A Long Vacation

October 13, 2026

I haven’t been feeling that good about my work lately. I don’t mean my job; I mean the work I do here on this website. Part of the problem lies in the fact that my wrist injury has prevented me from writing anywhere near as much as I would like to. Last year, during the initial flare-up, I kept writing like mad because at a certain point I stopped thinking that I would ever get better. This year, when the injury returned, I kept thinking that I could handle it better this time, that if I did everything “right” I would recover in less time. At the end of it all, my first injury phase started in March of 2025, I was working again in November, and then I felt like I was relatively “normal” around January. This second injury phase also started in March — on almost exactly the same day, weirdly enough — and I am now returning to work in mid-October, albeit at a different job. And I think the general feeling of my wrists is pretty much exactly the same as it was in October of last year.

Recently, my friends who e-mail me regularly and make me feel like I’m not the only person in the world trying to write stopped e-mailing me. I think they just got busy, but it’s left me feeling fairly lonely. No one else interacts with the writing I do here in any other way, so if I don’t have anyone e-mailing me, then I feel like I’m not reaching anyone at all. It makes me start wondering if I’ve done something wrong: if I’ve started writing about topics that no one cares about, or my writing style has finally become so archaic and annoying that no one is even willing to read it anymore. Instead of wondering what I want to write about, I end up wondering about what could possibly reach another person: should I write about my emotions, which feel totally inapplicable to others’ lives, or should I write about works of literature and art, objects that I can at least point to and say, “Look at that!”

There are enough people with the potential to read my writings — although how many actually read this stuff, who can say — with enough varying interests and concerns, that there’s no way I could find a shared ‘Essence of Balckwell’ that would keep them all interested. I’m sure some are more interested in old books, and some are more interested in the more vulnerable feelings that I share. Then again, I worry that I’m not actually vulnerable at all — that I have a tendency toward philosophy rather than sentiment, attempting to generalize my problems into some universal Aspect of human life that other people might understand. In my real life, I don’t have general problems, but very specific ones. My worries are quite focused. The majority of them have to do with writing.

I recently published my second novel. I will look back on 2026 as the year in which Pierre & The Ambiguities was released, even though the majority of the work I did on it occurred in 2022 and 2023. It was the same with Only in Dreams, which released in 2023 but was basically finished by early 2020, when I put it aside for 2 years before completing a mad-dash final draft in the summer of 2022. By the time that novel was published, Pierre was well underway. The same process has remained mostly intact, but my third novel Foreigner Enlightened is not quite as far along, again mostly because of the limitations of my wrist injury.

A friend far more familiar with the landscape of contemporary fiction said of Pierre: “if you picked up 999 out of 1000 books published within the last 3 years, you won't find another one written like this.” He didn’t mean this in an especially good way or a bad way. He just meant what he said. I didn’t set out to write a novel that sounds unlike 999/1000 books published in the last 3 years; it’s just the necessary result of the types of books I read. I’ve probably only read one novel published in the last 3 years, and I mostly skimmed it because I found it annoying. (I ended up writing a fragment about it in my 2025 Round-Up.) I did read a novella by my friend saddleblasters last year, and it was one of the best things I read that year, but that wasn’t published, not even by him — he just e-mailed it to me.

When I wrote my novel, I set out to write a ‘normal’ novel that made sense. Now, I will admit that there came a point when I realized that not all of the book made sense, and I accepted that, but I still thought, right up until I received that feedback from my up-to-date friend, that the writing style was ‘normal.’ As in, I didn’t think that anyone would say it was one-in-a-thousand level unique (again, I want to emphasize that this isn’t necessarily in ‘a good way.’) Ever since he said that, however, I’ve been wondering whether my writing style is archaic enough to be off-putting. Perhaps it seems like I am putting on airs. Like all writers, when I think of my own writing style, I can’t think of anything concrete: it seems to me that my writing is a mixture of the most obvious, natural sentences I can think of, and deliberate attempts to mimic my favourite authors. However, it turns out that these two elements are exactly what a writing style is composed of.

I once told my friend saddleblasters that his writing feels like it was translated into English from Chinese or Japanese. Again, this wasn’t meant in a good or bad way — actually, it was meant in a good way, even though it may sound back-handed. I don’t mean that his style is clunky or unclear. I just mean that novels translated from Chinese and Japanese sound a certain way, and that’s how his writing sounds. And the reason for this is obvious: he has read a bunch of novels translated from Chinese and Japanese, and he — perhaps unconsciously — likes the way they sound. Saddleblasters is likely convinced that he doesn’t have a writing style at all: that his writing is composed of the most normal, obvious sentences he could think of, combined with deliberate attempts to mimic his favourite authors: the former, in his head, being boring, and the latter being, in his head, pure affectation.

Authors who write purely in normal, obvious sentences, or purely in attempts to mimic their favourite authors, are insufferable. They are either style-less and dull, or pretentious and distant. There is some balanced area in the middle where writing feels personable while still being aesthetically satisfying. And of course, the width or breadth of that area is purely a matter of individual taste.

My sister was saying to me last month that she’s worried only reading contemporary novels is making her stupider. They don’t challenge her in any way, but just flow breezily on and on, dulling one’s senses. I’m appealing to her authority here because, like I said, I don’t read much contemporary fiction. I accept everyone’s freedom to write whatever and however they like, but I have my own freedom to set a standard that I apply secretly and privately within my own soul — and by that standard, the vast majority of writing out there anywhere is just not being done right at all.

I apply this same high standard to my own writing, and continually fail to meet it. I disappoint myself all the time. I generally like most of the essays I publish, but they all have some element or another that, when I look back on it, just isn’t right. And the more lonely and unappreciated I feel, the more these elements grow from minor disappointments to monuments of my complete and utter failure as a writer and as a person. Even when I think my writing is good, I know that I have failed, because if I am the only one who thinks so, then my goal of reaching out and touching the hearts of others has not been accomplished. The trouble being that I can’t change anything about it in order to make it more palatable, popular, or generally appealing, because then I wouldn’t be touching anyone’s heart at all, but merely grazing past them at a safe distance. What is inside of my heart needs to enter your heart, or none of this is worthwhile at all.

What I am most proud of about myself, however, is that I don’t mind failure. I have come to realize that I can not give up. I’ve tried, and it didn’t work. I am going to keep writing and publishing essays and novels forever. I sit in bed late at night, crying against my wife’s shoulder, lamenting my perpetual, ongoing failure, and then I get up the next morning and start working again. And I think, ‘maybe this next one will go better.’

The Japanese TV drama Long Vacation takes its name from a conversation the two main characters — a man in his early twenties and a thirty year-old woman, who suddenly become roommates due to an absurd scenario — have late at night, as they sit around being disappointed with themselves. To paraphrase, one of them (I can’t remember which) says that a ‘long vacation’ is a period of one’s life when nothing is working out and no progress is being made. For whatever reason, your shot at goal didn’t pan out, and now you’re recuperating for the next great attempt.

I don’t know if the last two years of my life necessarily fit neatly into that definition, but it’s at least close. I tried so hard to succeed online, through Youtube, Substack, and a podcast — ‘trying’ in a way that was almost destined to fail due to my total ignorance and antipathy toward the proper means of reaching such a goal — that I ended up burning myself out in an anticlimactic and rather stupid fashion. Around the same time, I returned to the so-called ‘workforce’ and began an honest attempt at developing practical skills and developing a career — an attempt that ended with a repetitive stress injury and a recommendation from my physiotherapist to try doing literally anything else.

A combined twelve of my last twenty four months were spent at home on a long vacation. I was writing, but I have this feeling that I wasn’t developing. This is perhaps an ungenerous view of the situation, but at the very least, in the realm of novel- and fiction-writing, very little progress was made. We could call that realm my ‘imaginative’ writing. I burrowed further and further into a mole-cave of literary analysis, philosophical commentary (on the Zhuangzi and Mumonkan particularly), and simple observations about my house and my cats. Meanwhile, I was reading the works of Coleridge and Shelley, feeling some deep part of myself screaming to be released: my imagination, dreaming of one day exploding into freedom. As much as I try to keep the Worldly World and the world of imagination separate, there is an extent to which my physical limitations have been shackles on my mind. My art is expressed through my fingers; for me, there is no other way. And when I can not feel free at this keyboard, when I feel like I must be prudent and write just enough not to aggravate my oh-so-delicate tendons and perpetuate my dreaded symptoms, then what emerges is half of what it could have been.

But the products of a Long Vacation are far from worthless. Taking a broad view, it could be argued that most of my life has been little more than one Long Vacation, punctuated by a few short bursts of creative energy, two of which resulted in novels. I suppose we could call that some sort of process. As a man who decided one day never to regret anything, I can’t say that I would like it to work any other way. I can only come to the conclusion that I must keep going, and that conclusion is the only thing that makes me feel better. If this is all just one Long Vacation, then we can place the emphasis on Long: there’s no point moping now if I’m only midway through the journey.

If there’s a way to succeed, I’ve done it already: I did it the first time someone read Only In Dreams and felt like they were being spoken to. No matter how many times I call myself a failure, I know that, for however little it counts, I have succeeded on occasion, in smaller or larger ways. A friend once said: “I feel very grateful to have people with minds like you read my stories and engage with them so generously. It makes me think I have found success as a writer, even without 7-figure multi-book contracts and penthouse suites in Dubai.” I’ve never wanted a contract or a suite in Dubai, and when I really think about it, I’m not sure what exactly it is that I’ve ever wanted from any of this. So when I say I’ve failed or I call myself a failure, it’s not any sort of fact but just a horrible feeling I get. And the basis of that feeling is that I know deep in my heart that I have succeeded, but that it didn’t change my life or the world nearly as much as I thought it would. No one knows or recognizes that I’ve succeeded, and I have no way to prove it, and even though I succeeded in the past I feel this need to succeed again in the future, and that I need to be succeeding all the time, with each essay and with each story. This, too, is just a feeling. If I do reach someone, there’s often no way to know it. I might be succeeding every day and simply never hear of it.

It’s been said before, but the artist’s life is a lonely one. It is intrinsically and inherently lonely in a way that simply can not be fixed, except through the completion of Human Instrumentality, the development of some other universe, or allowing us access to some dimension that works very differently than the ones we have now. Success is lonely and failure is lonely, and the only times it’s not lonely are those moments when you’re neither succeeding nor failing. The trouble with those is that they are also the moments when you’re not trying.

I feel the need now to repeat myself, a sure sign that this essay has run its course: As a man who decided one day never to regret anything, I can’t say that I would like it to work any other way.