Balckwell Rising!

Well, it’s December, and I’ve decided, for the first time in my life, that I’ve worked hard enough to earn myself a little vacation. I have been taking this website more seriously over the last five months or so, which you probably noticed from the shockingly regular updates, and I even started a podcast last month. So instead of the normal essay, here is an update about what to expect next year, although who can say what is really going to happen. While I believe everything I have written in this update, and will work to make it all come true, I also reserve the right to turn it all into a lie if I decide I must do other things instead.

In short, here is the schedule I’m currently working with:

A new essay on Balckwell Rising every other Thursday.

A full episode of Balckwell’s Books: The Audio Program on the last day of each month, with at least one mini-episode per month in between.

Original Youtube videos whenever it occurs to me, but also essay readings and episodes of the podcast uploaded there on a regular basis.

My first novel Only In Dreams publishing in the first half of next year (2023), and then other novels releasing as they are finished.

THE WEBSITE:

Next year will begin with a few good essays on here: that’s a promise, and I know I can keep it because I’ve already finished one of them, and that means I have like a month to make another good one.

I thought it would be a lot tougher for me to write an essay every two weeks, but I realized that if I build a bit of a backlog, then there’s less pressure and I can just write when the ideas come to me, and it all works out. Trying to force myself to write an essay results in the most mind-numbing idiotic nonsense anyone can ever dream up, and thankfully I am writing enough that I am never desperate enough to have to post any of that.

I was worried before that the posts are somewhat variable when it comes to subject matter and style, with some being personal essays and some being rambling essays about a particular topic, but I don’t think that’s really a problem for anyone except for some imaginary people I invented in my head, so the output is going to continue to be as eclectic or non-eclectic as I feel is right. In the end, it’s my website, so that’s that.

THE PODCAST:

I think Balckwell’s Books is fun. I like that there are two different formats: long-form scripted episodes for when I want to fully explore a book, and unscripted mini-episodes for when I just feel like hitting a few talking points. It has taken me some time to get a hang of the unscripted stuff, which carried over from my Youtube channel — for example, figuring out the right amount of notes. Surprisingly, the more notes I have, the more likely I am to lose track of what I am saying and mistakenly skip over a point I wanted to say, whereas when I use notes sparingly and allow myself to talk freely, I am more likely to cover everything. Nice thing about the podcast is I can go back and splice in little bits later if I missed anything, which is harder to do with video.

In general, I like the audio format a lot better than what I was trying to do on Youtube, and I really have no sense for visuals or composition or colours at all, which is why all my videos and thumbnails and logos look like trash. Video editing is fun when I’m editing together stupid clips, but when I actually want to make something good, it just falls apart, and I don’t think I have the interest to learn. Audio editing, on the other hand, is super easy, and this may not be a surprise to hear, but I like the sound of my own voice. I find my shows enjoyable to listen back to, which makes the whole process fun. I laugh at every single joke I make: first while I make it, and then again while editing, and then again months or years later when I go back to see what I was doing in the past. So I really was built for this kind of work.

I have some ideas for full episodes for next year, of which there will hopefully be twelve, and probably not more because they take a lot more effort and time than it seems like they might. Who knows how many mini-episodes there will be; kind of the whole point of those is that I don’t have a plan or schedule and can do them on a bit of a whim. The next full episode will release next week while I am on my holiday.

YOUTUBE:

I find the website and ecosystem of Youtube to be a little mind-destroying, at least if you are taking it semi-seriously, because it presents you with a bunch of numbers in a way that makes you think they mean something, when really it’s just a bunch of nonsense. I don’t like that view counts are always visible; it provokes some dumb part of my brain and makes me embarrassed and envious and emotional so I have decided to not take it seriously at all. I will occasionally post un-edited rambling sort of videos, because I think these are amusing, and to be honest that’s the kind of video I like to watch, even if no one else does. I will also upload readings of my essays and episodes of the podcast in a timely manner.

I do like that Youtube has a lot of people on it, so you can reach some people even without trying that hard, and I’ve received some nice comments on a few of my videos which is nice, whereas I don’t really get much feedback anywhere else. So I like Youtube for that, and it has its perks and everything as long as I don’t try to become a Youtuber or anything silly like that. Youtube is the lowest priority of anything at the moment, at least in terms of “serious work,” but it’s still there and I’ll try to keep it updated just for fun.

THE NOVELS:

I have a novel coming out early next year. It’s called Only In Dreams, and I’ll talk about it when it comes time to talk about it. I wrote it three times, and then I left it sitting there for a while, and then I wrote it a fourth time, and it was only after writing it that fourth time that I decided it was worth selling to people. It’s about dreams and it’s about love. It was originally going to be about love in a certain way, but it ended up being about love in a different way. That’s one of the things I like about it.

I’m working on another novel. It has a name, but I will probably need to change it at some point, because the name is almost the exact same as a Herman Melville novel (Pierre, or the Ambiguities), and I don’t want anyone to get confused. The original title, before I re-named it after a Herman Melville novel, was Knights, Snails, & Plastic Boogie which was a reference to “Night Snails & Plastic Boogie,” an album by the Japanese rock band Yellow Monkey. I don’t think that’s a terrible name, but the novel outgrew the original concept in such a way that it makes a lot less sense than it did originally, and it barely made sense then.

This second novel is about a man named Pierre who is looking for a satisfactory answer to the question, “What do you do?” because no one likes his current answer, even though he thinks it’s not a bad answer. It’s about the relationship between his expectations of himself and other people’s expectations of him, and how the former is affected by the latter in ways that are sometimes invisible and strange. I don’t know how it ends yet, so if anyone tells you they know how it ends, they don’t, because not even I do, and I’ve got to write the darned thing.

(Speaking of names, the original title of Only In Dreams was Crescent Dreams of Sea Breams and the working title of the novel I’m about to describe in the next paragraph was There But For the Grace of Gibbongod. These working titles help me solidify the identity of the book; after I am done, I come up with a title that makes a little more sense.)

I was writing a mecha novel inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion for a while. For about a year, actually. In the end, it kind of imploded, because it was incredibly unlike anything I had tried to do before, and I just lost the plot entirely. One problem was that I took the religious themes inherent in the Evangelion influence far too seriously, and ended up tying myself in all sorts of knots.

I learned a lot in the process, though. I developed a lot of skills that have helped in the creation of this book about Pierre. I still haven’t decided if I’ll go back to the concept later. We’ll have to see. It’ll depend on my feeling. I’m reading Thomas Mann’s Joseph & His Brothers right now and it’s giving me a lot of ideas.

I saw that E Rathke over at Wolf recently published a novel that he says was influenced by Neon Genesis Evangelion. I’m curious to see how he managed that! It has always felt to me a pretty disastrous influence to chase after as a novelist, because it is such a unique and strange work that does a lot with the medium of animation. I’m not sure in what ways the influence plays out in his book; perhaps it is less direct than what I was going for. I will have to see.

The novels are the most important thing to me personally, and they are my actual legacy and the reason for my life. However, because it is both impossible and undesirable for me to treat writing novels as a “job,” they are lower on the priority list than updating the website and doing the show. I like to work on the novel when everything else is done for the next little while, and I can work freely. It took me a while to find the right way to balance everything, and for a while I prioritized the novels over everything else, but it made my whole process and mindset a lot worse, and it simply makes more sense to prioritize the work with deadlines and schedules over the work that emphatically opposes deadlines and schedules.

Thankfully, I like everything I do, and I do it all because I want to, so all this fretting and worrying about what is “work” and what is “not work” and what is “important” or “unimportant” is entirely intellectual and, frankly, unnecessary, to the point where when I feel like it I can just cast it entirely out of my mind and be a normal person, to the extent that such a thing is possible.

THE END:

I’d like to thank everyone who reads this for reading it, and everyone who listens to the show for listening to the show, and I hope you continue to enjoy and support what I am doing in the future, because I can’t do anything else and that’s either a blessing or a curse depending on whether there are people in the world who appreciate what I do and are willing to express that appreciation, whether that’s by telling me directly, by clicking on a “like” or “subscribe” button, or by just silently reading/listening to my work and whispering, “cool,” to themselves, because even if I don’t hear your whispers, I feel them in my heart.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year from Balckwell Rising!