Lately I’ve been trying to loosen up and make a mess: fast collages, illegible notes in the middle of the night, and the inky smudges of a left-hander. There is no logic yet, but the scenery tilts toward the religious.

I want to believe in God but don’t know how. Some say it’s just a matter of making a decision, even inventing your own higher power if needed. But I require proof. A burning bush. A voice that shakes the heavens. Imagine that: demanding God prove itself to me rather than the other way around.

Meanwhile, the nation is preparing for an eclipse tomorrow. They’re playing countdown clocks on the news, and astronomers and astrologers are getting equal attention. Words like gamma, perigee, and orbital plane blur with talk about realigning our spiritual nodes and dramatic upheavals in our karmic journeys. Arkansas and Maine have declared states of emergency because of the traffic, and in rural Illinois, a Super 8 motel is charging $949 for the night. So many energies are colliding around this grand and rare event, possibly the last event, to pull everyone into a moment of shared reality before we go our separate ways.

Then again, if I look carefully and squint a little, maybe the bush is always burning.

Columbus is the eighth cloudiest city in the country, and after spending a year in a very bright desert, I’m savoring the gloom. I’m still turning up at the library to write fiction every morning, and I’ve been pondering why I’m good at doing a particular task every day or not at all. If I aim for three or four times per week, I’ll push it around until it dissolves.

I’m starting a new book while I wait for my first novel about a loud god to cool off and collect feedback from a gracious reader. Then I’ll spend the spring and summer revising it a final time before I harass agents in the fall.

This new novel started while dredging up the half-finished short stories I’d squirreled away in various clouds and drives. The ones I expected to be worth finishing were ponderous and concerned with “themes.” Then I found a ludicrous three-page thing I wrote fifteen years ago about a cage fight at a nursing home. It was terrible. But a line from it kept nagging me: They returned to the old ways and shaved their heads, grew their fingernails long, and slicked themselves down with baby oil. I wanted to know the conditions that could bring such a world into being. Perhaps a reader would too.

So here I am, five thousand words into something I can’t distinguish from worthwhile or ridiculous, but I’m having big fun writing again. This is important because I’m certainly not doing it for money.

Starting a New Big Thing has taken the weight off the Old Big Thing and made writing feel much less precious and fraught. How many times have I encountered this advice in writing how-tos? Put your draft in a drawer for a few months, they say, then start something new. But I have a knack for taking the longest, most taxing route to common knowledge before finally climbing out of the muck and saying ah, right, there’s wisdom in that.

The sun goes down at 8:05 tonight, there’s a waxing crescent moon, and the blessed cool edge of autumn is in the air. Today I learned that Cheez-Its were invented in Ohio. There’s magic here. There’s also magic in a fresh notebook.

The first thing I do with a new notebook is write something stupid and messy on the first page. This helps cure any notion that it might be precious. For years I believed the right notebook would solve all my problems. I explored blank pages, dots, and grids. I fooled with modular systems. I invested in artisanal, shade-grown leather journals. In the end, I’ve settled on these Muji notebooks. They’re five bucks a pop, the pages are nicely coated, and they lie flat, which seems to aid my left-handedness. And they can take a beating. They heroically suffer rain and sploshed coffee. They get jammed in my back pocket, I fall asleep on them, and sometimes I use them to kill bugs. Pen-wise, I remain committed to black 0.4mm Zebra Sarasa pens.

I’ve been relying more on these tools lately, drafting my stories with pen and paper before punching them into a machine. I think differently when I’m not locked into a staring contest with a screen. Maybe because my writing doesn’t look like the final product yet, I’m more willing to make mistakes.

(Inspired by Warren Ellis’s recent note about notebooks.)

They look less and less like recognizable humans, these billionaires buying everything we care about: books and newspapers, transportation and the moon. And now Twitter. 

I have no moral objections here. Perhaps I should, but I’m not sure if Twitter was any more righteous when it was governed by shadow corporations that bankrolled nuclear weapons and cluster munitions. Maybe it’s better if social media is delisted from Wall Street and no longer pressured to maximize revenue through attention hijacking and outrage mechanics. But now that this space I once loved belongs to an unstable billionaire, it might be the kick in the seat I need to rethink how I spend my dwindling time on this planet and who it serves.

We tend to talk about social media in binary terms—follow/unfollow, like/block, share/mute—which warps our thinking and, not coincidentally, mirrors the language of addiction. We talk about quitting, even detoxing from social media. I’ve never heard someone say, “I’ll just check it on Wednesday afternoons.” And like an addict, I’ve been languishing in the uneasy state of knowing Twitter is terrible for me, yet using it anyway, hoping to rekindle the golden days of making new friends, exchanging minutiae, and getting turned on to new movies, music, and ideas. But the scene turned sour years ago. Now it feels like retching in the street.

And so, after fifteen years of broadcasting on somebody else’s airwaves, I’ve decided to let my channel rot. It’ll be a dead station, auto-posting hyperlinks to my own patch of the Information Superhighway until the lights go out. I’m not going to look at Twitter anymore.

But habits are hard to break. My lizard brain is a ferocious beast. Whenever I get stuck in my work, my fingers twitch, eager to launch a new tab and type “tw…” for a dose of distraction or attention. I physically twitch. What on earth have I been doing to myself all these years? So I’ve had to block Twitter at the root level.

I’ll continue to tend my little garden here, maybe even compile some of the writing I’ve accumulated into small books. Something concrete. And I think I’ve managed to switch on the comments in case anyone wants to say hello or recommend a movie or a song.

Adam Arthur’s new live set for Interdimensional Transmissions is perfect concentration music for me: a long stretch of ambient drift that slowly gives way to sparkling synthetics that remind me I was once optimistic about a techno-future.

Snow-blasted skies and temperatures around zero. The sun goes down at 5:49pm.

I thought about Haruki Murakami while C. and I wandered through hotel lobbies and fields of snow. The days around my birthday often find me rethinking the rhythm of my life and nursing morning fantasies, and this seed was planted ages ago after reading about Murakami’s routine:

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

The Paris Review, 2004

I’ve spent years crafting a morning fantasy of my own, and it’s become a vision as rich and familiar as a favorite film. I wake at dawn, splash cold water on my face, and stretch. I meditate in the quiet and jot down notes for stories, maybe the scenes from last night’s dreams. Then I run a few miles and return home for a shower and a light breakfast: fruit, barley, or whatever morning people eat. Then I sit for an hour or two with only a notebook and pen, writing in silence before switching to editing and compiling. I do not check the internet or listen to music. Silence is essential, so my mind is left only with the world I am building. I work this way until late morning when I finally let the world enter my head and deal with the day’s obligations and bill-paying labor. Because I’ve already taken care of my spiritual, physical, and creative work, the day can go to hell at noon, and it will still have been worthwhile.

I’m very proud of this routine even though I’ve never done it. Instead, I wake up at all hours, never eat breakfast, and I scribble into my notebook while I’m in bed or the car or standing in the middle of a superstore. Music is always playing. An unholy number of browser tabs are open. I can’t contemplate walking quickly, let alone running, until deep into the afternoon. Although I meditate most days, I still fight the urge to look at my watch. Even if my phone is in a drawer, it hums in the corner of my skull like there’s another person in the room. The babble doesn’t fade until midnight. Then I can concentrate.

Yet my Spartan Morning Man fantasy persists, year after year. Maybe because it takes so much effort. Nobody works at becoming a night owl, do they? Yet just thinking about becoming an early riser makes me feel crisp and minty like I’m in a commercial, slipping into cool water with a fresh linen scent. The persistence of this fantasy is astonishing. Perhaps I’ll try it someday.

In the meantime, I’m grateful to be surrounded by snow because I can finally enjoy Echospace’s The Coldest Season in its proper context: at two o’clock in the morning on a long winter night.

Echospace – Winter in Seney

The Coldest Season | Modern Love, 2008 | Boomkat

Wind chills in the single digits and still no snow. The sun sets at 5:27pm tonight.

It took some time to humble myself and write yet another draft of this novel I’ve been working on for years. But at last, I’m settling into a steady writing groove for the first time in months. I write in the library for an hour or two each morning, which is terrible because I’m a night owl in my bones. But I’ve learned the hard way that I need to write fiction before I let the world into my head and start doing things for money. As much I dislike these early hours, I’m beginning to savor the routine: Brewing a thermos of coffee while last night’s dreams evaporate. Warming up the car in the January cold. Taking a seat in the far corner of the Quiet Room. 

I do my best to write longhand for an hour before looking at a screen. But how do you measure progress? It’s easy to applaud myself for spending an hour or two each day on my draft, but when does this end? I need to get back to counting words. Tonight I made a spreadsheet with a reasonable daily target of 500 words. I’m a slow writer, but I should be able to hit this no matter if I’m in Ohio, London, the desert, or some state of emergency. It also outlines the task for the day, and there’s a spot for me to note how many words I actually wrote to make sure I’m not kidding myself. (Maybe my reliance upon counting words is hardwired; I used to count how many words I spoke each day because I was so shy.)

I can keep rewriting the same story forever. If I’m not paying attention, I can push commas around for hours or lose a whole day deliberating between that and which. Years ago, I came across an excellent Finnish word for someone fixated on the unimportant details: pilkunnussija, which means “comma fucker”. Yes, that’s me. 

Sunset: 5:14pm. The blurry days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve stand outside of time. These long nights are tailor-made for dusting off childhood memories and tending to personal passions. Perhaps this is why I’m dredging up my old delay pedals, tape decks, and loop machines. I’d like to start making tracks again, and I don’t want to do this anywhere near a screen. In an age of mind-numbing options and endless virtual palettes, parameters are critical.

Today I spent the afternoon rooting through a storage unit for my copy of Snowcrash and some audio cables, and my brains hummed with digital chatter and trash. Celebrities are shaving their heads, there’s a glass bottle shortage, and China is building a hotter version of the sun. I want to improve my ability to sit still and simply be a person, so I stopped by the local zen center.

I meditated in the recreation hall of a Unitarian church with two elderly men who were live-streaming the situation to the internet. No matter where I go these days, there’s a fucking screen. I closed my eyes and tried not to fidget or look at the clock while I listened to the two men breathe. Heavy rain fell on the rooftop that sounded like static, and I spent the time thinking about how to set up my soundsystem, debating whether my beautiful new reverb pedal should come before or after the cassette deck.

Atlas Minor – Texas Radio Drift

American Decay | 2015 | Bandcamp

An old reverberated and looped bit of radio that I caught down in Texas ten years ago. I collected this with some other tracks for an extended-player in 2015, and I’m looking forward to making a new batch.

Six years later, I have 88,000 words about an elderly truck driver, a frightened voice on the radio, and a very loud god. It’s the nineteenth draft of this story, and it still has problems, but it’s as good as I know how to make it right now. I’m ready for C’s advice before I start the twentieth draft. She’s my ideal reader, the reason I write stories. I must remember this whenever I start worrying about things like symbolism, style, and relevance. Keep it simple. Return to the image of sitting around a fire thousands of years ago: we make up stories to entertain the people we care about. That’s all.

Along the way, I began to think of this book as a monster. A bizarre, embarrassing, and occasionally fascinating creature showed up in my life, and like it or not, it must be dealt with, or else it will leave me exhausted and haunted. As long as I pay some attention to it each day, it is happy. Sometimes it even performs neat little tricks. But if I ignore it for a day, it begins to get sullen. Let three or four days go by, and it turns downright mean when I try to approach, snapping at my hands. Weeks will pass before I can summon the nerve to go near it again.

After years spent fooling around with countless rituals and productivity routines, I learned the hard way that it’s all a mirage. The time of day does not matter. The perfect notebook will not solve my problems. Everydayness is the most important thing for me. If I’m lucky, this might mean a few hours of steady work in the afternoon. But it’s often just twenty minutes of scrolling through the document at midnight, rearranging commas and pruning a sentence, just to keep the monster tame. Even a quick pat on the head will do.

Legowelt – A Monster So Beautiful!

Loch Ness | Pacific Micro International Software, 2013 | Bandcamp