Summer Vacation 2023

A few weeks away, and a look ahead.

Portrait of the artist as a young man, circa 2019.

Somehow, as an adult, summer’s always over before it starts: already melting away like ice cream when I’ve only just started to enjoy it.

I feel like I’ve earned a break this year. Just in terms of sheer output, this has been one of the most creatively productive seasons I’ve ever managed in my life. I won’t presume that the quality has been anything extraordinary; still, if nothing else, I feel good about the volume of weird gibberish I’ve successfully put out on an almost-weekly basis.

And the steady uptick in interest is still blowing my mind. It was only March when I first made the jump to SubStack, when I was timidly hoping to pick up a handful of new subscribers. Somehow, I’ve managed to connect with dozens of readers through the work I’ve done on here. Many of them are actual, verifiable human beings; a few of them are heroes of mine—legitimate celebrities in the spaces I care about. My own contribution might be relatively small, but it’s thrilling to be adding a few ideas to the discourse around What Comes Next.

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed, shared, liked and commented these posts over the past months. I appreciate it more than words can say. I’ve dreamed of being a professional writer for a long time; although I might never make a substantial income as an author, finding people who are genuinely interested in (or at least amused by) what I’m doing has been very rewarding¹. Truly—thank you all so much.

As far as what’s ahead for the rest of the year:

• I’ll be taking a break until the beginning of August. My wife has been extremely patient while I go around raving about spirits and apocalypses and indigenous metaphysics (because she is a wonderful partner and I’m extremely lucky), but there are some mundane home projects that I’ve been neglecting. We’re also doing a big trip with the kids in late July.

• I might get one more post out before returning to work on August 7. In the meantime, my good friend and co-conspirator

  W. McCrae
  has graciously offered to share some of her original work on here. Keep an eye out for that.

• I’ve been having some weird feelings about fiction lately. More on that soon. I’m still committed to finishing one more story, which I started last year. (Subscribers to my old list will remember “All Green.”) That one is a ghost that needs to be laid to rest: I was midway through writing it when my dad died, and the story itself is weirdly entangled with that event, in ways I still don’t fully understand. That will be my big project for the fall. After that—I’m not sure how much traditional fiction I’ll be writing. Stay tuned.

• The idea of an audio project is starting to coalesce. Much like my weird feelings about fiction, I’ve been getting tired of moving ideas around in a purely theoretical space, doing para-academic work that relies on other people’s primary sources. Been getting the nudge to go outside and do some of my own fieldwork. I’m not sure how soon I’ll be producing any of that; still, it’s officially a work in progress.

From now until August, I’ll be doing my best to take a break, renewing my citizenship in the mundane world. I plan to go full-on Normie Dad: wear some aloha shirts; clean out the basement; sit on the deck; avoid any strenuous mental lifting, and read some completely unchallenging paperback fiction².

Enjoy the summer, everyone.

1. That said—I do have a family, and they don’t get much from my artistic satisfaction. I got kids to feed. Paid subscriptions make it possible for me to keep doing this.

2. My drug of choice in this area is the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brien. Sometimes—when you have two small kids and spend most of the year being Professionally Weird—taking a break means fully inhabiting the stereotype and reading a story about guys being dudes on a big boat.