Poem: Space

This poem contains no content warnings other than a non-explicit mention of sex. It was written on the 30th March 2022 and I am, to be honest, pretty pleased with it, even if I'm not 100% settled on the title.

Space:

I’ve always been terrified of space.

Not as a general concept, nor one specific

thing – more like a dozen things, one after

another. The idea of being trapped inside

a rocket ship haunted my childhood nightmares,

all lights and noise and bellowed instructions

from an unseen advisor speaking a language

I did not understand;

black holes consumed me with the same

obsession normally reserved by children for

quicksand, waiting for one to appear

in the sky above my head the way one

might be certain there are invisible sharks

in any swimming pool;

the idea, simply and most terrifying of all,

of drifting through the infinite, nowhere to go

and nothing to hold onto, nothing to use to

pull myself back down to the planet, condemned

to millennia of the void.

 

As much as I loved to look at the stars, the idea

of being among them brought no comfort. I had

to stop staring at them for years at one point,

so certain did I become every time I turned

my eyes skyward that I could feel gravity giving

up on me, surrendering me to that black

sky, offering me like a sacrifice to keep everyone

else down to Earth.

 

We were both adrift in the void when our

outstretched hands brushed each other, our fingers

quickly intertwining clumsy through the gloves

of our spacesuits, the same instinct that

gives babies the strength to hang from washing lines,

that makes newborn monkeys cling to their mother’s

fur as they swing a mile above the unforgiving

ground. We knew that we were not in this journey

together from hereon, that whatever our unknown

destinations, this was merely a pretty diversion

amongst the stars. If candlelight is romantic,

what can being in the same sky that stargazers

stare into do?

We danced for a moment, hand-in-hand, using

each other’s momentum to enact a spin that had

more purpose than any movement we had been

able to make in months. You laughed at some

joke only you could hear; I said you were cute

when you laughed, staring into my reflection

in the impassive glass of your helmet.

We both told lies for a little while, well aware

of what we were doing while we slid them in

between promises that we would be more

honest than we had ever been before.

I knew that you could not be telling the truth

both when you said,

I couldn’t bear to see you with someone else,

and, I think we should keep seeing other people,

but I nodded and agreed politely along

with the hum of the life support in

my spacesuit, running calculations on how

much oxygen I had left.

 

We pretended to kiss, our helmets clanging

softly together with the sound of a child

knocking on the glass of an aquarium. I

imagined the sign next to the tank,

quickly glanced over out of politeness by guests

then abandoned in favour of more impressive

viewing: The North Pacific Train Wreck.

Habitat: the bathypelagic, or midnight, zone.

Diet: scavenged detritus. Conservation status:

critically endangered.

 

When it was polite, we engaged in

a pantomime of coitus, not actually

trying to share the atmosphere inside

our suits at all, but going through the motions

of it. I did not take my socks off

(of course not – how would one even

get them off from inside a spacesuit?)

and I’m sure you, equally, broke some of

your own personal rules around the whole

affair. We both agreed that we did not

know what we wanted

but that this had been nice, we should do

this again sometime. And then, after checking

our watches and mumbling about

having somewhere to be, we gently let go,

both of us pretending it was not terrifying

to be adrift and alone in the infinite void

again, both of us well aware we had

too much tendency to cling on like baby

monkeys to things that were not good for us.

I called out that I hoped

to see you again sometime, perhaps

in orbit around some distant star; we were

moving in opposite directions again, and

I pretended to not know that the only

way you would swing back around to me was

if you found someone else’s momentum

to spin with. I do not know what you called

back or what you secretly hoped and pretended

not to know, because I had bigger black

holes to worry about. So I went back

to gazing at the stars around me, finding

freedom for the first time in the realisation

that nothing worse could happen when gravity

had already given me up.

 

[Image ID: a digital painting of two astronauts holding hands and dancing in a starry space scene, with orange, purple, and blue tones. The stars are reflected in their helmets. There is a glass sheen over them and they are surrounded by a bronze border and dark wall with a bronze plaque, making it appear that they are behind the glass in an aquarium. In the foreground is the silhouette of a young girl knocking on the glass. End ID]

Poem: A Conversation with God in the Car on the Way to Church

CW: mention of current events and religious theme.

 

... I would argue that the title of this poem is. Pretty self-explanatory. It's dated 6th March, 2022.

 

A Conversation with God in the Car on the Way to Church:

I really fucking liked them, you know.

 

Yeah, yeah, I’m usually the first one to tell people it’s not Your fault, but like… really? Really?

 

Serves me right for saying I was ready to get hurt again, I guess.

 

Yeah, I know, you don’t punish people in life, we just reap what we sow from the consequences of our own actions. I don’t know, it… most people make everything Your fault, y’know, and I make everything my fault, and I… don’t know.

 

I don’t know.

 

Shit, I just – I really liked them! When I said I was ready to get hurt again, I was expecting more than one week of happiness first, y’know?

 

Yeah, I dunno. If I’m gonna ask for anything, it should probably be for help with the jobhunting, or like… for Ukraine and stuff. I’ve never been good at asking for things from you. We both know we’ve had that conversation before. But it seems extra trivial to ask for anything now, of all times.

 

I know.

 

Yeah.

 

I know.

 

I don’t think I’ve ever asked for love before. On account of humans having free will and everything. Kind of an important moment in the Bible, from what I recall. Just seems a bit daft to ask You to interfere in whether some rando texts me back or not. I guess I can ask that you grant them the maturity to not at least ghost me, or grant me the strength and wisdom to be okay with it either way, but...

 

Haha, yeah.

 

It’s just…

 

Yeah. I know. I’m never alone with You beside me. But it sure would be nice to not be completely fucked off every now and then by everyone else.

 

I don’t know. A hot queer Christian with the same kinks, a high sex drive, absolutely head-over-heels for me, and nice and stable and emotionally mature, maybe? But again, I should probably prioritise the asking for a great job or world peace or something, if I’m gonna ask for anything. Seems more likely.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah. I’ll have a think about it. Thank you, for everything. It was a nice week until… yeah. I appreciate it. And I’m sorry, too. I try not to put material things and other people above You, I just… yeah. Tough balance, innit.

 

Yeah. Yeah, I’m on my way now. See you there. I love you.

 

Amen.

The Next One

On the one hand, I feel like I'm sitting a lot more on my next project ("story" sounds too informal, and "book" is just too conceited) much more than I ever have in the past. But on the other hand, this is kind of my first time starting out in this position. In the past, for one, I've been like a third of the way into the next novel by the time I finish the one before, while when I finished Sylv Vol II I was a handful of chapters into several and still dancing between them; and for another, I've always started them while in full-time education. I did technically start my current project while in university, but again, only a handful of chapters and ideas - now I'm really "starting" it, working full-time and putting real concerted effort into this blog and promotion of my books. It was different for Sylv Vol II, but in a different different way: that was preparing the next installment for a waiting (small) fanbase; this is something totally unrelated.

I used to get the hype and motivation to keep writing by getting chapter-by-chapter feedback from a very small community of other writers and fans on deviantART. For Sylv, it was by discussing character development and plot progress with people who already knew him and his story, or by posting meta on this blog. So to get the hype for my current project (in my own motivation more than anything), I keep wanting to talk about it... but I don't.

It's not like I have an excited fanbase of thousands who are waiting for any hint or announcement on this blog. There are a handful of people who know vaguely what I'm working on - character archetypes, vague worldbuilding, loose plot summaries - and I'm sure there are more who would be excited to know, but there's both a crossover and a distinction between those groups that I struggle to define. And I'm not totally sure where to take it. It's way too early to start promotion or make a release date announcement - what's the timeline supposed to be for that stuff? For me, it's like... a few months. But everyone important to me will already know loooong in advance what the story actually is and everything cool or shocking or funny that happens in it. How much do I reveal now? What can I mention in funny posts about how different it is to write than Sylvestus? Do I drop character names in blog posts? Do I start releasing art?

That's another weird thing. This is the deepest I've gotten into a project without doing any art for it. A huge part of it is definitely skill deficiency and anxiety: it's been a long time since I've done art properly and on a regular schedule; and the setting of this story is so different from my artistic strengths that I freeze up when I try to go about it. But I have been saying recently that I want to get back into my art more, so maybe this is the opportunity to push my boundaries and develop my skills. But part of it is also definitely that I'm a reeaaall attention-slut when it comes to my art. I don't get internet-hype because my art isn't nearly good enough, so I have to rely on friend-hype, and... well, no-one really knows any of these characters or their story yet. Why would they care? Of course, in reality, my friends are great and would hype me up no matter what, and would probably get excited if they had some cool art to check out, but when I'm sitting in front of my laptop with GIMP open and my tablet sitting in my lap for half an hour without drawing a single line, it's the anxiety that's winning the logic battle there. Man, it doesn't even have a title yet, still. And what will the motif be? As I complained to a friend recently, I've been doing Sylv promo so long I don't even remember how to make a poster or banner that isn't "parchment, line drawing, faint cursive, blood splatters, serif black text". I already did eyes, feathers, skulls, and moths for my covers, the f*ck else is there?

So I'm slowly forming a plan. I'm going to talk a little about The Next One in this post, I'm going to make an effort to create some art for it in the next few months, and then I'll make the official announcement much, much closer to the uhh... release date.

As I mentioned, this project doesn't have a title yet, but it has been referred to on this blog and in my personal life as City, City Novel, [Untitled City Novel], or various permutations therein. Any posts about it from hereon out will be tagged as city. It has five perspective characters, which, I am discovering, is a lot to go to from one (Dying Ember has three but it's been a long time since I wrote Dying Ember), and presents its own new challenges. As you might have guessed, its main - actually, its only - setting is a city. It's sci-fi. It's crime. It's not a murder mystery, but there are both murders and mysteries in it. It's very queer etc etc, but frankly I'm getting sick of the "judging books' merits by how many diversity boxes they check and ignoring every other aspect of quality" trend.

As for everything else? You'll have to piece that together from all the posts about it in the next few months-to-years, until the official announcement, eh?

[Image ID: a photo of Griffin McElroy from the My Brother, My Brother and Me TV show, a mid-30s white man with glasses, short brown hair, and a white shirt. He has an electronic screen in front of him displaying the text ".. you know ;)" in red, and is holding his finger to his lips while looking into the camera with a coy smirk. End ID]