October 2025 Update – Life, Art and Many, Many Reversals

Hey everyone 🙂

Been a little while between update posts, I know. Lately it seems like life has been nothing but curveballs, fast balls and absolute  bell-knockers designed to put me on my ass and out of the game. Between some massive changes in day-to-day family life, money stress and trying and failing to get a better paying day job to alleviate those respective stresses, trying to find the time and motivation for my extracurricular pursuits has been hard. As much I miss writing when I’m not doing it, it’s fallen so far down the priority list I’m yet to hear it hit the bottom. I’m usually too exhausted to make my writing a priority, even if it must play second fiddle to everything else right now.

Which sucks, because I’ve reached around 80,000 words on the draft of Do Not Go Gently (formerly known as Discordia), and like any novel project I know how important it is to keep the momentum going. Right now, it’s had to fall by the wayside, but I will be coming back to it once all the things settle down again. *sigh* I can’t but feel I say this all too often. I managed to create a strong, consistent work ethic over those winter months, in which I got the bulk of the writing done. Now that I’ve proven I can do it once, I know I can do it again – but only after I’ve taken care of the stuff that is most important right now. It still stings, though, the perpetual obstacles, as if I’ve pissed off the gods in a big way or something. Haha.

But even in the midst of chaos and uncertainty, beauty blooms. Even when I feel ready to surrender to a hum-drum life of bitterness and despair; ready to kneel down on the concrete, bow my head willfully to be crushed by the behemoth of circumstance (perhaps believing in doing so find a certain kind of death, and in it, glorious mercy), that creative urge sticks me like a knife in the guts. It’s a wound that compels action, a creative bleeding. That bleeding is coming out in the form of poetry (again).

It may not be the kind of writing I really want to be doing right now, but it’s the right kind. It’s the kind that’s helping me navigate, surrender to and make peace with my new world order. It’s cathartic. I can already tell there’s going to be another book in it, one that will hopefully surpass Bright Skies, Long Shadows in terms of its themes, style and power. But publishing another book (especially a poetry book) is not of paramount importance right now; neither is publishing anything else. It’s the keeping of the creative flame that’s most important during this difficult and, frankly, distressing time.

That being said, I have been sitting on about three or four short novel manuscripts for years now, and it occurred to me that I don’t have to be my all-or-nothing self. Just because work on one project stalls doesn’t mean I have to stop working on prose or editing. I just need to keep the flame burning one way or another, even in micro-doses, if that’s all that’s manageable.

So I’m going to attempt (key word right there) to dig up a couple of those finished manuscripts – my long-time readers may even recognise a couple of the titles: A Rose For The Damned and The Dominion of Night , both of which I have spoken about a lot in the past – and set my watch to editing, polishing and maybe even formatting them for eventual self-publication. The bulk of the work is done, it’s just the refining process now. I don’t think these weird little novels have a home at any of the big publishers, and I’m not inclined to let anyone fiddle with them too much. Between the poetry book (which coalesces slowly, as the poems themselves do), Do Not Go Gently and editing the two forgotten novellas, that’s more than enough to keep the creative fires burning.

I don’t like chaos. Unfortunately, being bipolar, it comes second nature, but I really don’t like chaos, even the creative sort. Without external stimuli, I am actually quite stable and ordered. I like to be clear, focused, working on one thing at a time to the best of my ability. I don’t like shuffling around. At present, that is not my reality, and I’m only hurting myself if I refuse to accept it.

So I adjust.

I’m sorry if that’s not the update anyone was hoping for – just know that work in one form or another is progressing, albeit slowly. Life has gotten extremely weird and chaotic and difficult, but at the heart of all that, there’s a lot of good things happening – good work that transcends the good of my beloved writing. As Stephen King said in his novel Duma Key, “Know when you’re finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.”

Luckily I’m not finished, not by a long shot. Just delayed, redirected. 🙂