we back

I know people have been clamouring for answers to why I did it. Many have compared my disappearance to Daniel Day-Lewis’ or that of Amelia Earhart. So here are a curated selection of reasons.

i got a job

The same month of going on hiatus I got a job. I expect that now I’m not on hiatus I’ll be fired within the month.

i overinvested in the value of lengthy and well edited posts in this bookshelf and it ended up making me sick of working on them despite the fact that this is my website and i can do whatever i want with it and there’s no editor looking over my shoulder demanding that i keep it to a rigorous standard and if i want to spew unfettered and overwritten garbage onto the screen then i can just do that and you just have to sit there and let it spray all over your face and down your leg

I still struggle a bit with the whole “this is my wobsite and I have unlimited freedom to do what I want” thing.

i got lost in the sahara desert trying to rid myself of the curse

ᗫꗛꕷᖘĬꞆꗛ ᙏᎽ ꗛꘘꘘꗞɌꞆꕷ, Ꞇዛꗛ ᙅꚶɌꕷꗛ ᖘꗛɌꕷĬꕷꞆꕷ

i burnt the fuck out

It’s hard to write about this coherently, but I’ll give it my best. I tried (and honestly have been trying my whole life) to get myself into a position where the barriers to creating stuff are as minimal as possible. Where I have to interact with the process as little as possible and still get a final product. I figured, hey, if I’m dropping projects because they’re taking too long, then I should just try to finish as quickly as possible (never a winning prospect).

I tried stripping down the prose of a story to the bare minimum and writing without a plan. All in service of getting a finished product pronto.

And I hated it.

I stopped writing stories in a way that was fun and started making content™. Soupy, grey content for the sewer outflow pipe. I’d achieved the platonic ideal of productivity by trimming the fat, but then I trimmed too much and my interest in writing became emaciated. It took a lot of time to unlearn everything I’d learnt over the last year-ish, but here we are. And we are so back.

what now, magic man?

First: I’m going to try to stop holding myself to made up standards here in the posts section. The whole point of this bookshelf was to have a communication method that I could shit out in an afternoon. Not spending a whole day drafting and revising until it’s perfect. And I’d like shorter posts, which are easier to make and more tolerable to read.

Second: I’m still very much working on things. Just because I haven’t posted anything here doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on projects in the meantime. I have:

• Two short stories
  • One a finished first draft on some Lovecraftian shit
  • One halfway through editing dipping into that techno-surrealism I love so much

As well as a novel-length project from an idea in The Forest. Yes I know what I said way back in the first post, but also that guy sucks and I’m having fun doing it. And isn’t that the whole point here, to have fun with it?

If it’s not fun, why bother?