THERE IS MORE COMING, I PROMISE
The Notebook Blues (08/05/22-09/25/22)
Hey, just over a month between this blog post and the previous one—that’s not so bad, huh? Could be better, I suppose, but lots of things could be better and what would better look like anyway? That’s got me thinking about 21st Century Living—”Ambition can backfire/Ambition means more/Ambition means faster/Ambition mean better”—and I guess ambition is what got Caesar killed… though, probably that’s more about perceived ambition. Whatever the case, two blog posts in a month-ish? Where is the real Henry Mudd and who’s replaced him?
Anyway, a few irons in the fire right now and a few things to share:
the long-awaited (by me, I guess) completion of my sci-fi poetry collection, tentatively titled In the Stars (a name I am not beholden to, but I thought it an unnamed son for long enough) is right around the corner. I suppose, by and large, the writing and editing is complete, so it’s about transposing over to this platform, typing it up on the Dream Machine, photographing it all for The Gram, getting those photos added to the poems here and then… poof! It’s done! I am excited and a little anxious about completing it all, to be honest. This one has been in the works since September of 2021, so now I am just itching to finish it and be done with it; I have other literary children to attend to, you know.
Like… getting through The Notebook Blues that I wrote from August 5, 2022 through to September 25, 2022. This was my second handwritten venture, right after Coffee and Yogurt, and my first done in a notebook rather than a notepad. I don’t love how I utilized my notebook, incidentally; I was a one-side-of-the-paper guy, which, in retrospect, doesn’t and didn’t feel super sustainable, or like a great use of the book itself, to be honest; Coffee and Yogurt, being done on a notepad rather than a notebook—there is a difference, I swear—was a one-sided affair due to the quality of paper (*cough* I’m cheap *cough*), where The Notebook Blues I wrote in a lovely Baronfig Confidant notebook (helloooooo endorsement!) and wasn’t used to actually writing on good paper; ha, look at me, explaining something that doesn’t really need to be explained; consider this a mea culpa, if one is needed. Anyway, that’s a lot of semi-colons there, but I needed to complete the thought and all that. So, The Notebook Blues is probably a ways away from being ready to see the light of day, but the demos, for lack of a better term, are complete.
And, of course, because I am a sucker for punishment—not to mention being a glutton for it, too—I’m also working on writing Botched Last Rites, too. As I think I mentioned in the previous entry, I spent some time once dreaming up death metal bands/record titles, and BLR is one that’s stuck with me. This collection doesn’t have any more or less to do with pain and death and existential suffering than any of my other writing, just a consistent thematic soundtrack to it all: death metal. I am just about 50% through the notebook—double-siding each page now, and, boy, does it feel good. I am absolutely certain there are some real duds in this one, which I don’t love… but that I also accept is just the result of working. Not every day yields the results we want, but we keep working; that sounds like work harder, not smarter, and that would be a fair reading, I suppose, but my mind operates from the frame of VOLUME VOLUME VOLUME. The more I have to sift through, maybe I’ll strike gold somewhere.
On the topic of Coffee and Yogurt, I guess I have to figure out what the hell I want to do with that one. I’m quite proud of a lot of the writing. Some of it is hard to read and there’s a good portion of the writing that saw me trying to process my brother’s death. With that said, there feels like a different energy in that collection, so it needs a different avenue for release. If anyone out there wants to pay me for the privilege of releasing them, let me know!
Okay, that’s enough of that right there. Updates on writing are probably not the most thrilling things in the world, but given that this is a website about writing and for writing, I guess content about writing is suitable. Next update I’ll have something different, cross my heart.
