I Hope the Darkness Holds You as Sweetly as the Light

or: I wasted that sick title on just some ramblings about writing and life

I finished a short story called “And the Clean Bones Gone” that is set in the Danielle Cain universe that is going to go out to the people who backed The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice on Kickstarter, digitally, and then in print to everyone in the zine of the month club over at Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness’s Patreon. Everyone who backs us there before Dec 31 will get our once-yearly larger than usual mailing.

Catch me on this and next week’s Behind the Bastards, learning from Robert just how bad the global nuclear annihilation system (sorry, nuclear deterrence system) is.

I hope the darkness holds you as sweetly as the light.

I hope you’ll forgive me if I write a bit less here this month, or less formally. We’ll see. I love the darkness of this time of year, because it feels like permission. Permission to want to hole up.

I can’t get mad at my dog for having tens of thousands of years of breeding to guard livestock and people, to chase deer and squirrels. So I can’t get mad at myself for looking inward at the end of Autumn. By tens of thousands of years of evolution or adaptation or whatever (we don’t call it “breeding” with humans, because it was less consciously a project), this is the time of year that I want to go into a low energy mode.

All of us, by rights, should be expending less energy right now. As pastoralists, our animals would be down from the summer fields, closer to home, and as agriculturalists, our harvest would be in. Either way, we’d be drying and canning and pickling and preserving everything for the coming winter. A few people I know are doing that, mostly as a hobby. Instead we’re working as if the natural world and its seasons had no impacts on us at all.

That enough is justification for us to destroy capitalism. But I’m always looking for excuses to justify the destruction of capitalism.

The economy demands that we keep working, for some strange reason, so I’ll keep working, but I want to do less with my time.

So I’m going to write less formally for you this month.

I’ve been back on my fiction writing, though, and that pleasantly takes up a lot of my time. Fiction writing is odd for me: half the work is staring at the screen, the other half involves letting my mind solve problems in the background while I walk the dog or drive or shower. Been doing a lot of dog walking and driving lately, and I’ve been leaving myself dozens and hundreds of voice memos, which I later have to transcribe.

It’s been fun though. I know I owed all the Kickstarter backers another story that could have been included in Immortal Choir, and I’d been putting that off, but then I drove down to North Carolina the other week, and turned off the stereo, and just hashed through the rough outlines of the plot. Then I got where I was going and talked with someone I care about at length about what I was thinking, and worked through the outline.

Then I spent four hours in bed writing it. Then I ignored it for a week, giving myself a break before coming back for a revision.

Then I… did some weird kind of embarrassing magic that I do. Almost half the magic I read about from the ancient world, it was about looking for patterns in chaos. From tea leaves to cast bones to spilled entrails. And I’ve got a way that I do that. It’s not gory, just embarrassing. (I actually didn’t expect to paywall any of today’s post, but yeah some things I’m halfway private about. Don’t worry, you got most of the post before the paywall. Just a little more rambling ahead. I’ll write more rationally again soon, I almost-promise.)