Under a Black Rainbow

Because of the next book, I released this current one. Despite releasing Under a Black Rainbow five days ago, I've been deeply involved in the creation of the next book, which feels more immediate and has, like other projects worth completing, become its own maelstrom of things to contend with.  Though dense in topicality, I've found a way to have a little fun with it (as I usually tend to do). Fictional locales of Latin-ized stages of grief, emotional landmarks on the map, incomplete fictions, potential GPS coordinates for signifcant places in significant moments, playlists that consumed my brain during particular stints... Excited is the wrong word for this book, but there is a thrumming pulling me along and telling me it's worth telling.  So I've been busy doing what it is that I tend to do best, which is make shit for other people to consume. Enjoy these fruits from your favorite dancing monkey. Works totally in progress. May your 2024 be better than you expect, an...

During the early days of the pandemic, I stumbled across a few different things online that caught my interest. One of them was a role-playing game by the name of Call of Cthulhu (CoC). Based on the writings of HP Lovecraft (a super problematic dude, even by the standards of his era), I often describe the game as "like Dungeons & Dragons, but set in the 1920s and revolving around the nature of cosmic horror rather than anything having to deal with high fantasy."  The two are really only similar in that both are games played by people who roll dice to see how the narrative plays out. Where the characters found in D&D become better, stronger, faster, more powerful and can potentially go to war with gods...the characters in CoC are normal human beings, pushed to the edge of their mental stability as they uncover more about cults, cultists, and the cosmic, uncaring beings they worship during the time of Prohibition (though other settings in other eras exist as well).  I...

  I truly recognized it today for the first time, this pattern of the last few months. Not that I didn't see it happening physically, only that I didn't see it for it what it was until now.  I've been angry about my writer's block and my reader's block. These are two things I used to take a great deal of enjoyment in doing. I've had to pivot my creative output into other avenues because my old stand-bys are on indefinite leave. Part of me hates this because it's the longest blockage I've had since I actively started focusing on my writing some 20+ years ago. The other part of me hates it because I can almost taste the potential stories on the tip of my mind's tongue. Frustratingly out of reach.  My music block is another one that's been really tough to grapple with these days. I've got some gigs coming up thankfully, which has lit a fire under my ass to really get back into it, but it's been an uphill battle.  You might be wondering where...

3/22/21 - Nearly three years ago, my mother was diagnosed with primary peritoneal carcinoma. It was a pretty harrowing moment for all of us in the family as there wasn't much of a history in the family of cancer. We didn't have a lot of experience dealing with it or handling it; it was a pretty foreign endeavor for us.  That was July of 2018. I spent much of that month packing up my apartment so I could break my lease and move into her basement to help out around the house and be more readily available for her should something more serious arise. Luckily, those moments were few and far between, but we had a few feverish late nights that required several baseline hours of hospitalization. This was part of the deal and I understood what my being in the same house would require of me in this regard. It was one of the biggest, but also easiest, decisions I've ever made.  Though true to form, mom didn't always need much help from me, incredibly self-sufficient woman that she...