Category: Writing

Personal Update #5

I… am not very much right now. I am at a particularly low ebb. I find myself wracked by a melancholy and lassitude which is nestled in my pores like scratchy iron filings. Discomforting me, irking me. And each little pocket of it doesn’t seem like much excess weight by itself, but it sure adds up when there are dozens or even hundreds of them dotted all over my body, making my skin sit too heavy on my bones. It’s proving quite the hardy affliction. Showers definitely can’t wash it away. Rare blessings of an endorphin spike where things briefly don’t seem so bad can’t wash it away. The compassionate acts of others cannot wash it away either. It’s just there. And it’s not just present in the background, I’m actively thinking about it a lot. Resenting it. Wishing it gone. I dearly want to go back to how it was before this took hold of me. I just don’t feel like the full version of myself. I feel like an old laptop operating on low-power mode where only some of the features are still available and the charge light is insistently blinking to tell you it needs to be reconnected to the juice fairly fucking urgently. Only, when I go to plug myself in to the usual power sockets for at least a little trickle of salvation, I find them inexplicably dead. And so I just sit back down with a huff and try to use the little reserve I still have left sparingly. This is the state I’m trapped in. I am emotionally fragile. I am bleak and listless. And I am greatly, greatly struggling to find a way to climb out of this half-person funk, to bounce back. I just can’t seem to do it.

I don’t doubt that what I’m going through is partly the cumulative product of the last… let’s say… eighteen months or so, which has made an undeniably spirited attempt to be the hardest, worst period of my life so far. There are times where fate decides to be kind to you and times where fate decides to be emphatically unkind instead, and I have been dealing with quite a long largely-unbroken streak of the latter treatment. I think I’ve had some of the lowest moments of my life during this time, to be perfectly candid. I won’t go into the entire laundry list of stuff, because I can assure you it is various and I imagine it will be quite tedious and unavailing to try to catalogue it all. But I will say there was one point in particular where this gratuitous cruelty from the universe really peaked, and I found myself simply… well, dumbstruck, I suppose…. by the sheer sadism of the thing. My childhood dog had to be put down and then just a few days later my grandfather passed away, and I didn’t get the chance to see either of them before they died. That rather speaks for itself, I would think. As one-two punches go, it’s… quite the doozy. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt simultaneously so devastated and so shellshocked-numb as I did in the weeks following that. I didn’t really have much experience dealing with grief as an adult and, yeah, it’s quite the learning process. Grief is a bare and frigid cell, where one is imprisoned alone. Even if positioned in a row of cells just like it — occupied by other cellmates well known to you, to boot — one can barely feel the salve of shared circumstance or solidarity. And, let me tell you, living so far away from my family only exacerbates this effect further.

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Personal Update & Various Reviews #4

Book stuff

A significant portion of the first half of this year has been spent on both my novel and my girlfriend Samantha’s novel.

All the stuff to do with my own novel I’m going to save for a separate piece, which I intend to set about writing in the near future, because I’ll need to get… reasonably long and in-depth. (Which is also what I’m wont to say in the boudoir. I find it’s always good to preface coital promises with ‘reasonably’, to manage expectations. I’m twenty-seven now, for christ’s sake; these bones are old and brittle, these muscles are tired and atrophied: my days of Olympic-level fucking are most definitely in the rear-view. But I’ll always look at that bronze medal framed on the wall with great fondness. Though in all honesty I technically had to share it with that year’s Lithuanian competitor, whose virility let’s just say even the editors of Fornicator Monthly strongly suspected to be synthetically enhanced, due to a tie for third place…)

I edited Samantha’s really very excellent and remarkable novel, an experience I’ll just say a little bit about. Obviously I would have been more than happy to do it in any case, but there was a certain pleasing element of reciprocity here, in that she was kind enough to suggest edits to mine a while back. Indeed, we laugh about the fact that we each restrained the… shall we say… less sound writerly instincts of the other, in very specific ways. I had to endure what will forever be known as the ‘Infamous Italics Massacre’, which she — no doubt in all sagacity — inflicted upon my novel. I tried to accept this corrective with grace. By which I mean just a bare minimum of petulant, melodramatic protests. For example, standing on a cliff-edge in the pouring rain, clutching the pried-loose ‘CTRL’ and ‘I’ keys and screaming that she’ll have to rip the italics from my cold dead hands. Like I said, I did no more of that kind of thing than ABSOLUTELY necessary. (I’m still a little bitter though. I really like italicising words and phrases for effect, okay?! I mean, give me a break, let’s not get absurd: I’m hardly a monster!)

And then I repaid the favour. I benevolently subjected her novel to what literary historians have, I believe, already begun to term the ‘Merciless Culling of the Commas’. Seriously, it was a bloodbath. You’d have thought that some wayward comma, perhaps a decidedly unrehabilitated scoundrel just released from maximum-security grammar-prison, kicked my dog when I was a kid or something.

Having never done anything like this before, I foolishly underestimated (by orders of magnitude, really) the amount of time that the editing was going to require. This is my fault and my fault alone. I suppose I had too high an opinion of my own powers of speediness. But, yes, I was very surprised by how long it ended up taking. I should specify that in terms of the level of thoroughness being applied, I was really exhaustively line-editing the prose. Samantha freely admits that she struggles with some of the more elusive minutiae of grammar and whatnot, and I was glad to help her out with that boring nuts-and-bolts stuff. And it goes without saying that when you’re going through a book with a fine-tooth comb and a magnifying glass, you’re in for a pretty time-consuming project, to put it mildly. Still, not at all without its compensations, obviously: although it’s not quite the ideal way to do so, it’s always a damn fine pleasure to read her writing. I trust you’ll believe me when I say that I would aver the exact same thing even if she wasn’t the woman I love. She is dizzyingly fearless in her honesty and she crafts gorgeous, sumptuous prose. Truly, she does things with language that I can only gape at.

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Personal Update & Various Reviews #3

Okay, I’ll tell you this up-front: I expect this one is gonna be fairly light on what’s been happening in my life (mostly I’ll be discussing what I’ve been playing/reading). Not because it’s been an uneventful stretch though. Quite the opposite in fact. There’s been some fucking intense, emotionally trying shit going down: holding my lover’s hand and maintaining umbilical eye-contact and trying to keep up a steady stream of sweet, distracting babble as a very long needle infiltrates her spine, riding in an ambulance for the first time in my life, and so on. But, interesting though they (and all distressing experiences) are, I don’t know that they’re really my stories to tell.

And, anyhow, I’m probably still too caught up in subconsciously processing it all to have any chance of articulating it halfway well. There are some things which one ought to await a certain amount of emotional and temporal distance from, before one dares to put pen to paper with them in mind. Otherwise, you’re probably going to just be unwittingly writing about the side-effects of shock, which tend to cloud everything else for their duration. And — alas! — the longer one is willing to wait, the better. Three-months hindsight is a magnifying glass; three-years hindsight is a microscope. (I am rarely so patient as to avail myself of the latter, however.) Definitively past-tensing it is the price of genuinely figuring out how it affected you, what your thoughts on it are. A price worth paying, I’d say. That is, if one hopes to avoid cramming these moments into a meat-grinder of fractured, incipient understanding and doing them little justice. Which is a prospect I find… unpalatable. To flippantly bungle conveying the gravity of grave things seems, to my mind, somehow disrespectful.

And, to get back to the point at hand, my brevity — I mean, relatively speaking; I’m still me, after all — of navel-gazing is also not because I don’t have me-things to ramble about. ‘Cause I always have me-things to ramble about, as befits/necessitates this type of post. (The narcissist’s quiver is never quite empty, rest assured.) I just happen to find myself, in this moment, with only enough… whatever the fuck… energy or willpower or capacity to stomach my own rambling… to touch on one or two of them. Lucky you, huh?

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Personal Update & Various Reviews #1

I have to say, something does really tickle me about the idea of having a separate category of journal-y posts on a website already dedicated to me and my thoughts. What shameless micro-divisions of narcissism.

But on to the matter at hand.

How have I been feeling?

Depressed…

Or rather, depressed AF, as the kids would say. Wait, do they actually say that? Shit, in all honesty I didn’t even really know ‘what the kids are saying’ when I was a fucking kid. So I definitely shouldn’t count on doing any better now that I’m peering in from the outside.

The cool new slang — even saying that makes me sound like your mom ineptly trying to work the words ‘tight’ or ‘sick’ into a conversation all faux easy-breezy like — is, uh, not really my thing. Not least because by the time it reaches someone like me, it’s probably already at the very end of its coolness life-cycle. I’m talking withered body, audible death-throes here. (At which point, fast-food brands, via the millennial interns who work for their PR departments, will just be starting to use it in their adverts. To superficially seem edgy and relevant. E.g. ‘Burger King™ wants to slide into the DMs of your hungry tummy with these thicc Whoppers™!’)

Allow me to sketch for you that life-cycle. First of all, the jargon takes a while to emerge out of the formative womb of the internet. By which I of course mean the insular, arcane, utmost molten core of Twitter. This is a realm of frenetic hyper-activity and kinetic urgency. I couldn’t tell you exactly why, but I envision it as being like a gargantuan spherical fish-tank filled with liquid fire. Wherein swim and skitter about absurdly agile, absurdly fast metallic spider-bots, which occasionally bump into each other and emit a screechy, distorted facsimile-recording of laughter.

You know, on second thought, maybe I should talk to my doctor about lowering the dose of this new medication…

Anyway, I’m sure you know the well-revered young, cool layer of Twitter I’m referring to. I’m more or less as ignorant an outsider as could be, but here are my general impressions of it nonetheless. (Look, this is my site. And I’m not here to not talk to you, you know?) It’s a place where capitalizing the start of sentences or using even semi-adequate punctuation is seen as a heinous faux pas which reveals that at birth you must have somehow ended up with an old-fogey soul trapped inside you, like coming across a fancy new laptop inexplicably running Windows 95. It’s a place where strategically left-in typos are seen as a marker of ultimate carefree authenticity. (The amount of time and effort one can sometimes sense has been put into finessing the off-the-cuffness of a purportedly hastily written off-the-cuff tweet is insane. Doing that must require having a very low opinion of the reader’s basic perceptiveness.) It’s a place largely peopled by those who strangely, unabashedly treat Twitter like a full-time job, and one they’re desperately, desperately trying to seem ‘good’ at. Who they’re hoping to win some kind of attaboy from I do not know; I wonder whether they do either. It’s a place where you can simultaneously bemoan the dumbing down of mainstream entertainment whilst happily bandying around an endless stream of low-effort memes which just recycle the same three or four kinds of tired, excruciatingly unfunny jokes.

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Assorted Reflections on First-Time Novel-Writing

The 31st of January 2019 may mean nothing to you. Fair enough. But it means a hell of a lot to me. Everything, really. It was the day I finished — truly, conclusively ‘finished’ — my first novel. A considerable self-imposed pressure was lifted from me that day. A pressure which I had felt squeezing my bone marrow into thin stringy pulp for quite a long time.

Before I get into why that was, first some background information.

The story of its creation begins as a disjointed one. As was perhaps unavoidable. Because I was asked to start writing a novel, rather than independently choosing to. So it’s not like I just sat down one day and resolved that this was the life goal I was going to tackle next. (Though it was, as with most writers, a vague ambition of mine. Whose start-date was set for some unspecified tomorrow.) It kind of just… came about. An external impetus set things in motion. But then I let that momentum sweep me along until, before long, I had my head down and I was running so much faster than the fading tidal wave behind me…

Okay, don’t wanna get ahead of myself. Let’s back up all the way. At university, I majored in English Literature and minored in Creative Writing. To be frank, I did not enjoy the in-person CW classes themselves. I want to be careful with my language here, so as not to overstate the matter. They weren’t a… horrible experience. They were generally just kind of a chore, and not very useful.

I disliked how some teachers would try to impose rigid rules (sourced from either received wisdom or their personal preference) about how one should write onto their students. Whenever they introduced one of these rules, my imagination reflexively conjured up a bunch of instances where defying it could work out well. And, alright, maybe I just have an overly rebellious cast of mind. It is true I’ve never loved being told what to do. But given that this ready abundance of counter-examples was obvious to even an inexperienced writer like myself, I think it was only fair to be dubious. I’m sure I was far from the only student there who was.

Now, I don’t for a second doubt these teachers were well-meaning. It’s just that their approach was, I believe, a very poor way of helping young people discover or cultivate what kind of writer they want to be. There is an adage which states that one must be deeply familiar with ‘the rules’ before one is entitled to and competent enough to break them. On the face of it, this seems to make sense. And such knowledge, when not inculcated as dogma, is indeed usually a benefit. To be consulted as one option among many; not a sacred yardstick. Yet it has long been my suspicion that it’s very dangerous to ever immure yourself inside that staid, conventionalist mindset. Before you know it, those perfect walls will suddenly seem so… homely. Aye, far too neat and straight and comforting to permit any impulse to start chipping away at them. This complacency isn’t just a novice’s bane either. No no no. It has seduced much, much better writers than you or me. And only towards the end of lengthy literary careers have they clawed through the brittled drywall and screamed their mistake through that gaping, jagged hole. I propose we heed their cautionary tales. These were, it should be said, offered for our benefit. If nothing else, it would be rude to spurn such a gracious gift.

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