On chapter 18? 19… of my Summer Project (It’s called Daisy, but I keep referring to it as my Summer Project to … appear more mysterious? I don’t know)
Gathered a list of short stories that I think I could possibly put together in a collection
Went through a few chapters of Lazarus Rising’s first draft (Fogg is so fun to read and write)
I spent yesterday reading 2.5 books, and both were disappointing. I don’t know why I keep expecting romantasy to be good. It’s all miscommunication tropes that make me want to slam my face in a blender. And if it’s not that, it’s the main couple arguing about their relationship. It’s so frustrating that the plot is non-existent in a lot of these. But if the people want the fuckin’, I guess they’ll get the fuckin’.
I’m going to spend some time typing up a bit of the first scribbles I made of The Dust Chronicles. A story I keep drifting to in my heart. It might be a duology. It also might just be a single novel. But a fuckin’ big one. That’s the next project after the Maker Series.
That’s all the snow on this mountain. I hope you are doing well. I hope the summer has been kind to you, even if it’s been hot as balls.
Q: What is your favorite food? A: Cheesy carbs, but also peanut butter
Q: Do you have a favorite color? A: Blue, in any hue
Q: How about hobbies? A: Sure, writing–although that one is more of a life. Reading (I’m currently reading two books, Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, and No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. I just finished Accomplice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer.)
I also enjoy hiking, art museums, listening to music, visiting my family, and seeing my friends.
Q: How big is your family? A: I have a blended family, which gives me two brothers and three sisters. Most of us live in the US, but one sister lives in Japan with her family. I have four nephews and a niece. They range in ages from 6.5 years old to two less than a year old.
Q: What music do you listen to? A: Pretty much everything. I’m not a country music fan, but I appreciate people are. I don’t usually listen to rap unless I’m in the mood for it. My most listened to band right now is Sleep Token (shut up, they’re good to me), but I also am very fond of soundtracks, “classical” music, and other assortments of musical acts like Dead South, Bedouin Soundclash, Breaking Benjamin, Noah Gundersen, Elbow, Modest Mouse, Heilung, Hozier, Juice WRLD, Keane, Linkin Park, Hanson, etc.
Q: Do you believe in God? A: Not really. I used to. I was raised Mormon (LDS) and was fairly active in the church until my early twenties, and then I kind of had some stuff happen that didn’t really shake my faith, more confirmed some things I’d thought for a while. I do believe in a spirituality of sorts, not necessarily religiously. I find a lot of solace in nature, and I like being reminded there’s more out there much bigger than I am, and I can get easily lost in the thought of how rivers know where to go. Spirituality often gets misconstrued as having to do with religion, but I think it’s more a connection to our place in the universe. For whatever reason, evolution gave us the ability to have a deep thought now and then, and a lot of us humans ponder why we’re here. I certainly don’t know the answer to that, but I do know I’m doing my best to enjoy being here.
Q: What is your biggest fear? A: The dark, deep water, mirrors, losing my family. The dark is, of course, the possibility of what’s inside the darkness, deep water because there’s an element of the unknown and darkness, losing my family is pretty obvious, haha. I don’t mean the natural way of life loss, though. I mean more the metaphorical loss. Mirrors because I don’t need to see things in there that don’t need to be.
Q: Is there a Mr. Salisbury Fake? A: No, and I don’t seek one. There is loneliness from time to time, but that’s human nature. I am quite content by myself. I think one day it’d be cool to be married, but that would probably be a weird relationship to outsiders. I’d like having someone, but I’d also really like being left alone, haha.
Q: Are you romantic? A: Unbearably so. I think there is beauty in romanticizing life to an extent. I don’t think it’s good to let romance become delusion.
Q: So, if you did get married, what would your choice of ‘first dance’ song be? A: Blue Skies by Irving Berlin, but specifically from the Picard season 1 soundtrack.
Q: Are you happy? A: Happiness is such a fleeting feeling and something I think as elusive as perfection. I don’t strive for happiness, I strive for contentment. Far more achievable and far more sustainable. Happiness is important and something to enjoy when it appears (such as seeing my brother’s kids play together), but to me it’s far more important to understand it’s okay not to be happy all the time. Generalized contentment is my preferred goal, and so in that line, I say yes. I am content. Wanderlust and yearning aside, I am content.
Q: Did you make up all of these questions for this interview with yourself? A: Yes. Yes, I did.
Hi, salutations, popcorn in your bucket, and maybe some peanut butter and jelly on your sandwich?
I’ve been writing, sure. The “Summer Project” is about to be merged with the 2023 draft, and that’s exciting. I have to … grow up? the 2023 draft a bit more because the character is older and some of the stuff is youthful.
Been reading. Finished The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (highly recommend). Read through a few others this afternoon, actually, and had the thought that I don’t think all people who can discuss books should write them. A lot of “thrillers” and “mysteries” are being churned out by the booktok machine and it’s clearly written for popularity rather than substance. That’s okay. The world does need books like that for the readers who want them. I am not one of them, it seems, so I will consume with caution from now on.
I don’t consider those books beneath me, but I prefer the books I read to offer a satisfying conclusion to a building of tension and “thrill.” Both endings of the books I read today were rushed and one of them I predicted well before the reveal of the “twist” and I felt let down. This is why I don’t tend to read modern mysteries. I usually figure them out before the halfway point and I get frustrated.
That’s all the spokes from this wagon wheel, darlings. I hope you’re well, and I hope the heat isn’t keeping you down.
A few thoughts and then I flee again. Not much to report, really. I’ve been
s t r u g g l i n g
to write my summer project. Most of it consists of staring at a blank page of notebook paper and wondering if I finally developed carpal tunnel from my decades of writing everything by hand. I mentioned something about maybe “outgrowing” a project, and I think I have a little here. And by a little I mean a lot. I still want to tell the story, but it feels like every other romance novel out there. What separates my characters from anyone else’s? Why should anyone give a shit about this story?
Am I being morose? Yeah. There’s a starvation in my chest. An ache where I wish I could stuff someone in there and love them. Loneliness and yearning I can’t explain rationally. But is that kind of thing ever rational? I don’t know, but I feel so stolen by it whenever it finds me. Kind of jerked out of time, a bit. My brain just rattles around trying to find the place it fits and the room is a mess.
Trying to write while being suspended above yourself is rather impossible. I could shove all I’m feeling into the story currently eluding me, but no one wants to read realism in romance. We all want to be swept into a reality not our own, and if I put down on paper my vulnerabilities like that, what am I setting loose into the world?
I know, I’m writing it down here, but no one really reads this, so I’m not too bugged. I want to be seen, but unknown. If you only see what I drop onto this screen, I still own myself and I am not beholden to anyone other than the gromblins chewing on my cerebellum.
How do you put such distended limbs on a person you create?
If I could find the right words, I know I’d find the story properly again, but for now, they’re going to remain buried in the pile. Slippery from being disgorged out of the intestine of my thoughts.
Do I even want to write? Do I want to see my words continually fail? Maybe if I write the wrong ones enough times, I’ll get something to make sense.
Actually, give me a second. Gonna go look at the last journal and see what all I said.
Ah yes. Well, the car is broken broken, and I now have a new vehicle to cart me on my adventures (to the office because all I do is work). I wrote a short story for a contest on a writing forum. I’m currently …. with some votes.
Have you ever “outgrown” a story? I felt lost with the novel I’ve deemed the “summer project” and I was worried I’d lost my way with it. Not necessarily that it was a bad story, but maybe I no longer felt like it needed to be told.
I rearranged a chapter and rewrote some other scenes and now I’m writing like a fiend. I still think I have some lingering “am I no longer able to write this story?” but for the most part, it feels like I’m moving forward at a steady pace. My right wrist and middle finger say “maybe lighten up on how you hold the pen, fool.”
I think that’s all I have for now. I hope you are doing well. I hope your stories are coming to you word by word and page by page.
That’s probably the last time I’ll try to get cute with titles. Maybe. Probably not. I’m fun like that.
Hello. Welcome. Thank you for being here. In general, and also looking through my rambly show-and-tell of sorts. What have I been doing? A whole bunch of working for my day job, and a bit of everything else. I went on a trip to another state with some friends this last weekend and got myself some books and rocks. I don’t do the crystal thing, but I do like the way rocks feel when I touch them sometimes, so I got the ones that felt the best. I had a blast hanging out with my friends.
Writing wise, I’ve been outlining a project I hope to complete this summer. I’ve been struggling with writing it first because it just falls so flat on itself and I’m forcing moments when they should be happening as they will. The bones are there, now time to stick the goo on it. I don’t know if I said so last time, but I finished the first handwritten draft of my third book in the Maker series. It’s currently sitting on my printer waiting to be typed up. Might do that with the rest of this week I have off.
My car broke down (truly a joy) so the plans I had to go to the movies and do some fun outings by myself are pushed to a weekend or something. The car shall be returned to me on Monday, so fret not, in case you were. I’m not pleased with the cost of repairs, but ya know, it’s not the price of a new car, so, there is that.
One of my best friends brought her chainsaw over and we got the bushes in front of my house cut down and I’m pretty stoked to start my summer outside projects. I despair at my backyard, but I also think once I get out and start groovin’, it’ll get figured out.
Sometimes it catches me off guard how many people enjoy being around me. Kind of like tapping the part of me that is obsessed with hating itself on the shoulder and whispering loudly, “You’re not the trash you demand you be.”
That’s all the cheese on this block, friends. Thank you for stopping by. It was truly nice to see you.
Singing Justin Bieber’s “Baby” while unwrapping a peanut butter cup is peak Saturday morning behavior, I think. I don’t know if this is journal number six. I could look, but that requires more dedication to a numbering system than I particularly care for currently. I don’t know “Baby” past the chorus, so it’s been just a repeat of “baby, baby, baby, ohhhhh” progressively more offkey.
I haven’t been stuck. Well, no, I have been. Stuck in chapter twenty of the Lazarus Rising first draft. I’ve come across things I’ll “fix in post,” I tell myself. Scribbling late into the night because insomnia has come to visit again. Who needs sleep when words give so much more to me? I probably do need sleep, because the headaches that have come from this lack of it are just debilitating sometimes.
But yeah, finally got through chapter twenty, and I actually made it through chapter twenty-one. Finished that last night, and then when I woke up this morning, I had some clarity to restart the gibberish I wrote to open chapter twenty-two before I passed out.
Currently, peanut butter cups are eaten, and water should be next to consume, but that requires getting up again and I just sat down to keep typing up chapter fourteen. I don’t want to get half a book behind on typing again, so I’m going to spend today doing some of that. After I have brunch/lunch with some friends.
Depression has been keeping me company as of late. I see it. I wave at it when I get home. I tell it how my day has been, knowing full well it’s been right there at my ankles the whole time. It knows my weaknesses. It knows my sadness. Not a bad roommate, really. More like a mother giving you the silent treatment and you aren’t sure what you’ve done wrong, so you’ll keep trying your best not to mess anything else up.
I hope you’re doing okay. I hope you’re able to see the sun, and I hope the warmth sticks with you longer than you expect it to.
I don’t necessarily have writer’s block, I have lack of interest in writing at the moment. I’m still trying to write, though, and so some of the stuff that comes out is useable and other bits are more scrappable.
I am not discouraged by this, though! Sometimes taking breaks is necessary. Give a brain a bit of a rest. I’m doing some reading, though. Currently I’m reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and The Temptation to Exist by E.M. Cioran. I may review one or both of those! May also just read them, haha.
I considered doing a game review of a game I recently watched a playthrough of, but I sometimes feel like a poser when I try to talk about video games. I’m not skilled in the slightest at playing them, so I usually watch games (without commentary). Big, big space horror fan.
Back to writing: I’ve done a few things with the language I made up for the Maker series, like named a metal and started … doodling? I guess would be the word for it, but seeing how sentence structure would work. Different cities would have different structure sometimes, I think, as a way to differentiate their cultures/accents/etc.
I think that’s about all I have in terms of an update for now. Until next time, friends.
I feel it poking at the back of my brain, trying to wheedle its way into my skull. To bury itself where it feels most familiar, most comfortable. I am surrounded by what-ifs and why. Can’t you just let me breathe?
I wish I had answers and timeframes, and understanding of the deeper parts of fear. I just have a promise to keep trying. Keep doing. Keep rising out of bed, keep putting my shoes on and still be a person where it’s expected of me.
I want to hollow myself out and climb inside. Wrap the cavity around me and tighten it with screws. Let me get to know the woman I’ve become. Without being asked why I changed. Why I became.
It’s okay not to be okay, of course, but how long do you let that be your maxim? Your guide through life? When does it stop being a thing you tell yourself for grace and becomes a thing you tell yourself to hide?
Hide with me, I beg the moon. Hide away with me from all the sunrises coming for me, so I can stay with the part of me I don’t know yet, the part I’ve been running from this whole time.
Is it right, I ask my back patio, to leave the tired parts of my mind behind, to stand guard against the darkness seeping in through their fingers, while the rest of me pushes forward a brightness I know is false? Is it right of me to do that?
I wish I could tell you, I say to the pillow I tossed onto my mattress last night. I wish I could tell you why I can’t find the pieces. I just can’t.
I’ve been working rather steadily on the first draft of the third book. Lazarus Rising. Not the religious connotations it might seem to have, but kind of? Based purely on Tobias (the creator of Telaroth) liking the story of Lazarus so much he used the name as a way to distance himself from the problems he caused. It goes so much deeper than that, of course, but this book is one of the first we see into Lazarus. Characters go into the sister-world and it is truly one of the coolest places to spend an afternoon in my head.
I am currently doing some typing so I don’t have an entire book to type in a few months when I have the first draft done. But I’m writing chapter sixteen now. Just scootin’ right along.
I’ve been thinking more and more about submitting a few short pieces for magazines/journals/etc, but I know next to nothing about that process. I have a few friends who are regular submitters and they’ve offered advice, so when I get the confidence to start collecting rejections, I’ll implement what I learn from them.
Sometimes I beta read as well, and one of the things that surprises the people I read for is how fast I get it done. So, I’ve considered maybe turning that into a side hustle. Get some dollars for a hobby? I don’t know. I truly enjoy reading through people’s work and seeing how I can help them tell the story they want to. I don’t really do line-edits, but I do broader content and some typo assist. I keep waffling back and forth on asking for money for it, though, because it is something I really do enjoy.
But my father told me once never give my work away for free.
And the part of me that breathes words says the delight I get from doing this kind of thing is the payment I need or even want.
Things to think about, of course.
Aside from that, I have a secret-not-so-secret project looming for the summer months, and I’m excited about that in the sense that it’s a piece I never really thought I’d publish. It’s a romance novel of sorts, and one I’ve worked on for yeeeeears and years. Never putting it anywhere more than a now defunct forum.
I will get the first draft of Lazarus Rising finished, and then work on Daisy while Lazarus steeps. When I get to the fourth book in the Maker series, that’ll be a challenge because I’ve never written a draft–first person or third. Everything else has at least been through a first person POV version. Uncharted territory ahead, and it’s exciting but intimidating all at once.
Thanks for reading this ramble of writing thoughts. Until next time, friends.
salisbury.fake 