MacroParentheticals0138 – featuring the return of the audio "I am the voice in your head" editions(!) – is out and on its way to subscribers' inboxes, 0139 and Shard003 blank pages templated and set for composition and headscratching. Returning, finally, to MainFictionThing with an understanding that part of its challenge is maintaining my interest in and keeping a sense of surprise – both for me as the writer and for the eventual reader – while working with a pre-defined (or as close as I allow it to be) form and genre. The day’s run, leaves, and visits lie ahead until they lie behind.
happy / done?
Two notions duking it out across brainmatter battlefield:
One, that I'm happy writing what I'm writing and publishing it the way I do. No interest in aspiring to go beyond short things and experiments published to newsletters and zines. Aspiration pointed only towards increasing the quality of the work.
And yet:
Two, the emptiness I've felt around most aspects of my life and self at one point or another has, as of this pondering, consumed nearly all aspects and, for the first time since I left music school 20 years ago, seeped into the one area I didn't think it could: Am I writing now only because I haven't a clue what else to do with myself? Or because the alternative, not writing, is too scary to fathom? Is there something else I should be doing and if so, is the only way to find it to stop writing?
Synthesis(?): while I'm about 98% certain that writing will remain part of whatever the new normal shapes up to be (and that notion one will win out), that two percent is – or, rather, I'm in a state of mind where that two percent is – compelling, perhaps dangerously so. Likely cause: utter exhaustion.
Duly recorded here solely as a reflection of the current status of my process of processing.
sitrep/20230930
Tomorrow's newsletter's written, the first Shard (weekly 100-word microfictions exclusive to subscribers) done. Next: deciding whether or not to continue the "I am the voice in your head" editions of the NL: while it's not a ton of effort, it does impact how long I can work on the writing, so I'm still weighing that one. A lot depends on how my voice is doing in the morning.
MainFictionThing remains at a standstill but I'm chipping away at the brick wall in front of it, a little light peeking through. I think I see what I'm trying to see which is maybe what it wants me to see?
Grandfather on road to recovery, out of hospital and in his (rather swanky) resort/transitional care. Fridge stocked with Ginger Ale, football on the TV. He's set.
The hanger is real: multi-grain cheerios and a shot of bourbon do not an excellent dinner make.
Compiling a list of times I haven't felt a pervasive emptiness in the last 14 years and it's rather paltry and I don't know what to do with that other than state it for the public to myself record.
sunday newsletter drabbling
Follow-up to yesterday’s pissnmoan re: newsletter-blog differentiation. This week, I'll be moving the Shards series over to Macro and making it a subscriber-exclusive weekly series of 100-word stories (Drabble powers activate) designed to function for my fictional brain as the Attendance Cards do for my awakening brain each day, a way to force me into quantity over quality and foster an even greater attitude of fictional experimentation. The first one will launch in Sunday's Macro0137. You can sign up here, if so inclined.
(cl)ashes
Been doing the newsletter for more than ten years and a blog for even longer and I still don't have a clue how to balance things out: what do I share publicly, what do I save for Sunday? is Sunday a review of the week previous, a revision of / synthesis? do I use all of the pieces from the week to construct something new? is it simply something new?
A clash of Annie Dillard's exhortation in THE WRITING LIFE with this writing life, at least as it stands at present (same river twice, etc etc):
Every week being new effort to understand it?
Of course, the real question may be why I'm continuing to wonder about it at all, a conflict between my usual whenever/whatever and that OCD need for (faux) certainty in an calling that feeds on uncertainty.
This week's newsletter – on the trials and travails of being part cyborg (Welcome NuHerbie) and discussing a new podcast experiment I'm going to try – is written and ready for recording (will get on with that later this morning, when my voice isn't such a grog-gravel mess). If you're so inclined, you can subscribe here.
(anti)climactic
Running behind on Sunday's newsletter (or feeling like I'm running behind on Sunday's newsletter) but that's usually the case: the addition of audio, while a welcome feature and a great writing aid, has added a bit more rush to the deadline than I had anticipated though most of that sensation's probably from my own pre-performance mental fuckeries. Once I sit with the thing and write it and record it, I'm fine and the dread reveals itself as more than a little anticlimactic. Though I can't deny a growing desire to make it more than a recap of this weekly unfurling. Heading there, certainly, hopefully, perhaps.
In other news, I leaned my head too far back and snapped the headrest of my office chair / shit fuck etc etc.
/202308260703
Putting the finishing touches on this week's newsletter. Light week so I've taken the opportunity to add some things (back in) and play with the format a little. Experimenting with doing a comment thread here for the newsletter, but I'm not sold on the notion, though I keep going back and forth. For my innumerable qualms with the platform, I do like Substack's approach to this. You can sign up here if so inclined. Unrelated but pertinent: I have a summer beanie now and I kinda love it.
/202308200625
The 131st MacroParentheticals dispatch, in which my good friend Uziel Colón subjects himself to being my first guest on THE GROUND LOOP, my newsletter-exclusive Proust-meets-Lipton-meets-me five-question grilling of friends, inspirations, and other assorted humans, will be arriving in subscribers' inboxes in +/- 45 minutes. Also: THE SUPER MARIO BROS MOVIE is a delight.
/202308181709
The weeds upon the hill have been weedeaten and, unlike yesterday, no lifting of riding lawnmowers was required / leaving to play in the poison ivy patch (seems to be a thing this week; haven't gotten it yet), I gave portable Switch RDR a go and LOVED it. Charlie the dog and I took out a ne'er-do-well before he could abscond with a horse at MacFarlane Ranch / finished the edit of the first GROUND LOOP mini-interview, premiering in Sunday's newsletter. Think I enjoy the format / grilled hot dogs await.