What is this blog for?

Hello chums

A few weeks ago, I got a very enlightening clairvoyant reading. This won't be surprising to people broadly familiar with my whole deal–I read tarot at parties, am very superstitious, and have used astrology to bully friends into donating to charitable causes (it's a great Saturn remediation!). I scheduled this particular reading largely out of curiosity as to what a clairvoyant reading would really look like and partly because I did have some genuine questions that perhaps psychic forces might be able to answer.

I have spent a fair amount of quarantine dipping in and out of feeling very down on my contributions to society as a whole and the various creative arts in particular. Familiar refrains: I am a fake activist, I ceased having good ideas for paintings seven or eight years ago, every decent song I have ever written was a pleasant accident that will never happen again, my career is unhelpful to the good of civilization, etc. It's especially easy to feel directionless at a time when the primary thing giving me direction–performing in bands–is on indefinite hold, but all that energy has to go somewhere, and disorganizedly giving away my money and sending hectic emails to my elected officials every day isn't quite enough.

I learned several interesting things from the clairvoyant reading. In a possible past life, sometime around 1000 CE, I was a seafaring woman decapitated for piracy, which apparently explains my present-day resistance to monoliths of culture. More pressingly, she stressed that I need to start writing fiction again and be a bit more public about my work. I found this surprising for several reasons: I hadn't said anything about fiction, I haven't meaningfully worked on any fiction writing since I was still in college, and I definitely haven't shown anybody any of it since then, with the exception of a small benefit zine I published in 2018 that was based on a short story I wrote years earlier.

Let me know if you want a copy, $5ish including shipping, more if you like,

proceeds go to a Denver punk spot run by trusted pals

I was, as apparently my spirit guides had said I would be, initially sort of resistant to the idea of writing fiction, and tried to parlay the assignment into other media, but nothing really stuck. Finally, one evening, a paragraph kind of appeared in my mind while I was puttering around the apartment, and now I have around 14,000 words of something that may or may not be total drivel. It certainly isn't ready to be shown to anyone yet but I've been finding I have a lot of questions relating to the writing process and observations on the research I've been conducting but very few outlets for either; hence, this blog. 

With the caveat that I don't want writing stuff for the blog to supersede writing stuff for the thing itself, I did think it might be fun to do some capsule book reviews of stuff I have been reading (or have read long ago) that relate to my current project. Some of the characters I am writing about are musicians and I have found almost all of the fiction I've read about musicians to be varying levels of intolerable for different reasons (I'm open to suggestions about tolerable musical fiction, see also other suggestions I am seeking here) so I thought it might be fun to share a few thoughts on various books about musicians I have read and why I didn't like them. I may also review some books I love that are informing my writing in different ways.

Otherwise, I will be using this to document research I am doing and maybe occasionally ask questions about different features of the project.

Enjoy! Get in touch if you like.