About this Space

Foreword

This is not a blog. I’m going to repeat that – partly for your understanding, and partly as a reminder to myself that this is not a soapbox for me to aimlessly drag you down personal rabbit holes. All right, here goes, once more, with feeling:

This is not a blog.

It took me a while to realize it, actually. Let me let you in on a little secret: I was originally going to settle on an outer space theme for this site. Not just for kicks, no, though it really did cover several bases. A space theme represented my commitment to universality, I could make plenty of clever anecdotes, and my artistic options were just flashy enough. All that, and I’m also somewhat branding myself as a pseudo-science fiction screenwriter. But there is a problem, a BIG problem, with such a universal theme. That big problem is, it just wasn’t personal. Space is cold, unfeeling, frightening, and clichéd. Sure, it might give my blog a solid theme, some good symbolic direction – but that doesn’t help the fact that the feeling it evokes, by being universal and unrelatable, is undependable. To not be dependable makes a writer impersonal and without defined expectations.

An audience needs something personal…something to hold expectations to.

My problem with “theme” actually put this blog on hold for a long while – I wasn’t feeling it. If you can’t nail the aesthetic, you can’t focus the product and clarify what exactly you are offering. So, after months of stalling, I abandoned the space theme. Instead of space, I turned my attention to something more personal, at least to myself: time. Specifically, the early morning, where darkness still reigns but the sun is primed to reclaim the horizon. Kind of bizarre, when you think about it…is not a time of day even less relatable and more impersonal?

Not to me, no. And I suppose that’s the challenge for writers, anyway: to make what’s personal to them, personal to you, the audience. To evoke the feelings involved with experience through words alone; words that are picked up, removed from the page, assimilated and repurposed by the reader. Yet still, hopefully, retaining the control the original author had on them if he or she truly is a competent writer. Such is the test of our ability. You know…that, and actually getting paid to write.

Midword

This is not a blog. This is an archive. It is an accumulation of all works that I would like to share with you – mainly stories that would not fit in a larger body of work, essays I would find difficulty being published, or pieces that I simply want to share so badly that I can’t wait to get through the slog of publishing to do so. However, all of it, minus the photographs and tunes used to flourish this site, are still entirely my work, unpublished though they may be. So all writing and sketches on this site are mine, and may not be used without my permission and proper credits to me.

This archive is fluid, ever-changing, and highly adaptable. Only a fraction of my finished work will be uploaded at first, as I polish the rest. Yet much of what you find will not be a finished product, by virtue of no one has made a finished product of it yet. Sometimes I mix what I don’t plan to publish, with the works I do plan to publish, but there is no way I’d drop a whole novel here. How underwhelming would that be?

“A Dash of Poetry” is self-explanatory – I have over 200 poems to offer you. Not immediately, of course, at risk of them drowning each other out. “Horrors of the Hopeful Heart” is a collection of horror stories, a collection I could see publishing eventually. Be very aware, ye of shifting stomach: that material can get very matureish and gruesome. “Off the Chopping Block” is a series of posts from the blog I kept during a college course called Posthuman Rhetoric. I tended to see differently from the rest of the class, which was clear in my weekly posts that tried to ignore the done-to-death topics of gender and race. I might keep adding to that series. “Notes from Overground” is going to house my personal essays and opinions on matters of life…a section that might remain sparse. Not because I have nothing to offer, no – it’s just that the narrative and the lyrical are far more entertaining.

Whelp, that about covers the order of this archive! So, go on – click one of the buttons below to visit whichever group strikes your fancy. Just because I’m lost in my own neighborhood, doesn’t mean I can’t give you a map. Just understand it’s still being charted while you read it, probably because I keep discovering new places~

Postword

There is something about a misty dawn, just before the sun rises, that relaxes my mind and brings clarity. With clarity, comes focus, and with focus, comes creativity. And creativity is purpose. I hope I might be able to show you with words exactly the sort of state a misty morning produces in me, and make it clear the sort of purpose I am pursuing. You might know me better, sure; you might be sufficiently entertained for a spell, certainly; but my sights are set much higher than that. And I’ll continue wandering through the mists until that aim is clearer for all of us. I offer what I have so far in the meantime.