I am slowly catching up. It’s not going as well as I would like, but it is slowly creeping forward.
I started the third draft of Father Lightning yesterday, and I think for the first time, at least for that first scene, it’s turning into something that might hold someone’s attention.
Hallelujah!
Target: 1500 words
Written: 1830 words, novel: Father LightningI think The Mungk really fucked me up. I always think each book will teach me a little something, to give me time to explore a subject and really think it through.
The Mungk was about trauma, big and small, and how it can utterly destroy a person if they don’t work through it, and just keep repeating the same behaviour in various forms over and over. There’s a mindlessness to it, a lack of introspection that works (in my opinion) to really show how completely derailed life can be by allowing trauma to drive the train.
Father Lightning was meant to provide the opposite, an exploration of kindness in the face of bad shit, and while it’s doing that, it’s not here.
I meant to write about it in these pages, but instead, I’m just telling you how much life sucks, little snippets to say I wrote something that day.
That’s changing.
I am going to make more of an effort in this blog to really document how things are going. The Mungk may have destroyed lives in its blind fatalism; Father Lightning will serve as a way out. A glimmer of hope. A path forward.
Then again, no one’s ever truly reviewed the books I’ve written, so yeah.
They could be piles of shit.
Killing the ego is everything; denying all value is not.
Target: 1500 words
Written: 1427 words, novel: Father LightningI know, I know. If The Mungk was all about the impact of trauma in our lives and how it can suck any joy out of it, Father Lightning was supposed to be about kindness.
The same, but opposite.
I’m not doing a very good job with kindness these days.
I suppose the process of The Mungk was about understanding how trauma and the crush of life can negatively impact me. It was a discovery.
Perhaps then Father Lightning isn’t about being kind; it’s about discovering kindness altogether.
The end result of The Mungk was to understand what my starting point was; what I don’t want my life to be.
The end result of Father Lightning? Discovering kindness. How to be kind. Kind to myself. Kind to others.
Do better, man.
You can, you know.
Target: 1400 words
Written: 1509 words, novel: Father LightningAnd grocery shopping. Basically, all I can do today. All in all, I thought I did a pretty good job of keeping it together at work and getting things done.
Surprising after the brain fog of the last few days. Work continues on the novel as well, a little, so take that, COVID.
I can still do shit, even when I’m sick. Norovirus was worse.
Target: 1300 words
Written: 257 words, novel: Father LightningIt’s hard to describe the feeling of peace when you let a piece of writing that’s dwelled inside you for so long go, especially when it’s one that took you to a very dark place.
I have ideas.
I have lots of ideas.
As it stands, I’ve over three dozen ideas for novels written down, in part, and at least a dozen ideas for comic books. Hundreds of short stories. Poetry just tends to happen.
But The Mungk represents a starting point for me. While someday, I hope to write novels about the Great Way, blending reality and all things good, today, here, now, The Mungk focuses on everything and anything awful in life.
Feelings of hopelessness, of loss. Of trauma and drain, the kind that wears you down over the course of a life and leaves you withered and bitter fruit.
And I’m glad to see it go. I suspect there will be some residuals, as I try to sell the thing to a publisher or an agent, but it’s a novella. Not particularly saleable in the best of times, no matter how good.
In any case, it’s done. No more editing. No more putzing about with it. It’s time to send it out into the world to spawn its feckless devils. If I can’t get any takers in a year, I’ll publish it myself. From this point on, everything I write gets out there in some way. The universe receives it, whether it’s wanted or not.
Peace, Mungk.
Target: 1200 words
Written: 1449 words, novella: The MungkI’m taking my own well-being into account these days. I knew I would start small, and I did.
I read short books. Crappy books. Short comic series. Standalone movies. Single season shows that got cancelled.
I wrote a haiku.
A piece of flash fiction.
A one-shot comic.
A short story, which was really more of a noir, back-twisted rant I didn’t believe in.
Weirdly, all the individual work was published. The comic is pending, because comics are collaborative, and I’m an anxious collaborator, in the sense that I’m terrified of anything beyond the script stage.
I try to remember. Little things build to bigger. Most overnight successes spent ten or more years laying groundwork.
Learning. Mastering. You don’t pick up a guitar and channel Jimi or Kim Thayil.
That shit takes time.
Piece by piece. Trying to remember, it’s not about hitting targets. No such thing as delayed gratification; the joy is found in each stage. To defer it to the end is to guarantee frustration and a fleeting moment of exultation, if we even make it that far.
Most of us will not.
Target: 800 words
Written: 631 words, novella: The MungkPart of me wants to give up and write a poem a day for the next two years, but how does that get me out of this shithole job?
Unfortunately, it’s book or comic or nothing. Short stories and poetry are fun, but they don’t pay the bills unless you’re established.
Target: 800 words
Written: 436 words, novella: The MungkDoing my best today, but my head is pounding. I see the United Church moved to an even more progressive and liberal stance regarding substance abuse, which justifies my use of them as a baseline for kind Christianity, as opposed to more toxic sects of Christianity like those that support Republicans (and likely the Inquisition, if it still existed).
Of course, I still don’t believe that kindness and religion are required bedfellows. To me, kindness chosen instead of suggested or enforced is more natural kindness. Internally generated kindness is better than kindness pushed from outside by an institution.
We shouldn’t have to be told to be kind; it shouldn’t be an externally touted mandate.
The kindness that comes from within, kindness we choose ourselves, is always of a greater quality than kindness dictated to us as actions by others. Not that there’s no value in “forced” kindness, only a less pure intent, which becomes easier to forget or twist.
Choose kindness for yourself. You don’t need a man in the sky to tell you that.
Target: 800 words
Written: 199 words, novella: The MungkI know this blog does little to market me. I don’t promote it, beyond having the link available on my social media profiles, and it’s not exactly engaging in the sense of providing value.
It might have some salacious interest, in the sense that anyone reading gets to understand the frustration of a struggling artist as he tries to discover his place in the world, whether the art he wants to create is viable and whether it’s actually possible to find a way to live with some sense of joy in this crazy world.
There’s a point I reach every time I sit down to really write, where I just want to chuck it all and start over, but that’s not the way the world works, is it?
We can’t just throw the baby out and start again. We have responsibilities. History.
We do not exist in a void – a fatal error I made in my youth before I learned to see past my own nose. Truth be told, that is still an issue at times, and only really became something I was able to move past in the last four or five years.
The Mungk was meant to embody the hopelessness I felt, the constant sense of impending doom, where everything seemed to get worse and worse and every action taken to make things better only drove me further into despair when they failed. Life, particularly in the last few years, has been a hell of an educator in that regard.
I am trying something different with future ideas. Ironically, one of these ideas is similar to The Mungk (and in fact, I have at least two more pending ideas that revolve around ethereal dark entities guiding us toward destruction in the works – based on hopelessness, appetites, addiction and depression, though certainly not so delineated as that).
However, unlike The Mungk, these later ideas have positive resolution. Three wins and one loss isn’t bad, right? Of course, I’m months, if not years, away from having time to tackle these.
Kindness plays a huge role in this, and while I’m a big advocate of kindness and compassion and understanding, actions are what matters there, and outside of family, I’m not sure I’ve lived up to that advocacy. Even inside family, at times.
My incompletion is forever a source of pain, but also a driving force. I’m not sure I could exist if I were already complete. Completeness, perfection – these things imply stasis. Fluidity, growth, retraction, change – these things give us movement, places to go, things to contemplate and discover. Omnipotence is boring. Static.
And static decays, always.
Going forward, I need to focus on kindness. On its theories and application, in philosophy and in reality. In words and action.
Still, I worry it’s not enough. I don’t need to take over the world; I just want my part of it to be better for having me in it – in actual fact, and not simply appearance.
I’m not certain I’m living up to that promise. I certainly haven’t during the last hundred-and-twenty-plus days of enduring misery while writing The Mungk. My goal over the next few months is to do better, to find that spark of potential and come to a better understanding.
And through my actions, maybe put a few of these doubts and worries to rest.
Target: 700 words
Written: 145 words, novella: The MungkI don’t know why, but this birthday feels different. Perhaps it’s because I just went through one of the roughest periods of my life. Call it my Mungk phase, in which I learned most definitely what I did not want in my life.
It could also be my mother-in-law’s hospitalization. I’ve already had three grandparents die, but this is the first in the generation right before mine that’s gone. Everyone younger has been more tragic than fact-of-life aging.
I’m definitely feeling it. Still, I can’t claim no progress. I’m writing a novella. I had three things published – two short stories and a haiku. I wrote a one-shot comic that could be fun to draw (and it’s increasingly looking like I might need to do that myself, despite my lack of ability).
The process could be good. Find the pitfalls on my own so I can have a better rapport and understanding with future collaborators.
As I head into a new draft of The Mungk, having ideas for a four-issue crime comic, three more short stories (including one that strays into novelette territory) and another couple of poems, I’m actually a little proud, even if the work is a bit raw and I’m feeling less than inspired lately. I’ve read over forty books since I penned that first haiku back on St. Patrick’s Day. I’ve read almost five hundred comics. Lost a pound. Built my meditation practice up to five whole minutes a day. Listened to almost a hundred and fifty albums. Learned forty new recipes.
I get it. It’s a little ridiculous, but it’s important to acknowledge even small steps forward. If The Mungk was about feeling all the bad things at once to understand how I don’t want to feel, the next one has to be about finding a way forward. Finding a few moments of kindness in the dark. Being nicer to myself, included.
Target: 700 words
Written: 1324 words, novella: The Mungk