“I can’t decide if ink loves you or hates you.”

Back where?

> “No one’s coming,” he tells him, like it’s cereal packet trivia. “You can scream, if you want. But no one’s going to come. And it’s not that there’s no one to hear. It’s just that they wouldn’t come. Not for you. You know that, I know you know that. I can taste it on you. You’ve lost everyone who ever cared enough to.”

sometimes I am hashtag-blessed and Sleep Undefended was one of those times

I’ve spent a lot of my very short professional life [...] being accused of extreme obscurity in the way I write. People seem to think that I delight in being confusing and verbacious just for its own sake, that I’m in love with the idea of myself, that all these Saxonisms and long clauses and even longer words are a sort of pseudo-intellectual duffel, and that if they untoggled me they would find that, at the centre of all this insulation, is just a chubby zygote who only has the genetic material available to grow a mouth exclusively for the inhumation of sandwich paste.

There’s every possibility that those people are right. I may indeed be a fraud full of ouija and noise. However, I would like to promise you that I cannot help it.

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So this section of “I Did A Thing On A Hill: On Meaning And Purpose In Games” by Rob Sherman made me cry. I kept crying until I finished copying it out. I will probably repeat the feat at a later date. My pen/ink combo was disagreeable this time.

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you can send me requests (13 words max)

you can send me donations (ink for the ink bastard)

I’ll keep this quarrel between the sky and I

I’d like to write something dark, but the Dark won’t let me yet. The Dark insists that I get to know it first, that I become intimate with it, that it gets to know me...

The Dark would rather I not write something dark, but instead simply write—and have it be dark by nature.

Requests: open, 13 words max.

Donations: always appreciated.

I’ve been experimenting with alternate fixes; we’re currently on to Plan C, which you’ll see accordingly in good time (...by which I mean I need to empty out the pen in question to switch colors first).

The quote hasn’t changed, though an early attempt had it paraphrased for spacing. From Mind & Nature by Gregory Bateson, it’s as follows:

But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer:

What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?

I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the entire biosphere of creation.

Ink washes: Herbin Emerald Of Chivor, Amethyste d’Oural, Rouge Hematite, Stormy Grey; Monteverde California Teal; Noodler’s Lexington Grey; Robert Oster Heart Of Gold.

Text: Herbin Emerald Of Chivor.

and places very far;

it’s actual, and I can show you more

So I got introduced to Dreams in the Witch House. (The rock opera, more than the original story. It’s got gayer subtext, for one thing.)

She whispers in a voice that still carries the hundred feet to the car,

We call beyond the final horizon.

Realtalk: I have an excellent DM and sneaky compliments will continue until morale improves.

Bonuses:

The full incantation.

Beneath the limitless sky, with words already written, reaching for the ultimate gulf, we call beyond the final horizon.

(Plus gratuitous inkshot.)

The moment he steps out under the open sky, the sky takes him.

a palace wing for the ones I love,

stuck staring at stars they proved unworthy of

(The Indelicates, Beyond the Radio Horizon intro.)

Imagine being far enough out to sea that all you can see around you is blue and almost entirely flat. Your body bobs gently up and down with the moving peaks in the water that, in a hundred miles, will crash into empty space and be waves. One will be the first of a tsunami, and those after it will follow, but that is far away.

The bright treble of waves on the beach has subsided into a dull roar. But this sound is all around you; it fills your ears and, once given the opportunity, your mouth and nose.

You cannot see the shore, and you are drowning.

And yet your arms don’t move, your legs manage only lazy circling kicks to keep your eyes above water. It seems unforgivable to do anything more, to disturb the peace in this piece of a calm cycle so much larger than you or anyone else.

The sky is bright and cloudless, and there is no one who you could hope would see you.

In a little while, it will rain.

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My next commonplace book’s nickname is ma-no umi. This is the progress on the back cover: a monologue I’m somehow still proud of (it’s circa Q2 2013, for perspective; I have always been like this) in tiny Rotunda and sparkling ink, the better to make calligraphy server denizens groan in horror. I feed on the horror, you see.

Behind-the-scenes perspectives: Between the prep, the text, cleanup, and ink washes, this is at least 20 hours of work plus drying time, spread over several months.

I wanted a book I could be proud of for a year.

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Materials breakdown as follows:

Text: 1.5mm Parallel, Diamine Lightning Blue.

Embellishments: Herbin Ocean Blue, Robert Oster Heart of Gold.

Ink wash: Diamine Lightning Blue, Monteverde Carribean Blue, Noodler’s Lexington Grey, Herbin Stormy Grey, Herbin Ocean Blue.

every moment points toward its own sad end

every battle heads toward surrender on both sides

all roads lead toward the same blocked intersection

(Sax Rohmer #1, the Mountain Goats, my continued attempts to parse out exactly how far from human my experience of fiction is.)

He knows what the sky is.

With incalculable inchoate thanks to @flo-nelja, because I can’t link things in posts without tumblr shadowbanning the post so you’ll have to do your own followup here but that fscking fic—

Such as the fact that you have an ear infection.

For weeks.

Anyway, I’m something like back now!

(For real this time. I hope.)

Still have an 8” range of vision because I need stronger glasses, but I can at least, like, find my own elbows.

And elbows are what one writes with, obviously.

Responses to DMs and requests may be a bit halting because I’m an anxiety disorder that draws like a draftsman, but I can hear well enough to think, at least.

Backlog first, send me new stuff while you wait if you wanna, Cyrus has wares if you still have desire to commission, etc.

If you’re in a mood to #TransCrowdFund it up in here there’s a paypal link under my blog title and 2019 started off with some extra kicks in the teeth, so, there’s that.

the problem with marrying an elementary school teacher is I get all his students’ colds.

Pretty sure that’s how the fiancé feels about me so y’know what, valid af

Oh, a mood.