Wow, it has once again been a while! The advantage of this? I have a lot (a lot) of material to catch up on. I’m going to touch briefly on a lot of things in this first post, and hope to expand on some (perhaps even all) of them in future weeks.
First off, I have not updated y’all about the state of Evernost. The state of Evernost is this: I am now trying to create the material associated with a given Evernostian month during a year corresponding to that month. So, this year I hope to finish (and, if I am lucky, release) the material associated with January, and next year I’ll do February.
Three categories of things: I have been reading, I have been writing, and I have been coding.
Reading (the highlights)
- Explored George MacDonald’s non-fantasy work (in particular, Mary Marston, a real favorite; Sir Gibbie; and The Vicar’s Daughter). Historically, I’ve had a hard time with books that aren’t at least a little bit speculative, but he’s an exception for sure. He is (to my eye) an impressive psychologist, who also does positive psychology (paints convincing pictures of what it’s like to be healthy, happy, and sometimes exceptional that are, while sometimes sentimental to the 21st century ear, decidedly not boring or fake)
- Went back to Garth Nix, whose Abhorsen / Old Kingdom series has inspired the closest I’ve ever gotten to fanfiction-with-a-coherent-story that I might actually finish someday
- Read Jerry Saltz’s How to Be an Artist, found it wise and inspiring, also read some of Art Is Life, a collection of his criticism, which I enjoy too, and Googling the names in which allows me to learn something about contemporary art
- Reread Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay and then read his long, terrifyingly racist Devil’s Tor, came away still thinking he’s a brilliant thinker and immensely imaginative individual but also wondering if he was an actual, literal Nazi 😦
- Discovered John R. Mabry, was delighted to come across a Christian thinker whose sense of the sacred resonates with mine but whose politics don’t make me ashamed – one might even say, one who brings together my spunky, exuberantly liberal hippielike childhood self and my C.S. Lewis-obsessed adolescence and adulthood (the other author like this who comes to mind is Diane Duane; I grew up on her Young Wizards books and found her first Star Trek novel, The Wounded Sky, in college and was like — “This is kinda cringe, also much more like Moby Dick than random obscure Star Trek fiction has any right to be”)
- Read a collection of Diana Wynne Jones’s poetry and was deeply impressed (the Truth poems I wrote about a year or two ago were, it turns out, only the start, which shouldn’t surprise me); they resonate with some of the best/deepest moments in her novels. They are on the whole much more serious (which I think I like), though there’s also light verse (some hilarious, some that hasn’t aged well)
- Discovered Rich Shapero — once-English-major, next-successful-venture-capitalist who self-publishes his brilliant and wild novels and releases them in a free app with music and art. (You can see why I find him inspiring.) Note I say brilliant; I’ve only read one of them yet (Too Far ) and found it remarkably powerful and beautiful (also intense in a way that makes me want to space them out a bit). I’m also annoyed by the degree of venom his work has attracted from reviewers and want to analyze this further
- Most recently, finally finished Gertrude Stein’s playful, thoughtful The World Is Round and enjoyed it a great deal; it’s a children’s book and just as peculiar and abstract a children’s book as one might want Gertrude Stein to write.
Writing
So, writing . It is probably the thing I am best at, and probably also the thing I find hardest and least surface-level-appealing of the various creative disciplines I attempt. It’s also central to my ambitions. This means that I have not a laundry list of writing accomplishments (see above) but rather one big one and one beginning.
The big one is Out of Tales, or Evernostian January (see above). It combines Jennie’s ~27th year (loosely based on mine, but replacing my real family with Jennie’s fictional one) with stuff from the past: some of what I call the Normal Novel (it is not normal and it is actually seven or so connected novelettes but whatever), a smattering of poetry, and some art. I hope to have it done and self-published by the end of the year (I’d originally wanted to aim for July 15, but I am not at all sure I’ll be able to make it as good as I want it to be by then, and I’m still half-toying with the idea of submitting to indie presses).
The beginning is 15,000 words I wrote in six days, a story to be associated with Evernostian February , and which will (I hope) meet the world sometime next year.
Coding
Turns out even when I spend all day coding for work, often I still want to do it when I get done! Coding is hard enough to be engaging without being so hard as to be offputting, and it’s the closest I’ve found to a logic puzzle that accomplishes something useful. So I continue to produce things like “Twelve Days” and “Of the Firebirds” (see previous posts), and I hope to create (or at least make progress on) some Evernostian January in interactive web format as well. So far, since “Of the Firebirds,” I’ve released:
- “While True, It Is Not Sufficient” — brief superficially gamelike meditation on escapism
- “Magic Cards: An Art Oracle Deck” — which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a virtual oracle deck (maybe someday I’ll make a physical version!) made of scraps of art with fun overinterpretations of each. Originally made for a game jam called something like “Pretentious Garbage” but not finished in time. It’s the January aesthetic (lots of black and white, rather shrill colors when colors exist), though released the previous October, and I’ve already started on a February one (perhaps to be released this October, or perhaps to be rethought).
- “Chaos Dancing” — essay thing I’d made a couple years ago but altered to be a standalone, thematically very similar to “While True, It Is Not Sufficient,” aesthetically quite different
- “Midday Snowstorm” — musical poem, technically challenging because it uses the browser as a synthesizer and only works properly in Chrome ( 😦 ), a fragment of a fragment of….
- “Jennie’s Room,” the piece that will tie it all together as I expand it, an updated version of https://new-years-day.glitch.me You get to wander into my main character Jennie’s room and look through her stuff and go on adventures by looking out the window. I plan to keep updating it as I make more stuff.
Of Elsewhere 