrelevant. It’s not important. This MacGuffin. So it is extremely important (it is though, its an aesthetic choice). It’s inevitable. I make a plan and immediately want to take it apart, and maybe that’s why planning is a good thing to do (even and especially if you plan to improvise). Cancri 55(e) chapter 2 is coming. Reader, I know not when.

13-AUG-2025: Chapter 1 is done and up and the teaser for 2 is gonna sit a bit (a bit being an entirely undefined span of time determined by my focus energy and general moody-ness). I turn 41 tomorrow, and it is my modest goal to do another year of this shit so that I might make it to the Douglas Adams answer year (to giggle wryly that there is no answer you silly billies). Anyway Reader, chapter 2 is a lovely little baby zipper plot jaunt. Grampa cat is doin well (I gotta wrestle the Nemian Lion twice a day). Stay hydrated. Befuddle fascists. Be kind.

12-AUG-2025: Chipping away at the rest of the first chapter. It’s almost done. I’m aiming for end of week/weekend. I know the ‘how’ of two and whence-goes-the-zipper plot. I’m trying something new in this book. I’m writing to a narrative location I determined on paper. That way I can argue w myself outside the text and in advance. We’re taking things of our plate (royal we that is me). May my reach exceed my grasp, but in a ‘happy accident’ way (side note: deep abiding love for both Bob Ross and everybody who borrows that man’s words). “Hydrate or dydrate” and befuddle them fascist fools at every opportunity.

11-AUG-2025: Cancri 55(e) is in-process. The teaser has been replaced w the first couple of pages of the book. “First Contact. It’s a process!” (that can include hostage situations). More to come.

7-AUG-2025: Every day is a writing day. But some days are, words ain’t coming let’s piss off and play Rocket League days. That’s today. In mundane doesn’t matter good news: post Lyme treatment my hands will let me play pretty well (for like beer league rando dude).

6-AUG-2025: Sometimes writing is like slamming the body part you care most for in a car door repeatedly (until its not). The third draft of the intro to Cancri is the one I like. Ignatius had a ‘write toward it’ first chapter that I am glad I kept for happy accident purposes. It’s the new book that’s like the old stuff. Ignatius is the closest thing to one-draft-and-go I’ll ever go with, and I love my Puffins. I have this dream of a dad-joke where people who don’t know what the hell a Puffin is read the whole book imagining these land-pirana devil birds only to google the word Puffin and meet the cute little Auk. I like that thought. Brings me a giggle. Stay hydrated, Reader. Befuddle fascists and be kind to yourself and others.

5-AUG-2025: I am currently using writing (more the idea of it), to keep myself focused while we wait for the cat’s surgical date. It’s good for my mental health, less so for producing words on a page in any quantity. One of the challenges of Cancri, the new novella, is that its more put together and planned than anything I’ve done for this site has been. There’s a lot to be said for “no, I hate the plan, fuck the plan” or “shit I didn’t think that far into the book… buy time….” One of the blessings I didn’t intend to receive when I started this site is this: sitting there karaoke-ing to my cats and remembering (in greater detail than my old middle-aged ass thought possible) my grandfather’s “greatest hits” and some of my dad’s old-bullshitter techniques for keeping a bedtime story going. I gotta go take my Nimean Lion (one of them) to the doc in a bit here. Dear Reader, I shall endeavor to get some writing, or at least rolling my face upon the keyboard, time in this week (with whatever fingers remain to me after this whole “go to the vet again” and “give a cat who will fuck you up a pill 2x daily forever”).

1-AUG-2025: “again again” isn’t mine. I heard the song again (again) where I stole it (accidentally) from my favorite rapper, and that’s my bad. You should listen to the Blackhole Superette album (and everything else the man has ever done, which you’ll want to get to after that album if you don’t already know). What’s more, there’s that quote about bad writers borrowing and good ones stealing that’s true bullshit (for the record I ain’t steal that one on purpose). It’s the ‘how’ of it (always). I’m trying to aim you at the art I love when I use other people’s bricks (self consciously and with great care most often). That’s the right way (right-est) way, and to be clear: the bible, myth, and public domain art. The way AI steals is gross. It’s abomination. And boy howdy if I hear another motherfucker talk that em-dash shit, I’m gonna force feed them my MA thesis and all the other non-NT people’s work that AI tick/trait was derived from. In any case, it’s a writing weekend. I dunno how much I’m gonna get done. And I’m having a moment here, Unanimity had that thousand-year jump that juiced the prosetry–gave me context to get baroque with the minimalism. I have no holy highground to jump back from the narrative here, and that’s a good creative challenge for me and my one trick (zipper plots). Anyway, Cancri 55(e) and Earth(0x20) and the fucked up first contact that don’t end the world (OR DOES IT?). Dark forest hypothesis. Says the firmament is full of life, just rotten with it, but they’re scared to say ‘hi’ to each other (maybe for good reason?). Let’s see if I can pull it off.

28-JULY-2025: Writing the thing. Don’t know what it’s called yet. Here it comes: Cancri 55(e). Fuck, I’m terrible with names. This world doesn’t end (at least I don’t think it does). Times are too dark for that, but due to fractal self-similarity and its recursive reverberations through the Exile-verse, “Woe to thee Cleveland” is always in effect (rules is rules).

28-JULY-2025: Cancri is percolating. The star can’t be the title, can it? I like Leptik (the name of the language, it’s an EOT interlude in one of the earlier books, Epitaph maybe?). So there we go. I got a sick cat, and we gotta push back the surgery he needs so we can get his old timer thyroid calm, and I’m over here daily asking myself a question I would like to ask in a fictional frame only and ever because it does hurt to ask in the reality I live in. My guy is a tough cookie, and he’s doing well and has a puncher’s chance. Then there’s the difference between mercy mild and the technical definition of it. I would like that fine distinction to stay over the horizon or at the very least the fuck out of my house, ya know? My boy, Cooper, is doing well. He’s laying on my chest right now, turkey leg dangling lazy off of me, purring. We’re gonna put on some crooner shit in a minute. He loves Sinatra. Shit you not. Got him right as the pandemic bit and me and my ex split, and for the 6 months or so of having this grampa cat that did not like me (no way no how) I was at-home karaoke-ing a lot of crooners. He came and snuggled up to me while I was doing my very best bad Sinatra impression, and the guy’s had a soft spot for the Rat Pack ever since. I guess what I’m saying is this, I’m never gonna be ready to lose the old guy.

23-JULY-2025: Thinking Cancri. Taking a break. Doing the 9 to 5 dance and tending to chores so I can focus on writing and living. Cat is doin well. We live in cautious optimism land. AI. I hate it (not machine learning, LLM’s I hate them). No one has my permission to use this site’s content to train AI. I’m too old and tired for some John Henry race-the-steam-plagiarist shit. I’m old enough (bout 41) to know you’re suppose to honor-not-emulate the guy who dies at the end of John Henry’s story. So we’re gonna slow roll the writing in defiance of the gross plagiarism machine, and in a genre that is simple (elegant) I’m gonna try to do a thing a machine can’t (even when it does). There’s a thing I do on the page (a couple actually) the chatbots can’t. And I’m throwing at least one more novella up here episodically: Cancri.

22-JULY-2025: Reader, I made a to-do list. I despise lists. I hate them. But I made the list so I could do the chores of life to sufficiently organize my life to find time to write.

21-JULY-2025: February 4, 2025 (thereabouts) is when I started Unanimity. Finished mid-July. I’m ok spending 5 months of the free time I can steal from myself to produce that text. The story of me writing that thing is in Archives (top of the site) where it belongs and the next thing is percolating. I’m taking a break still, and the little placeholder teaser is not next-book content. Morningstar was a creation story and Epitaph an Ending (in a multiverse that abhors them). Dolores books were yellow brick roads to sacrificial love (and the resentment of it). Ignatius is about going home, to a home that isn’t yours anymore (and island that wants to eat you). Unanimity is about eco-rage at disposability and the eating of the rich. Next Book is about “the dark forest hypothesis”: the firmament is full of life (just rotten with it), but all that bible black is a big dark wood and would it be wise to shout out? Past that? It’s percolating. On paper and post-it scrolls. Project goals: well executed bad idea that got a little whimsy and poetry clinging to its bones, a text somebody might waste/not waste an evening or two of reading on. If I have done that so far? Thank for your time and attention. Next book coming, when I know not.

21-JULY-2025: My cat is doing well, so the optimism is overriding reason, as I knew it would.

AFTERACTION ON UNANIMITY: I really like Unanimity. I’m proud of maintaining that style whole text (the vibe someone said they liked in a workshop class in undergrad forever ago “but I doubt you can maintain it whole text…” Motherfu… Well I did (20 years later and no one give a fuck.. but I do give a fuck and I did the thing). I love ‘lofi’ because I love my Soviet Heretic: Zamyatin. And I love writing lofi because I can make my claim that the genre (whatever the medium one uses) ought to be rich-minimalism or baroque-minimalism. Lush sketches. Excessively lush. Yeah. That’s really all I got. Oh man, that and this: the book rhymes with Ignatius and Epitaph and Dolores in ways that are precious and important to me. Plot, or the plot of one book or text, is not driving things in Exile. Character is. Poetry is. The sacred Circle Liturgical is a driving force. Fractal logic is part of it: self-similarity above and below in books (and across the z axis across worlds and texts in this multiverse). If you’re looking carefully in Epitaph (less of a success but it was fun to write and my cat is in it so its a win) and here in Unanimity, there’s opportunity for someone of faith to see god’s machinations (though god is absent in Exile, they walked the fuck off and left us). And if you’re not a theist (like me), there’s an opportunity to consider the firmament with a little awe at the majesty of creation–even and especially if creation was only the product of accident without intention. Stay hydrated and befuddle fascists at every opportunity. Make opportunities.

19-JULY-2025: My big boy is recuperating. Cooper is a hell of a cat. “Rationally superstitious” is a contradictory state I aim for. But I’m sentimental fool. Little big-headed dumb baby me thought them Buffalo Bills were going to win all 4 of those Super Bows (with sincerity). My boy is doing better, but he’s an old timer. And the speed with which he had an infection emerge means their might be a no good, nobody wants to see, tumor surprise. And I’m sitting here trying to soak up every hug my guy wants to give me, and that’s a blessing. The student loan shit is the sword of damocles and always has been. But my guy is gonna get his peace and care and I’m gonna do my thing: ‘pray’ for the wisdom to recognize the difference between fighting for my friend and fighting to make him continue to suffer (to see the moment soberly when we are at that point). I have an elder cat and a lil goblin found-cat to take care of, and I’m enjoying my break. Writing: I got a jumping spider as my background on my computer at work and I have some post-it scroll notes and I’m scribbling (when and only when) when whimsy hits me. Gonna sketch the Leptiks (the offended if you call them spiders people of Cancri 55 whateverthefuckletteritis). They’re the ones whose language taught me the Circle Liturgical: the how and why of sacred repetition.

18-JULY-2025: Cautiously optimistic about the health of my old timer cat. Papa Coops is doing better. Reader, I don’t know if you noticed this, but a dignified end (and the struggle for it) is a big part of Exile (this site and the fictions it contains). Trying to savor the time with my guy in case my hope is false. Taking little notes on the next text, and my after-work routine is less Cooper yelling at me to take cat hug breaks from writing and more just coming home and letting him nap on me. Cats is good huggers. Dogs? Wonderful. Love them, but they’re people pleasers. Man’s best frienemy is where it’s at.

16-JULY-2025: I’m letting Unanimity breathe a little bit. I wanna get my “its done” re read and do the little after-action of a novella (what I see that worked and what didn’t, yada yada). I’m gonna get to that (like I’m proud of how I made Unanimity ‘rhyme’ w Epitaph and Endlings and that came out well). If I get far enough into this? Every text is its own an an echo too. Woo. In other news, it rains on the just and unjust alike. Cooper, aka Papa Coops, is my big old 15 year old cat, and we just had a vet adventure today. And now we gotta hope for the best and brace for its opposite. And I am not ready to lose my friend. Cat with a Tux that puts Blue Eyes to shame (and he swears he knew Frank personally). He got big old tummy biscuits. Cooper does not run. He rumbles. I got him when he was 10, cause he was trying to fight this lady’s service dog. He did not like me, and I didn’t think he ever would. Took bout 6 months (starting right at the beginning of the pandemic) to build any kind of relationship with the guy. Now, I’d rather take the heart out my fuckin’ chest than say goodbye to him. Man, I would go full Faust for another year or two of Cooper happy and healthy enough to be happy.

14-JULY-2025: Reader, I wrote you a story. It’s called Unanimity. It’s got a tech-bro Macguffin. Eco-rage parable about rendering people and the whole world disposable (woe to thee that do). I hope you like it. Editing the last bit was pretty breezy because writing it kicked my ass (and because that’s the time for brevity in this genre: “half brief and twice strong”, even and especially when you took your time to get there). Enjoy the cake. I’m gonna take a break and try to pester people to read this. If you like it (or hate read it) come tell me. I’m on bluesky. Maybe this is the one we try to get illustrated and bound?

13-JULY-2025: Unanimity (8 / 8.5 / 9-Epilogue) are rough draft done. I’m dumping them on the existing page (when they’re done) when they’re ready. Then I’m going to take a break for a little bit and get my life in order so I can write more later. But before that. The end to the eco-rage parable about disposability (people and things being rendered thus) and the meek’s inheritance is almost done. Also, Unanimity was written by a socialist (it me, I’m the socialist). Socialism or barbarism, broney. Stay hydrated and befuddle fascists. Them cakes are coming. They’re cooling and I gotta decorate them and make ’em look as cool as they taste.

12-JULY-2025: Uni 8 in process, and the 2nd half and epilogue are sketched as of this morning. Plan is to finish the book and let things breathe for a bit while I do the work of sorting life so I can still have enough surplus time and energy to write. Woo. This is the hopeful book with the happy ending. This is what me hopeful (this and Ignatius and Endlings) looks like. Mushroom did what humans failed to and some former humans are gonna keep that mushroom from eating everyone and everything. Its a lil eco-rage parable that veers in and out of prosetry about disposability and the long-time and horrifying-scale cost of doing economics and politics the way vain rich oligarchs insist (on threat of violence) that we do them (its about the meek and their inheritance and their being held hostage). Unanimity is my baby and I’m proud of it. This is what a ‘phase 3’ novella looks like and its almost done. It is now my intention to do laundry because clean drawers are good for morale. Stay hydrated and befuddle fascists at every opportunity, reader.

11-JULY-2025: Uni 8 is half-ish done. First draft burned down. Second draft? You know how it goes (sank into the swamp) But THIS draft is the keeper. We’re halfway home, but we are most definitely not living on prayer. End of Unanimity is coming. You’re going to have seen this iteration of Earth at 2030, 3030, and 4030. I don’t know if the epilogue gets its own page or just gets rolled into the eighth episode.

10-JULY-2025: Plan for the end of the book. It’s always something. I got this site through next April, not sure after that (never sure). Its student loans and the politics of punishment. I got two degrees I use every day and I shouldn’t have tried to do a doc, but here we are. So if its financially gnarly, I can’t afford to have this site (and I’m not comfy putting my work on a platform where what I produce is someone’s ‘right’? When its original fiction). Solution I got so far is to just throw everything in the google drive. There’s a shared-via-link drive for exile, and ifykyk. Don’t know? Don’t worry about it. There’s way worse shit happening in my country than the student loan sword of Damocles maybe falling on my ass, but this is happening/will happen to everybody who is struggling w education debt: huge payment hikes. I’m a first generation college student, and Im proud of my education. Proud of the time I spent teaching and learning, and I’m proud that I did what education allows one to do: go learn and do something new. I might get drowned financially for it, but I’m not going to call my degrees “useless” because weak people with shitty politics say so. Finishing Unanimity. Doing the next thing (Spiders, the next thing is the jumping spiders from Cancri and a botched first contact with humanity–the “mistakes were made…” kind).

9-JULY-2025: Unanimity 8 half done and coming in little chunks. Sometimes words run away. Then they come back and run away again. Hopefully what I wrote today is better than what I just wrote here. Hydrate. Eat food. Befuddle fascists. Be kind to yourself, Reader.

9-JULY-2025: I need a day off that I cant afford.

7-JULY-2025: First draft. Half the ending of Unanimity. It sucked and I hated it so I trashed it and I’m starting over. Yay. I’m baking the cakes as fast as I can without food poisoning you, Reader. Forgive me. I kept one fuckin’ paragraph (the good un… its actually not even that good). “But I am very poorly today…” It’s coming. Edit: yeah. I have a couple pages, and its the same basic idea, but better done. I get myself psyched up and act like I’m racing “AI authors” (people who want a chat bot to write for them, which is fucking stupid and lame and a waste: why should a human waste time reading a thing a human couldn’t be bothered to write? Prompting is not writing). Fuck that shit. I am not John Henry, and much as young me did not understand this, you gotta know that story all the way to the end and just hit that machine with your hammer. Why race it?

7-JULY-2025: 3 years ago in July I found a kitten on the median of a busy ass road. She was crouched by a stop sign. I played frogger to go snatch the tiny goblin. I wasn’t doing well, and Molly (the cat in the story) was “what’s shakin this here july” as the song goes. She’s awesome and a grown ass cat now. Working on Unanimity 8. It’s gonna take as long as it takes. Fireworks, dude. My grampa cat took a stress shit in protest last night, but like a gentleman he did so in a container (which I thought was classy). I’m keeping him cool and tending to him (and me) so i can go to the 9 to 5 i do to stay alive so i can write the sci fi nobody asked for. Wooooooo.

7-JULY-2025: Yeah man, I assumed I wasn’t the favorite neighbor in the apartment complex. I was not aware I was the “we’re gonna set off our fireworks right the fuck outside his bedroom” neighbor. It’s me and my cats minding our own biz. I don’t make money off this, and I know stupid people assume that anything done well must be worth money (and it’s a safe assumption cause creativity only ever comes from a place of surplus). It’s not surplus money I got (I hand solder and turn a torque driver for a living, you don’t breathe vaporized metal for a living if you’re big and rich, moron). It’s not surplus time I have, because without the possibility of overtime (unlikely as it is), I’m only making almost enough to live. Surplus creativity is the thing I have, and damned if that don’t make stupid people, the kind with no inner light, real fuckin mad. End of Unanimity is coming whenever the fuck the local morons run out of explosives.

4-JULY-2025: new self imposed deadline is when i finish it and it aint shitty (hopefully this weekend) uni 8. Befuddle them fascists and drink that damn water.

1-JULY-2025: Uni 8 is a little short of half done. We’re gettin there. Soft self imposed deadline is Friday.

29-JUNE-2025: Couple pages into Unanimity 8. It’s coming. Feeling good about it and as good as one can when things are thus out in the world. Disappear is a verb in my country, and that’s wrong. Disappearing people is evil, and I don’t care what your politics are, Habeas Corpus is a thing ya gotta have to not live in a dictatorial nightmare. So yeah, I’m trying to write something more hopeful than I usually do because the real-real of my world scares the living shit out of me and I do wish, cowardly as it is, that I could pick another world in the infinity mirror multiverse and flee. But I can’t . So. For what little it’s worth, this is my effort to ‘rage against the dying of the light’ even and especially because the world seems like a lost cause. There’s so much ideological poison that is nihilistic and “lost causer”, then there’s the cause that isn’t lost because it is worthy, right, and necessary: human beings not destroying our home. Stay hydrated so you can befuddle fascists (and so it is not your body’s want of water that befuddles you).

25-JUNE-2025: Unanimity 7 is rough cut done, and I’m gonna take a day or two to edit and polish and all that good stuff (and to cheat out on 8 to ending). Stay hydrated and be kind to yourself and yours (that you all may befuddle fascists at maximum efficiency). EDIT: Yeah, I am running with what I got. Dear Reader, I hate when I do half chapters and do endeavor to bring you the rest quick as I can when I make re-make that mistake. Baking cakes.

23-JUNE-2025: Scribbling is hard. Episodic is a choice I made. Pruned Unanimity 7 and got that isht on track. Aiming for done by-or-on this weekend. Late chapters are an extra pain in the ass (because endings and shrinking probability cones). Baking-re-baking these cakes. I am NOT taking notes on a book about jumping spider people until I am fuckin done with this one and I have an actual good idea. EDIT: Yeah I’m gonna be impulsive and put the first nugget of 7 up live “In Process.” It’s like 2 pages. That’s two pages of shame from me to you, Dear Reader. I joke. Just gotta take breaks so I don’t fall off the highwire. Episodic is a choice I made. Yup :/

22-JUNE-2025: No war. No. None with Iran. I love stories, the ones that are good and virtuous and the ones that have ideological poison in them. That’s, for sake of this argument, all of them. There’s this character, Pete Mitchell. I like him. He’s a super-butch badass pilot who has these two movies full of sweaty repressed homo-eroticism and joy genuine joy with his bros. And in the second Top Gun movie, he even does the death star trench run against an Iranian target that is better defended than any American site (Rocky 5–it is actually the Soviets who have the advantage). And when his plane goes down another American comes to save him (story of Thomas Hudner a Korean war vet who died in his corsair, they made a movie about him). And when Pete Mitchell makes it home again… we get another Top-Gun to Top Gun reference (narrative self symmetry…for we have ended the movie just as we ended the first: with American dominance). I guess what I’m saying is this, for every “heroes journey” etc. humans have ever made, there’s a good and a shit reading (multitudes of both), and it bums me out to live in a time of crisis-of-literacy. If you accept that the United States somehow should or must or has to attack Iran the big bad scarry threat? I need you to know that you’ve been ideologically poisoned and that the US took 1/4 of that country’s navy from them in less than 1 hour in the 1980s in a spat over an oil platform (Operation Praying Mantis), and they’ve never recovered. Iran’s military is not a threat (and their industrial base cannot make it one). Israel and Iran lack the navy or heavy lift capacity to actually move armies and sustain conflict. And the only people that want a war-real-war between the two? They’re war pig ghouls. Full. Stop. Stories tell us we need heroes. That’s the truth of it. Stories tell us people who do murder are heroes. That’s a filthy fucking lie.

62-JUNE-2025: This one time, I got drunk and deleted the front page of this website for a few minutes. My bad. I’m gonna go drink some water and cut the hangover off at the pass.

20-JUNE-2025: Hey Reader, I’m gonna go get drunk tonight. Politely drunk. Walk there and back cause I live in a town whose core came to be pre-ww2 (in US terms that means the berg is walkable). Demure drunk. Whimsically drunk. Doesn’t require the intervention of the constabulary drunk. Lil bitty bit of seriously drunk (but was like cool to people and their isht and the people’s peace in the process.). While I do this, drunk me shall take writing notes on the rest of unanimity. Drunk bastard me will be really mean and cynical and argue that the earth described in the ephemeral pages should end. Later-much-later, sober Adam will return to be like “no dawg, we mustn’t” and shit… it will be good times. This is not my Bukowski phase. Love is a Dog From Hell is a hell of a book, and he was trainwreck brilliant (but also and please hear the sincerity: fuck that man and all like him). We ain’t Bukowski, we just (a few nights per year, most often in spring/early summer). get drunk enough to howl at the moon (and sober enough to survive an encounter with the constable should he take issue)). So I’m gonna go get fucked up now. You, whatever you do, hydrate and befuddle fash.

19-JUNE-2025: Struggling this week so the creative cakes struggle and that’s ok. It’s comin. Trying to grind out Unanimity 7 and cheat out on 8-to-end (while maintaining quality control). Dear Reader, the struggle is real. Me. I’m the struggle. Hydrate. Befuddle fascists. Godspeed.

16-JUNE-2025: Hey. I have the ending of Unanimity. The real one I’m gonna run with. It lives somewhere between the version I wrote on paper (and now hate) and the other one I wrote on paper (and also hate) and the one in my brain that’s blurry but getting clearer as the probability cone collapses to actual shit in the world. Hope. I think I know what it looks like or how to point to it, but its ugly and maybe that’s ok. Hydrate. Be good to people. Befuddle fascists. Godspeed.

15-JUNE-2025: No Kings. The gilded turd sat wringing his tiny little hands while his tiny, underwhelming crowd watched ‘whythefuckarewehere’ looking soldiers drag a string of tin cans through the capitol. Elsewhere and everywhere, the people were present (en masse) to joyfully say “get the fuck out.” It’s cool to see the cross section of society saying ‘no’ to this shit. It’s cool to see sustained energy in defiance of jackboot bullshit. Fuck Trump. Fuck the Israeli genocide. No human is illegal (the land is stolen anyway), and god doesn’t get a say in human politics (or sure as shit not the say war mongers and rapture cultists want). Every part of the human tapestry makes it to the future (or none of us deserve to). Stay hydrated. Look out for each other. Continue to befuddle fascist trash. Godspeed.

10-JUNE-2025: Uni 6 is done and up. I dunno, 5 was the big deal and its a train-sitional (boom) chapter, but it’s still gotta ‘pop.’ Gotta give ’em the old razzle dazzle they didn’t pay for. More coming when I get to it, aiming for 2 weeks or sooner. The Herald carries the message of “woe to thee” because he has not choice, but here we see him attempting to appeal to a mushroom’s sense of mercy on behalf of the human race. Couple more chapters to go. Stay hydrated and continue to befuddle fascists.

9-JUNE-2025: Unanimity 6. “Cry Havoc” is more than half done. Looks like this guy has two thumbs and is gonna make his self-imposed soft deadline (of having this chapter done by this coming weekend) and I’m gonna probably do it better fed and hydrated than usually. Unanimity 6 and beyond are coming. Remember, this is the happy ending (not really, but we’re aiming for hopeful and that’s close as I can get).

6-JUNE-2025: Oh man. It feels nice when the story is right and the chapter is where I want it and you get traction on the words. Uni 6 is comin as are chapters beyond, but I’m also gonna like sleep and eat nutritionally balanced meals. Its slower going with treat-my-body-right more as part of the process and I’m ok with that. I’m aiming for every two weeks on chapters knowing it might be longer. So I’ve got till weekend after this one (with extensions I offer myself in advance) to get the next chapter up. Let’s go (lay on a heating pad).

2-JUNE-2025: I’m drinking normal people amounts of coffee. The power train of me is good and we’re gonna take a look at the electro-chemical meatball that is allegedly sentient. And I’m going to succeed at quitting smokes at some point in the near now. I’m working on hope as a concept because I can’t shake nihilism. Hey, you want the ‘secret’ to Exile? Of course you do (because as we have established) secrets are delicious: the whole thing from the apocrypha to the novellas is about running from nihilism and death and that part of you me and everyone we know that wants to lay down and die. I apologize, I assumed I would get somewhere. Hope in the Dolores days was “the world doesn’t have to end even when it wants to.” And Ignatius was “Ulysses can go home, he can get there and its Penelope’s story anyway.” And Morningstar was “life finds a way.” Now, it needs to be bigger and that’s what Unanimity is. I know enough about Utopian fiction and its opposite to fear Yogi B, nah mean? We’re not here for a perfect world, but some human beings who manage some kind of truce with a nature that could literally eat them. May my reach always exceed my grasp.

1-JUNE-2025: What’s hope look like? In this book and this world. I guess this is the “hey look over here” trick of what I do artistically and aesthetically: look at this world that’s even worse than ours while we can still change path. That’s not really all that hopeful. But maybe this is where Unanimity is going: mushroom, the Mighty One, ate a lot of dead things and learned a lot about how rich folks, the ones who imposed Unanimity, fucked things up. Now, in a moment of great and terrible hubris the lesser god of decomposition is going to hit reset, eat some rich folks in arcologies, and usher in the age of Consent. That’s the whole book, but follow me a while cause the how of it is what’s good and unique. Everything I do is an exercise in writing myself into a corner and writing myself back out of it. I’m a one trick pony, but that’s a pretty fucking good trick if I do say so. To the handful of people who read, thank you for your time and I hope I do one thing right. Ultimately, I am a damaged man trying to reassemble himself through a recursive process. I got me two lit degrees and love stories, a lot a lot. And there’s this pattern in male lit where its just their jerkoff fantasies. That’s it. Lot of artifice hanging on a jackoff fantasy. Ozymandias. Every one of us. I’m trying to write anything other than that? Aim imagination toward some other purpose (cause like libido time is just for me). Don’t get it twisted, I’m not judging smut (its got good and noble purpose). I’m just saying there’s hubris in saying “yo i hallucinated this story, its a banger, you ought to read it” at all. I wanna make that a lil more meaningful than my id and libido, nah mean? I think I’m doing that? Or dying trying.

31-MAY-2025: Unanimity 5 is done and up. I like it, I hope you do too. This is the best thing I’ve done on this site (this or Ignatius). Take that with a big fuckin’ grain of salt, right? “Oh ye mighty look upon my works and despair” applies to all of us. Vanity of vanities. Yadda yadda. We’re all fucking Beowulf (but more sad and basic cause we ain’t beat no Grendel, and also leave Grendel the fuck alone, dickhead). Kthanksbye. More coming.

29-MAY-2025: Unanimity 5 rough cut is done. I’m gonna try to get it edited and embellished and shit by the weekend, but I like where this is going. Cleveland is cooked. Coming soooooon.

28-MAY-2025: Bout a third of the way through unanimity 5. I am bad with self imposed deadlines, but I’m aiming for this weekend some time. And if I don’t get the chapter done I may well do a half-sies, but the pacing I want for the rest of the story is starting to reveal itself to me. What happened in that year of baroque villainy where Cain slowly sabotage-killed MacGuffin? That’s a different book, but you know how we do here in the Exile verse. We’re going to go back to the 2030s now that Macguffin (character) has served his MacGufffin (plot mechanism) purpose for little flashback narrative peeks as we move the story forward. Yes, Cleveland is gonna get it (and I even know how now). Baking these narrative cakes.

26-MAY-2025: Unanimity 5 is in process. Reader, I feel like you deserve (and the work deserves) more than a few-paragraph-at-a-time piss trickle of writing. I’m feeling my oats. I’m also tired and not charging you anything for this and the 9 to 5 does grind a little bit. More to come. Befuddle fascists and stay hydrated and watch out for falling bits of masonry or falling pieces of the capitalist mode of production in its death throes.

25-MAY-2025: Unanimity 4 is done and up and episode/chapter 5 is coming. Why are we Kilgore Trout romping through an ecological wasteland? Because we’re gonna talk about disposability and endurance and the obligation to endure and “careful what you wish for rich folks” logic on a time scale that individual humans don’t get to live. That’s one of the good things fiction and stories and art do (god continue to grant me the fuckin’ hubris to try). “Fiction is a lie that tells a truth” as opposed to bullshit, which can be delightful but contains no truth content. In any case, the road is always winding and complicates things. I like the world building I did, but Cleveland gonna have to get it next chapter.

20-MAY-2025: So Lyme disease can take a long walk off a short dock (with fucking rocks in its pockets). I’m gonna go feel like I’m dying (I’m opposite of that and taking a bunch of medication and hydrating and sleeping lots). I’m uh write. But not tonight. Worked on “woe to thee cleveland” bit second half of Unanimity chapter 4 a little. It’s nice. I like where its going.

17-MAY-2025: Been a lovely little writing weekend and we’re about halfway through Uni 4. Let’s fuggin’ go. The goal is to get the second half done and polished and up by end of week. I dunno though man, my old bones determine the pace at which I do things. Look at this, I still got a whole day for like laundry and groceries and being lazy and gathering my strength for another work week in the slow-mo-poca-clypse. About that: rage against the dying of the light and all that good shit. Hydrate. Befuddle fascist trash. I’ll see you on the 14th and beyond as we continue the building of a mass movement. No gods. No masters. Sure as shit no kings.

16-MAY-2025: First little chapter nugget of Unanimity 4 is up. I wanna write this weekend and I also wanna do laundry and shit so who knows. Goal is to get bigger chunks of the chapter and later chapters up at a time. I dunno bout that though because royal-we are trying to keep the style tight over here. We’ll see. More to come. Stay hydrated and continue to befuddle fascists.

14-MAY-2025: Some nights are writing nights and other nights are editing nights and there are a third kind of night that I don’t know how to name that just reminds me of that note in Darwin’s journal where he was like: “everything is fuckin’ stupid.” I know Charles. I know. Chrono Trigger soundtrack and all that other video game music and other stuff and taking notes and planning next chapters. I’m a couple paragraphs into it. It’s coming eventualy? Stay hydrated and befuddle fascist trash.

11-MAY-2025: “Life is to be worn gloriously” til the very end. Chapter 4 comin’, its the one where we see Thaddeus do the thing he was written to do: demonstrate his glorious naiveté. Oh yeah, Cleveland. They’re gonna get it (or at least earn it, I don’t know if their smiting is coming this chapter or next). To the good folks of Ohio, I got no beef with you save that your state is too much like mine. Both places are flat as my ass and the people are passive aggressive as fuck (and that Fargo line about being mean and acting like they’re doin’ you a favor is us at our worst, the whole fucking midwest… like, i love us but…). Ohio is lovely. It’s just a running joke I am committed to: Cleveland has a higher probability of getting fucked up in my multiverse than any place so pleasant and benign should have. I dunno fam. I don’t make the rules (except that I do, and Cleveland gonna get it).

10-MAY-2025: Uni 3 is done and up, and I’m looking forward to getting out of 2030 in the narrative to play-and-stay more in the 3030 portion of the story. This is the one with the happy ending, or as close as this author gets to them. Two word phrase sums up the end of the book and I repeat it to myself with regularity in the race to get there. It’s good to have a path. It is still hard to walk it. More to come.

10-MAY-2025: Uni 3 is alllllmost done. Then we’re on to chapter 4: Moscow Signal. One of my favorite pieces of Cold War 1 lore. See, the Soviets baked the fucking shit out of the US embassy in Moscow for 23 years (1953-1976) with a something like 2 and a half to 4 gighertz microwave signal. Microwave radiation is non-ionizing, true, but a US ambassador did bleed from the eyes and a lot of people got gnarly cancers. Here’s the deal, I write fiction and that little moment of madness comes to mean what I make it mean. Can that be dangerous? No more dangerous than the horse shit that paranoid state security apparatuses get up to. I have a suspicion about the Moscow Signal: it was retaliation. See, the first Cold War was in reality a lot of really boring nerd shit like chasing radio broadcasts and waiting for shit to happen. I think the little frequency hopping microwave radios we carry in our pockets today (cell phones) flow from the lil’ bitty clandestine microwave radios Uncle Sam’s spies used to clown on Ivan way back in the way back (you can find de-classified public domain US patent docs for wearable and implantable microwave radio receivers predicated on the Frey effect in the post WW2 era). The Soviets chased microwave signals but caught nothing and no one. In frustration? They microwaved the fuck out of US diplomats. And here’s the thing: US was like “hey man, we would rather pretend like we don’t know what’s going on and let Ivan microwave our people…” Verily, the US let that shit happen because that’s the kind of country we have always been. See “Havana Syndrome” for more on how Uncle Sam leaves their own to twist in the wind. I guess I told you that to tell you this: Thaddeus MacGuffin bout to get fuckin’ microwaved. Also, I’m autistic. I do this shit for the love of the game.

6-MAY-2025: Unanimity 3 is one little chapter nugget or textual-piss-trickle away from done. We got them little robots into space with a mega-engineered plan to rid the firmament of debris. Gotta zoom in for a little vignette snap shot of that, then we find this episode’s rest. Then its on to chapter 4, just baking cakes, just baking these cakes as fast as I can (which is not very fast, not very fucking fast at all).

4-MAY-2025: There’s another lil’ nugget of Unanimity 3 up. Again, apologies for writing it like a piss trickle, but these are hard times to be alive in, and sometimes that’s what episodic means: a piss trickle of text. May it become a deluge again some day, amen. We’re jumping back and forth between 2030 and 3030. And here’s an innovation in the exile-verse: this world has a future past 3030. I’d like to show it to you. Lemme get through its past first.

3-MAY-2025: “Words be sick as I am sick.” I am writing because I am actively failing my friend. “What a poet.” I’m sorry, Reader. I’m not quite sure I’ve ever known what to say to you. I’m trying to write this book. Unanimity 3 is coming. It’s weird to put this much effort into a thing exactly no one but you gives a fuck about, but here we are.

29-APR-20255: Slowly working on the end of Unanimity 3 and beyond. Also re-starting the not smoking thing and that just makes everything in life slower. Stay hydrated and be kind to everybody who isn’t a fascist shitbird.

24-APR-2025: Lil’ bit more of Uni 3 is up and posted. I don’t like writing my chapters in piss-trickle, but this is where I’m at. It’s helping me keep the style tight, and it makes sense with the ‘zipper chapter’ jumping between year 3030 and 2020-whatever. Half way through chapter 3? I dunno. We’re not breaking the Warhol protocol. Unanimity is the “only picture.” But I wanna revisit Cancri and the Leptik language chittered by the definitely-not-jumping-spiders part of my exile-verse. Maybe that comes after Unanimity? I dunno, holmes. I just work here.

23-APR-2025: Here we go. A little bit more of Unanimity 3 is up. More coming as I write it. We’re trying to be bible-brief with the life and ties of Thaddeus. Unanimity 3 is the one about the cure for Kessler syndrome: a disposable labor force. Boy howdy ain’t that the thing about capital-C-Capital in the real: it yearns to render human labor and whole humans redundant/disposable like capitalists say the children yearn for the mines.

20-APR-2025: I was gonna write a lot this weekend, but then I got high. I kid, we write high here. Big fan of Walter Benjamin in this house, and we like our illumination profane. We weep alongside the angel of history, and we keep the cookies and the cannabis close at hand. Creatively I’m pushing rope, and I don’t know how to find that sense of urgency I had in my work. I need a break. I refuse to take one because my time on this Earth, as you likely know, is limited. Did a lot of thinking. And I’m arguing internally with the plan I have for Unanimity. I’m uh keep working on it if only to see what it looks like when its done. I hope you like it? I hope there’s something worth liking in it when I’m done? Stay hydrated. Fuck facism. Fuck rationalism (its fascist mysticism invented by fuckwads trying to think around philosophy and other discourses they’re too lazy and stupid to read).

19-APR-2025: Here’s the deal. I feel guilty that I’m not showing up to protest today, so it’s a writing day. I’m girding my loins and getting my heating pad ready and I’m writing this weekend. What I finish is Unanimity chapter 3. We baking these cakes. Don’t fuck it up, Mitchell. 🙂 If you’ve got some religious upbringing baggage you recognize the desire to self punish/ do-a-penance, right? Yeah, I see you out there. Look man, we (royal we) work out neurosis for creative purpose on this here website. Book plan as it stands: Unanimity (state of being) came to be on this world through some sinister shit that came from some banal evil choices (like the pursuit of a disposable labor force). I showed you a ghost’s eye view of a version of Earth year 3000 choking to death on concrete. Now we’re going to walk from early 21st century on that world to some of the points in time that made Unanimity. Innocent sounding word that comes from a lot of brutality. We’ll end the book hinting at Consensus. Oh yeah, the whole thing is told by a mushroom to a ghost (who is gonna have roll to play in the world’s future). I am not arrogant enough to say I know what that consensus is. But there’s the brutality of imposing unanimity vs the effort to build consensus. Now we put, hopefully pretty prosetry sounding words, on both them concepts in a fictional setting. That’s the book. May it be fun and pretty and confounding. Amen.

19-APR-2025: Me and my sickly ass are staying home today. Will be working on Unanimity 3. Might just shit it out one draft because I give no fucks. I’ll be there protesting next time and next time and next time and next time. Because its about the long haul. Making a political movement to remove a fascist piece of shit (on the fly no less) is marathon-not-sprint work. You’re making a social movement, and that means you’re learning to welcome and work with the broadest cross-section of society willing and able to oppose the banal-evil that is Trumpism. It’s not about who is most radical. It’s about who is present and how you can bring more people pressure to bear on an illegitimate regime. You can be punk rock on your own time. God speed. Stay hydrated. Make good trouble. Remember, you got cops up your butt. Organize and act anyway.

16-APR-2025: Unanimity 3 under way. I’m writing the words and stuff. Gonna try to idio- the -syncratic style lots in this here weird ass text. As always, I bake these cakes just as fast as I can for you, reader.

9-APR-2025: Uni-2 is up and I’ve got the functional trajectory for the baby-book that is Unanimity. Unanimity 3: Kessler Syndrome is coming. After that, it’s Unanimity 4: Moscow Signal. Beyond chapter 4? I don’t have titles yet. I crave a sense of urgency I can no longer produce in any kind of healthy way. I’m gonna manufacture that (or the next best thing) by shadow-boxing the version of me that made a plan for a book called Unanimity and beating his ass (politely). Stay hydrated. Protect the things the meek are meant to inherit. Fuck fascism. More to come.

7-APR-2025: Unanimity 2, the real one that isn’t a fuckup draft, is almost done. I’m crawlin forward again. Did me good to see a lot of people saying “no” this weekend. Reject that bullshit lumpen-prole jaded working stiff horse shit you see that says “nah it’ll be worth it.” What’ll be worth it? Watching a bunch of robber barons who never worked a day in their fucking lives burn down the real economy you and I need along with all the horse shit fictitious capital so they can dance in the ashes? You can’t tell me that helps working people with a straight face because it does not and it never will.

6-APR-2025: Whan Aprille with its shores soote, the droughte of Marche hath perced to the roote. That’s when I fucking start writing again. Unanimity 2, the version that didn’t burn down and sink into the swamp, is coming. It was nice to participate in the protests that I hope eventually remove the orange fascist and his friends from power. That has to be the fucking goal or why the fuck are we out here? In any case. Read hard. Write hard. Remove a fucking fascist from power. Excise the tumor. Now.

29-MAR-2025: Website renewed. This website is mine, and the Exile-verse plod/crawl/slides on another year. Unanimity 2 is continuing at a real slow pace while this author learns to string words together w out a cigarette in his hand. I give myself permission for that to take as long as it needs to take. Yeah, I like the episodic vibes of my work. I don’t have “write urgently before you die” energy any more, and I’m not working like that. I do however have 6 novellas (some of which I’m even proud of) for your consideration. More to come. If you are in the United States, you’re either hollering against the fascist garbage that run this place or you are enabling evil-actual-evil. Make your fucking choice now. To be silent is to enable fascism. I don’t give a fuck what your excuse is. There is no excuse. Get loud. Now.

26-MAR-2025: Fuck Unanimity is where we are at in my house. I took the 2nd chapter teaser down, so I’m breaking my “no-takebacksies” rule (which is fine cause it’s my self imposed rule and ain’t nobody paying me for this shit). I dunno. Liking parallellism is one thing, doing something like it on the page and having it come out pretty is another. Tried to make a Yawhist and Priestly prologue to the book and it just came out shit-tedious and repetitive. So fuck it. I needed a break after Morningstar and didn’t take it. I like the idea of the giant mushroom under Michigan watching the rise and fall of human civilization from a perspective and with a capacity to intervene that is by nature beyond the absent god that runs my cosmology. And because I like that idea I will try to give it voice. Brings me to my next topic. Thanks for reading, but the site might not exist much longer. I know I’ve got a small readership. Thank you, from the bottom of my shriveled heart. But I’m also broke and tired and it’s website renewal season and I’m going to wonder (as I always do) about quitting. Not sure why I’m acting like it’s a hard choice or why I’m even stuck. But here we are. So. If the site goes down? Bye. Thanks for the time and for taking a second to look at the little world someone built for you (or really anyone who happened along). I hope you found something nice, and that you remember that you can always say “Dear Dolores,…” any old time (and I like to think somewhere out in the warp-wefty ass multiverse she’ll hear the note). Remember that you can always throw a prayer into a heat vent and ask the god that is absent to come on home.

19-MAR-2025: Rough cut of Unanimity 2 is done. I’m gonna expand-expound and edit-cut and do all kinds of shit to it in the next few. Might even cheat out on chapter/episode 3. It’s about Kessler Syndrome, that third chapter. Spirographing toward something. Probably the ground (at a very high rate of speed).

17-MAR-2025: I need to fuggin’ write. I’m feelin’ physically grimy. I’m only 40, but I feel 4000 years old. It’s slowing me down in all realms of life. Apologies and thanks for your patience with me, reader. I really do bake these cakes for you as fast as I can (and sometimes that is slow as fuck). My shit hurts, all of it. I wanna have the second chapter up this week. Gotta get the flesh-helicopter scene right.

12-MAR-2025: Hey. What up. Yes, I am alive. Am I writing? In a way (the way where I am not actively writing right now). I’m fuggin’ tired and burnt out and this is the toughest time o’ year for me personally. So I’m gonna keep crawling and writing (toward the writing, crawling toward the writing….).

5-MAR-2025: Unanimity 2 is coming. I’m closing in on a rough-cut. I wanna have it done and the proper polished thing up this weekend. We shall see. Reader, as always I bake these cakes for you just as fast as my fragile earthly vessel will allow.

4-MAR-2025: Hey there. The Exile-verse rolls along (and I with it). What have I been doing? Writing Thaddeus MacGuffin’s backstory. It’s comin’, Unanimity 2.

25-FEB-2025: I’m back. I didn’t go anywhere, but the Unanimity train is moving again. The words is un-constipated (if only ever temporarily). It’s a fungal vision inspired text, this one. It’s a little novella about how a disposable work force came to be, and what it means to be disposed of. Only natural that such a book should start with fungus and in once-and-future rusted country, no? Forgive the solipsism of setting, but I love my home and know it well and we’ll only stay in the upper Midwest for a while before venturing off into the whole wide world. Reader, bear with me while I bake these cakes and buttress my failing mind and body, and I’ll tell you a few more grown person bed time stories.

24-FEB-2025: I just scrapped me a chapter. It weren’t right. What “right” means on this here project? I have no fucking idea. I’ll know when I see it. Unanimity. We ended with a ghost and a mushroom. Ya gotta flesh that out a bit. You can’t go jumpin’ to other times or places or topics. I mean, you can, but you gotta do it more gracefully than I did in the draft I just destroyed. It’s no-takebacksies. So once y’all see it? I gotta keep it. Back of the house? I’m chopping my words ruthlessly as I feel like.

20-FEB-2025: I’m being chickenshit because I already like Unanimity, the idea and the world I’ve been running through when I sleep. Consequently, it’s been difficult to get started. My angst is hilarious when I appraise it honestly: no-takebacksies means I’m committed to whatever I put on this digital page, and I don’t want to break a text I like. Most of what I’ve written here, I like the itch of an idea and wrote far enough into it that “well fuck it, might as well finish…” carried the day. I liked every experience-book and wrote like I was gonna die (cause I thought I might). Now, I wanna linger, and I’ve lost the sense of urgency. Fuck the urgency. I romanticized that shit in my youth. Write urgent words while being calm. This isn’t “Character acting”, it’s writing. I say again, I’d like to linger a bit–ain’t saying like a rose, more like a trapped fart. So I shall linger and take my time. Thaddeus MacGuffin, born in our moment but casts a thousand year shadow. I’m uh try and tell you a lil bit about him. I hope you like something of it. And even if I shit the bed in this text? Whew, go check out those three Myst books. The third one? No one will ever convince me it’s not the product of a fight between very-particular-christians who wanted a very specific kind of ideological poison that says “No slave revolts are bad!” and a ghost-writer who was all like “book ain’t done til every drop of blood taken by the lash is re-paid with one taken by the sword…” (or I guess the germ….). Read them, the Myst books. Great setting, and I love “the art.”

18-FEB-2025: Oh man I can get my arm over my head without the other arm’s assistance. How nice is that? I get scared when my body gets weird because I’ve been so broke (money) for so long that if something breaks (a part of me) it’s staying broken until I have the money to fix it (which will be the Tuesday after never). Probably a strain and not a tear. Yay. Working on Unanimity. I think I got it (which means I don’t. Reader, I don’t got it). But we trust the process here. Would you like to trust the process with me, reader?

17-FEB-2025: I got two arms, grateful for that. But one of them is attached by a shitty-shoulder that I re-injured and it don’t like me. I’m ambidextrous, so aside from the feeling of being stabbed when I reach with that arm, I’m good to work. Gotta get my car worked on and my me worked on in no particular order. I’ll tell you what I’m not doing in my free time right now: writing. That sucks, and I hate it. I also can’t think straight or concentrate, even w reefer. I have a really high pain tolerance (for a man) and two fucked knees, a back that betrays me on the regular, and a shoulder held together (until recently) by surgical scar tissue and prayer. So yeah. The cup of pain runneth over. Worst part is that I saved all my little HSA dollars to see a doc over some far more pressing issues, and I’m pretty sure this is going to eat all of that, and I know for a goddamn fact I can’t afford to meet my deductible. So. Seeing if I need shoulder surgery takes precedent over other health issues (health issues that I’m really trying not to hope will just put me the fuck out of my misery). This is but a small glimpse of why when a healthcare CEO gets ‘got’ those of us with functioning brain and conscience celebrate it–for it is a thing worthy of celebration.

16-FEB-2025: It was not a good creative weekend, and I’m ok w that. I wanna write this week. We’ll see if I actually do that. I don’t do well in rough winter weather any more. “Why the fuck did you move home to Michigan?” Well you see, I didn’t expect to still be alive and wanted to see my people a few more times. Now that I am alive, infuriatingly so, and seeming to stay that way? I gotta actually deal with the passage of seasons. There is that “il-liberal liberal” that posits their purpose as “bearing witness” to suffering and calamity (and nothing more). I don’t want to be that person, but that person has so disempowered all of us that to exist is to be that person. Here’s the deal, people who are not fascists: the enemy wants to exhaust you to death because now, even now, they know they can’t win. They’re weak little unremarkable white men with limp dicks and we outnumber them by a terrifying margin. Shock and awe governance by incompetence. Your job, whether you want it or not, is to ‘rope a dope’ the fash. Godspeed thee. You’ll be here when they are dirt (whether you wanna be or no).

15-FEB-2025: One of the more disgusting things about being an American in this moment is watching Christian compliance with authoritarianism. It makes sense ideologically: “Bow to Earthly authority and lick them boots like you do with heavenly ‘daddy.'” But its utterly incompatible with anything solid and real and decent in the theology. “Why you picking on Christians?” Because I was born into a particularly crazy flavor of fake Christianity I call a “rapture cult” and I survive-escaped, so I get to/have the moral obligation to shit talk you all (Christians) until you act right or we all perish from the Earth. You need to act right (even if your church and preacher man and every idiot you know is acting wrong: i.e. accepts this authoritarian nonsense as god-ordained. It is not. Resist or go to the hot place with me when this life is done. I’ll be waiting to meet you…).

11-FEB-2025: Tonight was a shitty writing night but a damn fine not smoking cigarettes night. I can live with that. The first half of Unanimity Chapter 1: “The Elysian” is up and live. I hope you like it (what there is of it). We’re not getting into the story yet I guess. Second half to two thirds of the chapter are comin’ whenever I can order my thoughts without fellating Phillip Morris in the process. I can do that now, it just takes longer. Here’s the deal. If capitalism were as good as it claims to be? They’d have invented the cancer-less cig by now. All I’m sayin’.

9-FEB-2025: An odd creative process is a blessing. I am trying to reconcile (at least) 3 different plans for Unanimity. And maybe that’s part of the problem? Stop trying to reconcile them. We’ll see how that works, and I’d like to have the first chapter done and up soon (even at the risk of the thing biting me back and dragging me down the “work work work till its done” rabbit hole… I don’t want to do that).

6-FEB-2025: Half chiseled my car out of the ice, burnt half a day of time to wait for things to melt. Tried to write and I’m tired of wanting to be done smoking and wanting to at-home-tracheotomy myself so I can smoke a pack at a time. Sick of living in a world where to live is to watch the controlled demolition of said world by mediocre men with ‘everything’ in practical terms that feel they are entitled to that which they lack (imagination, capacity to feel, the resect of their peers). These are the kind of people who ultimately destroy everything, even the shit they possess and that which sustains their false sense of superiority. The worst part of this shit is the horde of mediocre entitled white men and women, the kind rich folks (actual rich folks) wouldn’t piss on if they found aflame supporting the rich folks who are running the controlled demolition of my government and society. “Barn Burning” by Faulkner. Short story about a confederate cracker dead-ender written from the perspective of the guy’s son. The father in that story. That’s the kind of man and woman running my country right now. It’s all over the internet, go read it.

4-FEB-2025: Clean slating the updates page (everything is in Archives). Unanimity is the name of the new project. No-take-backsies. Once its up, it’s up. Episodic, as we do here in the exile-verse. I’m gonna tell you about a guy named Thadeus MacGuffin. I’m going to tell you about a city that must first be called what it is: scar on the Earth and great gouge out of the thing. We shall explore the place with the hope of finding the cracks in the sidewalks and avenues where something that shouldn’t be able to survive there finds a way. We shall catalogue a few of the wonder-weeds that thrive defiantly in the broken stones and cracked bricks. I hope you like it.

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?