090: Solstice
Summer solstice today. Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, we've got the Long Day to suffer through. I don't know about the rest of you, but it's already too warm for rational thought. Fever dreams are the currency of the nighttime hours, bed sweats where you lie like a drying fish and gasp out tiny pleas for any sort of breeze. You sleep with the windows wide open and, all night long, the outside world gets to creep in and whisper in your ear.
I used to be a night person; used to love the winter months with their eternal darkness. While I still are partial to those months, I have started to appreciate the hour before dawn, that last hour when the night has finally cooled the earth and the fog is just starting to creep across the water. Dawn will be drawing a pink line across the horizon but not for another thirty minutes yet. Everything is still and crisp.
You can get some good thinking done at this hour. If you're awake. This is like the first moment of birth when your brain hasn't started shuffling through all the things you didn't accomplish yesterday and probably won't get to today. This is the hour when you can be your own man and think your own thoughts. "We murder to create." You can imagine an entire universe in twenty minutes, revel in its complexities and Mandelbrotian edges for fifteen, and then spend ten destroying it with giant cyborg sharks or mutant space funguses or a single pissed off clown hopped up on adrenochrome and goofballs.
And still have fifteen minutes to make yourself a piece of wheat toast and eat it quietly, listening to the sound of your jaws working on the crackling bread.
The longest day has been long for me. I was too close to its beginning when I went to bed last night and too close to its arrival when I got up this morning. I'm still on the cusp of Chapter XIV. I know what Markham is going to do with the fork and I'm kind of tickled by the image. But I'm hung on the edge; too many distractions and deadlines keeping me from the book.
This soap bubble will pop soon and I'll fall back into the book. But, in the meantime, I entertain myself by creating and un-creating the world in forty-five minutes.
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.