The blog has been pretty quiet lately.
I haven’t.
If you’ve been around here for any length of time, you probably know how I tend to work. I’ll post constantly for a while, disappear into something else, come back with twelve new ideas, and sometimes decide the whole thing needs to be rebuilt from the foundation up.
There are bursts of obsession and energy and focus.
This has been one of those bursts.
Most of my writing energy lately has gone into a book.
Or, more accurately, into figuring out what the books are.
The larger project is called Fragments of a Life. That’s the frame for the whole thing, and it’s already the series name I’ve been using on Amazon.
The title makes more sense to me now than it did when I first chose it.
I’m not trying to write one giant book that explains an entire life. I’m writing parts of it, going deeper into different periods instead of forcing everything into one long chronological account.
Right now, I’m working on childhood.
The title of that part is still emerging.
For a while I’ve been calling it The Swerve, and that phrase is still very important to the project, but I’m beginning to realize that it may be more useful as the concept behind the book than as the title itself.
The idea is simple enough: lives don’t usually change in one clean moment. They move because of choices, accidents, reactions, other people, things we understand at the time, and things we don’t understand until decades later.
A little movement in one direction can change where you eventually end up.
That idea has helped me understand what I’m writing, but I don’t want to force a title onto the childhood material before the book tells me what it wants to be called.
So for now, I’m just writing it.
I’ve been going through old writing, photographs, journals, conversations with my parents and friends, previous books, and years of material I’ve accumulated. I’ve been trying to separate what I remember from what I learned later, what someone else remembers, and what I’m only now beginning to understand.
Sometimes those things line up.
Sometimes they don’t.
That process has changed the book quite a bit.
It has also changed how I want to publish it.
At least for now, I don’t plan to put this new book on Amazon as an ebook.
I’m planning to publish it here.
In parts.
The blog will become the place where the book unfolds.
That increasingly feels like the right home for it. This entire project grew out of writing publicly anyway, and I like the idea that someone might find one chapter, read another a week later, disappear for a month, come back, and slowly realize they’ve been reading a book.
Childhood won’t be the whole story.
There are other periods that deserve their own books.
One of them will be 2003, and that is where Another Day Stuck in Bullshit City belongs.
That period has its own material, including a notebook I was keeping at the time. The notebook appears a few times in the childhood work because sometimes something I wrote later provides evidence for what I was remembering earlier.
But when I eventually reach 2003, I can actually open the notebook up.
That book can live inside that year in a way this one shouldn’t.
There’s no reason to make every part of the project carry the entire life.
For now, the ebooks I already have on Amazon will remain $2.99. Considering the work that went into them, I think that’s a pretty fair price. I may eventually make them free or move more of that writing onto the blog.
The paperback and hardcover versions can stay on Amazon for now too.
That may change.
A lot of this depends on what this site becomes.
What I do know is that I want to start making the blog more active again.
Not necessarily polished. Not necessarily predictable.
There will still be random posts.
There will still be periods when I become completely obsessed with something and write about it constantly, followed by periods when most of the work is happening somewhere you can’t see.
I am still me.
But I’m hoping to create a little more rhythm here.
For a while, the main thread will be this childhood project: family, memory, the stories I was told, the stories I told myself, and things that look different from here than they did when I was living them.
Then, eventually, other parts of the life.
Other fragments.
And mixed in between all of that, there will still be whatever else gets into my head and refuses to leave.
So if it has seemed quiet around here, that’s why.
I haven’t stopped writing.
I’ve been building something.
More soon.
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