Botched Last Rites
Ah yes, Dear Reader! No burying the lede here! A few minutes ago I made the last pen stroke in my Botched Last Rites notebook. There’s a whole lot of other poems I have to work on before I get to going through this book, but I am glad for that glut of writing. I filled this notebook, as pictured above, from September 28, 2022-December 6, 2022, so while there isn’t a great deal of time passed from beginning to end, I tried to get into this book every day and I’m sure there is more I was working through than I was aware.
I mentioned this in a previous entry, but I’d dreamed up Botched Last Rites as a title/name/whatever a few years back and it always stuck; similarly, the phrase “cult invasion” popped into my mind about 10 years ago and it’s never left; I have a novel started with that concept in mind and it’s been in drydock for a few years now, though I hope one day I’ll revisit it. Anyway, as I also mentioned—and this is accountability, Dear Reader—in a previous entry that I would only be listening to death metal whilst writing in this book. I mostly kept true to that. There are a handful of non-DM records to which I listened while writing, and there are some blanks where I listened to whatever was going on around me. I frequently write in coffeeshops and at bars, so sometimes I leave the headphones off because I don’t want to be the guy sitting in a place like that with my headphones on. I know I shouldn’t care, and generally I don’t, but sometimes I do. Whatever the case, I listened to a lot of death metal while writing. Some favourite artists on a quick scan are:
Yeah. I know. Not enough Morbid Angel. Not enough Tampa Bay. Not enough New York City. Ugh. Not enough Montreal. Where’s Deicide? No Cannibal Corpse? Did I even think about Nile? Goddamn, man. I know. I tried my best here. I don’t think I even thought about Anaal Nathrakh. Here I am just gatekeeping myself. Something to dig into another day, I guess.
Well, heck, not much else to say here because I’ve been writing non-stop the last week to get through the last 40 pages of this notebook, so my brain is pretty mushy. As a parting gift, I’ll include the playlist I’d intended to go through whilst writing; some records I didn’t get to, some I listened to more than others, some I just listened to once. Whatever the case, it was a lot of fun, it was a lot of death metal for 2 months.
Have fun!
