Dystopolis is $2.99 for the next week →

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To celebrate the kinda-sorta-recent release of High Strange Horror (which features a brand new story by me called The Lights Are Off), my last book is over 50% off the usual list price over on Amazon. Here’s a synopsis, that I wrote, which makes me putting it in block quotes a little weird:

Two hundred years after a catastrophe that ruined the planet, humanity re-emerges with a whole new purpose and ideology. In the newly-built city of Stopfordia, a traffic cop is embroiled in a murder mystery. A chef at a diner on the edge of town turns to androids to satisfy his basest desires. An assassin, facing exile, finds her whole life transformed. A farmer finds himself on trial in front of a jury of thousands for a crime of horrific proportions. A journalist, facing unemployment, turns to a life of crime to keep the stories bleeding in. And a sex worker peers behind the curtain, only to discover that life in Stopfordia is not as it seems. This is the world of Dystopolis: where the pursuit of a perfect life can take you to places you’d never expect to end up.

Get it here! Support independent authors, and by “independent authors” I mean me!

So here’s the thing: I just finished Good Omens, and it’s definitely on track to becoming one of my favorite books, but for me that’s a problem. It’s a problem because I was in the middle of planning a book about the end of the world, and that’s awkward, especially because it uses elements of Christian theology altered for comic benefit.

I didn’t know, okay?

The thing is, there are a lot of points where my book diverges, both in terms of the source of the apocalypse and in terms of the version of the UK in which it takes place; there’s science fiction stuff beyond and behind the out-and-out fantasy, and I think that there’s enough there that it’s a distinct work.

But. I really, really liked Good Omens, and it’s extremely vivid in my mind. And I don’t want to write something that shamelessly rips off Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett. That’s depressing. So it’s going on the backburner for a while longer.

I had a dream the other night, and the dream developed into something resembling an idea, and I’m going to work on it. It involves a dinner party that turns into an all-nighter when the entire outdoor population of a city turns into vampires. There will probably be a bit more sex. There will probably be at least one fistfight. The general idea is that a lot of parties usually take their course, and there’s a reason why most of them are over by a certain point. I want to write a human drama with a fantastical background. I want to have a group of people who are fundamentally different by the sunrise. I have the beginnings of something, but it’s going to take some time.

And I’ll come back to the other thing. I’m just a little dispirited whenever I look at it, right now.

To The Four Winds

I was all over the place last night, and I was probably not helping my predicament by drinking copious amounts of Dr. Pepper and listening to Howard Shore’s Naked Lunch score and focusing on six different things at any one time.

I finished the first draft of a story that may or may not end up in a thing soon, depending on whether or not the people editing the thing end up liking it. It’s called THE LIGHTS ARE OFF, and it’s about a person who lives in a bunker where nothing is quite as it seems. There is every chance that it’s utterly crap. I quite like the ending, but (as with anything I write) that’s because I wrote it last and got better at writing as I went along.

It’s also 240 words too short, but I’m not too worried about that. I always end up writing more in the process of redrafting. Dystopolis was initially half the length that it ended up being. I have this problem where I get carried away with plots, and forget to actually, you know, make things worth reading. I start sounding like someone recounting a dream. You know. One of those people.

I also wrote an essay recently that’s going to be in the March issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room. It’s about 2008 in movie music, and it’s a strangely personal one.

This is tangentially related, but not in the essay, so:

A few years ago - long enough ago for the memory to be hazy, but not so long that the shame has all been burned away - I was pub-crawling with Joe, and we ran into a group of people who had been close friends with us in high school. Time had gone by, and we all fragmented, and friendships that had once been impossibly close found themselves slackened and then broken off without even a sliver of ceremony. For a long time, this is how most of my friendships ended - there was rarely anything combustible, just a slow acknowledgement that we weren’t quite invested enough.

One of the people we saw at the pub had been one of my best friends for a few years, and seeing her again hit a few internal notes that threw out a wave of nostalgia. I wanted to go back. Away from the noise, after Joe and I left, I got in touch to see if she wanted to reconnect. I got a tentative, if confused, yes. We said we’d make plans.

We never did.

I learned a little later that she’d passed her phone around the table, and they’d all laughed scornfully at how weirdly sentimental I was being. I was deep in the throes of artistic pretension at the time, and it’s in thinking about the texts I sent - not exactly creepy, but just weird - that the shame flares up.

We had once spent hours into the night talking about Heroes, the NBC sci-fi drama that creatively tanked after its first season. I had spent whole summers hanging out with her. She had saved me from being utterly mortified by being my (superior) dance partner in our school production of Grease. And it hadn’t been enough for me to just let that time fade into memory; I had to make it weird, almost a year after we’d gone our separate ways.

Now, six years later, thousands of miles away, I don’t know why I’m thinking about this, or the countless other bridges I allowed to crumble and fall. There is a quiet but firm part of me that knows that this kind of thing happens to most people. There is a quieter and yet firmer part that understands that, hey, this happened to me more than it happens to others because I was an impetuous little shit when I was 16, and it’s hard to work around prior perceptions past a certain point. There is every chance that the person those people were mocking deserved to be mocked. I was a cruel, lonely kid, and it’s way too easy to romanticise the past.

Generally speaking, I’m happier these days. I am, haltingly but surely, making new friends. The other day, someone I work with hugged me, and I couldn’t help but grin.

There are so many close friendships I had that have dissipated now, and if one were to look at the numbers, it’s decreased a whole lot compared to a decade ago. Then again, when I cast a hard look at the past, I have to wonder about quality. Yes, I have some brilliant memories of being a teenager, but I also have a lot of miserable ones. Compare that to the life I’m living with my best friend and partner for life now, and the brilliant experiences far outweigh the rest. That counts for so much. 

I don’t know. When the life you’re living no longer resembles your past, it can be tempting to spend all of your time examining the things that came before. And there’s value in doing it sometimes, I think: people who never look back have a tendency to repeat their mistakes. Obsess beyond a certain point, though, and you stop living in the present. Right now, I have so much to live for, and so much to look forward to, and so many new avenues to explore. When I stop burrowing into my memories, and breathe out, and open my eyes, I can see that what I have is so much more than enough.

Brief notes

  • I completed the outline for the first of two books tonight. I have a rough idea for the thread of book two, but it was always my intention that I’d fully plot it out later. More importantly, though, I have a workable plot for a novel, which is something I haven’t had since I was sixteen. It needs expanding, and I’ve identified a few points that I need to research, but I have something.
  • Now, I’ll refine the outline a little, add in details where I need to, and conduct the aforementioned research (thanks in advance, Wikipedia), and hopefully start writing the book in a couple of weeks. I don’t know how long it’ll take. Maybe a few months. Maybe a year. But I’m excited about this, so I’d guess closer to the former than the latter.
  • This is the first thing that I’m writing where it essentially ends on a cliffhanger. It’s still a natural point to end the book, but it’s something I’m aware of, and I’m not sure what to do about it. One thing I'm not going to do is release it without at least an idea of when Book Two will be out, so I’ll at least have a working outline of the second part before I start to do the legwork in publishing Book One.
  • One last thing - I’ve grown to hate the working title, which was initially Undertaken - the half-pun being that it was about a sort-of undertaker who gets taken on the journey of his life (I can already hear the crunching sound of a thousand faces falling asleep on their popcorn). But that has to go. There is so much going on in this story - horsemen of the apocalypse, and memory hacking, and murder (I can never get away from murder, it seems), and love, and tragedy, and a dozen characters that I actually care about for a change, and I can’t just give the book a past participle as a title. But I guess I have time to work that one out.

Reclaimed Spaces

I was watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty tonight and marvelled at the initial scene where Walter, played by Ben Stiller, is balancing his checkbook. That someone might have $7000 in savings - that, in fact, one could be well-off enough to have the impulsivity to take an impromptu trip to Greenland whenever they wanted - is simultaneously exciting and infuriating to watch.

Greenland was the first place, other than back home to the UK, that Arden and I set our hearts on visiting. There’s this unremarkable little town called Kangerlussuaq that has 98% visibility of the northern lights between November and March, and it’s one of those natural wonders that falls into Serious Bucket List Territory for me. All that said, I’m resigned to the fact that this might not happen for a few years - I am unlikely to land myself with a high-paying job anytime soon, and the first opportunity we get I want Arden to see the places I grew up. I am resigned to putting sentimentality before wonder.

Maybe that’s all a little internalised, though. I am not Ben Stiller’s age; by the time I get there, I hope to have seen considerably more than Greenland. I’m also lucky enough to have already travelled a great deal, even if the vast majority was within European boundaries; really, I don’t have anything to complain about. This all likely comes from the insecurity of pursuing another job hunt, and only having the sort of income that can sustain basic luxuries in the meantime.

I’m still figuring all of this stuff out, nearly nine months in. How to be part of the American workforce, which functions in a different way to the British workforce (here, the pay is lower and yet everyone seems to be smiling); how to absolve myself of the guilt of living rent-free in a house that is not my parents’; how to be a good husband; how to deal with the strange, unbidden dreams of people and places back in England that bubble up at night and leave me feeling uneasy.

That last one is more recent. The truth is that the sudden cutoffs I experienced in the UK happened long before I emigrated. There were plenty of people whom I stopped pursuing socially, then realised that if I wasn’t pushing, no-one was stepping in to push for me. It was jarring. There were some really close friendships that ended that way, and it makes you question yourself; how much of that closeness was just perception and one-sided sentiment? 

Does anyone like me?

These are the kinds of crazy questions that sound laughable when stated soberly, but take on a deranged sensibility when you’re approaching them through the haze of sleep. I don’t have childhood demons, but sometimes there are ghosts.

All of this is to say that I wrote tonight, for the first time in weeks, and it feels great. I’m not sure what was stopping me. Writer’s block, I think, is more a case of finding whatever excuse you can to put something off; in the past, it might have been the terror you get when sitting in front of a typewriter and seeing a blank page, but nowadays I think it’s more a problem of knowing that you can tab over and see multiple feeds full of the words of other people, or open Netflix and watch any of hundreds of movies and TV shows, or start to clear a backlog of (and I am not exaggerating here) 400 video games you somehow legally accumulated over less than four years.

There comes a point, I think, where you have to quietly and deliberately put all of that stuff down. Yes, the backlog will increase while you go away. I opened up Netflix after I finished writing a couple of pages, and discovered that Richard Ayoade’s second film, The Double, is now available to stream. I will watch it, but I need to abandon the idea that I have to somehow clear it out of the way. Media is just stuff - it’s fulfilling, and it’s art, and it’s hundreds of thousands of people making things with resources you could never hope to gather, but there has to be a line between their stuff and your stuff. You have to allow space for your stuff, otherwise there’s nothing that contextualises their stuff. You just absorb all their color without reflecting anything back.

So I carried on writing my outline, and I think it’s getting somewhere! I am, in theory, up to Chapter Nine of maybe around Twelve, and once it’s done and redone I will sit down and actually try to write this bizarre first novel of probably two. And I will keep at it, even if I find a job that forces me to work sixty hours a week. I will make the time. I need to try and remember that even though anxiety about writing feels terrible, when I actually sit and write, it feels golden.

9/10/2014

First, some housekeeping.

Both Dystopolis and Tales from the End are now available on Gumroad, Smashwords, and hopefully a bunch of other places soon. If you’re into owning digital files, I really recommend Gumroad - they have a slick interface, and make it incredibly simple to buy and download digital stuff. Reflecting this, they’re now $6.99 and $5.99 respectively, but that’s still pretty cheap. A Fireball and Coke at the Paradise Rock Club is $8, and that didn’t kill me, so I doubt this will either.

(Don’t buy drinks at the Paradise Rock Club. Good God.)

Also, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the audiobook. Turns out that audio fidelity on my current microphone isn’t exactly perfect, so either I’ll figure out a way to tune things up, or delegate it to someone who has a recording studio in their bedroom, or just not do it. (Do you know someone who has a recording studio in their bedroom? Let me know.)

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I have an essay in the latest issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room, about Monsters University. You can subscribe or buy the single issue here (if you go for the latter, you’re looking for School), and I absolutely recommend you do - BW/DR still showcases some of the best film writing out there, and I promise I’m not just saying that because I somehow swindled them into including me among their ranks.

Everything below this is about stuff I’ve been consuming, media-wise, so for the sake of brevity I’ll throw in a cut here. But please, do finish this if you feel like it. I think my taste is okay.

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I have been playing and watching and listening to so much stuff, you guys. Tonight I watched Heathers, and while I absolutely now believe the hype (that film has one of the best endings to a high school comedy I’ve ever seen, and had me silently punching the air while wiping away tears, which is a surprisingly complex gestural act), I am utterly unconvinced of Christian Slater’s ability to act. He seems to think that squinting and channelling Nag from The Jungle Book makes him seem interesting and imposing. Really, it makes him look silly. Winona Ryder is incredible, though. She’s also one of those people who I see in films and loudly exclaim “come on, that’s just not fair” at.

I also watched The Great Gatsby. I’m of two minds about it - I think that when the film is consumed by the headiness of the twenties, it really excels - there’s a spellbinding soundtrack, and a very snappy visual style, and Leonardo DiCaprio is pretty much perfect casting as a former sparkling youth who’s desperately trying to hide his age. The problems come when the film slows down and gets serious, which Baz Luhrmann really isn’t very good at - he tries, bless him, but it never quite comes together. Where Luhrmann excels is in finding beauty and melancholy through chaos, but the way that Gatsby is structured is almost as two films - one that shows the chaos upfront, and one that attempts and fails to grasp some distance. But it was fun. And my God, that soundtrack.

I also played A Story About My Uncle for the first time and Dragon Age Origins for the third. The former is a beautiful first-person platformer. Here’s a screenshot:

Right? Look at that nonsense.

Dragon Age: Origins is a 60-hour RPG that I can’t even begin to explain, for fear that I won’t do it justice - at its core is a very simple “assemble an army and beat the bad guys” story, but what with it being sixty hours long there’s quite a lot more than that going on. It’s very good, though. The third in the (presumed) trilogy comes out this November, and I am anxiously awaiting to see if it’ll run on this laptop or not.

Okay. I think I’m just about done. I’ve been listening to a lot of Porter Robinson and the soundtrack to Purgateus. They do not go well together, but apart they’re great.

Instead of doing the sensible thing and sleeping last night, I instead read one of the stories I wrote for Dystopolis. It’s called Death In Exile, and by and large I’ve found that people like it the most out of the six in the book. In the story, a woman grows up, becomes an assassin, is embroiled at the centre of a screw-up with her employer, finds herself in exile, and learns the value of relating to other people. I think it’s that last part that’s the hook, and it’s a useful lesson to learn: it doesn’t matter how many ridiculous bells and whistles you put on a story if it’s hollow at the center.

I think this is probably why I’m reluctant to start my latest book. It has to be - the premise of what I intend to write is utterly ludicrous, and features alien civilisations and global terrorism and gameshows and a company that edits together the memories of the dead for popular consumption, and yet at the moment it kind of feels like a bunch of ingredients rather than something whole. I want to confidently answer if someone asks what the point of it all is, even if that answer is that there is no point.

Making things a little more complex is the fact that this is going to be a two-part series, and while Part Two immediately follows Part One, I still want the first book to have a satisfying coda. I think this is the biggest struggle, really - I have some pretty earnest ideas about the final direction of the whole thing (that I need to tweak somewhat because I realised the emotional beats were starting to mimic The World’s End), but Part One ends on a pretty grim note and I want to find a way to at least take stock and give my protagonist some room to breathe.

I think I might have an idea, but it still needs some groundwork. There’s a scene in a metro station towards the end of the first book - in a weird way, the location I have in mind almost acted as the genesis for a lot of the rest of the book. There, the protagonist discovers a portal through which all manner of unspeakable horrors have entered the world, and makes the decision to go on through with the dim hope that they can be stopped. This isn’t an original idea, of course. This sort of thing happens at the end of The Maze Runner, and Catching Fire, and a bunch of other novels that lead into a sequel. Venturing into the unknown at great personal risk is something that makes sense as a narrative beat, but it’s been done time after time. It’s the one thing making me cautious. It’s a gimmick, but I think it’s one I can justify. I just need the right emotional beats.

I am learning that there is a gulf of difference between being happy and being entirely fulfilled; I have felt happy almost every day since I arrived in the USA, because I’m with the person I love and constantly making little steps forward and there is an overall lack of anxiety when you aren’t waiting for the worst to happen. All that said, I haven’t written in months, and even saying that feels like an admission of guilt.

It is a weird thing to realise that the thing you consider an essential part of you doesn’t necessarily have a bearing on your happiness. I wrote most of Dystopolis in the three-month gulf between submitting a visa petition and waiting on the results; I was definitely fulfilled at the time, but happiness was a distant blip on my radar. We assume that these things go together, because more often than not they do, but I don’t think correlation proves causation in this case. I don’t think that the inverse is true - I don’t think that I need to be tortured to produce art - but life has been moving so quickly that it’s been a long time since I really got to grips with myself.

Book research: help me out

So I’m writing another book. Well. Possibly two. (Probably two.) I don’t really want to reveal plot details publicly (in part because coming up with a pithy synopsis for what I’ve got planned is insanely difficult), but what I do want is to research something in particular relating to Christian belief.

I am not a Christian. You can see where this might get awkward.

To that end, if you belong to any Christian denomination and are willing to spend a few minutes of your time answering a few questions relating to your faith, email me at me [at] chrisjfraser [dot] com or drop your email address in here and I’ll be in touch.

I’ll be respectful and treat your answers in the strictest of confidence, and your responses will help me (hopefully) approach certain elements of plot with as much nuance as I possibly can.

Numbers

First: if you haven’t already bought Dystopolis, you can do so here. It’s currently $8.99 in paperback, and $4.00 as an ebook. Quite a few people seem to like it. What follows is a breakdown of sorts of the first month-and-a-bit of sales, which probably won’t interest anyone who isn’t interested in the publishing side of all of this, but I’m guessing there might be one or two who are. So. Here we are.

In the last five weeks, I’ve sold 44 books. This includes 8 print copies (18%), 13 full price digital copies (30%), and 23 discounted digital copies (52%). When it comes down to royalty breakdown, however, I’ve earned by far the most from full-price digital copies (46%), followed by the copies sold during the recent discount (28%), followed very closely by print copies sold (26%).

The reasons behind this are fairly straightforward, of course - I make the most from digital sales, despite the fact that the retail price of Dystopolis in ebook form is less than half of its print counterpart - ignoring the fact that the Kindle publishing program allows for 70% royalties, it actually costs a substantial amount of money to produce and ship a print book in the first instance. Additionally, Amazon (as a third-party seller, despite owning Createspace, where the book was originally published) takes a decent cut even after the costs of production are taken away. Not that you should be discouraged from buying a paperback if that takes your fancy. It’s nice to hold something in your hand, after all, and I spent quite a lot of time on the typesetting.

The thing that maybe surprised me the most was the surge in interest over the last week, helped mostly by the fact that the book was being sold for a fraction of its original price (99 cents for two days, followed by $1.99 for another two, and so on) and possibly also helped by the fact that I was pushing it fairly aggressively.

Promotion has to be factored into all of this, actually. Most of the original batch of sales came from the few who know me well enough to trust this blog, and then a small sampling of the large number of people who follow Arden’s online presence. With the recent sale, I have no doubt that quite a few sales came from Ashton Raze, the lead writer of Starbound, retweeting this fairly desperate plea to over 3,500 people. The flip-side of this, of course, is that even ignoring the various other fronts on which people were highlighting the promotion, that creates a ratio of one sale for every 163 people.

I suspect the message of this is that only so much comes from exposure; initially, you need to nurture an audience. Which I sort of do - of all of the people I interact with on the interact with on the internet, I think most of them have bought my book (and if you haven’t, shame on you), but at the same time don’t. There’s an element of dialogue in the way I interact with computers, but it isn’t quite as two-way as it could be; this whole medium, for me, is still fairly one-way.

There are no grand conclusions, here. This is more of a data-dump, and I’ll need some time to figure out what it all means. But it’s interesting. And gratifying. Holy hell. The final point of all of this is that forty-four people have bought Dystopolis, and that’s pretty damn lovely. I hope you’re enjoying it.

Check your lapel

So hard to articulate everything happening to me at the moment. In a little over a week, I will be married. That’s such an insane and beautiful concept that part of my brain has decided to shut down rather than fully process it. I feel like I’m floating, still.

Starting with the creative front, because that’s easy to talk about: Dystopolis is finished. You can find a synopsis here (along with the lovely opinions of a couple of lovely people) and sign up for release updates here, and I absolutely, definitely recommend that you do. I’ll also apologise in advance, because I intend to plug the hell out of this book. It’s the culmination of nearly three years of work, and I want as many people as possible to read it. On which note, if you’re a person who makes things and has released them into the wild (preferably writing, not industrial machinery, but creative things in general are good), I’m happy to give out review copies for free to anyone who’s willing to volunteer one.

Comments - positive or otherwise - are my bread and butter in terms of promoting this book. I’ve been doing all of this without the backing of an industry - no publishers, no agents, just my own know-how and a core team of wonderful editors - and as such I don’t have the same marketing machine that other books have. Every reblog helps. Or something like that.

Also, a quick note on release schedules - I’m hoping to publish it early in March, in both print and digital formats. It’ll start on Amazon, and spread from there to people who have other devices. You’ll also get a free digital copy if you buy the paperback, because fuck publishers who try to make you pay for the same product twice. (In the interest of exclusivity-related promotions on Amazon, I might wait a little while before openly publishing a multi-platform ebook edition à la this one, but it’ll be available on everything eventually.)

I’m also aiming to record an audiobook version of this one, and that’ll be distributed through Bandcamp; I have no idea what the ETA is on that, though, because it involves recording a 153-page manuscript. That sort of thing takes time. But no doubt I’ll be screaming about it at the time.

This barely touches my life at the moment, though. I’ve been planning a wedding, and that involves so much more than you initially think. Last night, we decided on our entrance music (Interlude - Gymnopedie No. 1 by Anamanaguchi), but there have also been decisions about food (New England clam chowder; butter poached lobster served with biscuits and asparagus tips; turkey pot pies; roasted chicken in a porcini cream sauce with fetuccine, peas and corn; a fucking tier of cupcakes), decorations (purple), flowers (also purple), guests (mostly family and Arden’s friends), playlists (as yet undecided), vows (sentimental), the justice of the peace (a very intuitive lady) and an ever-growing catalogue of things to take care of.

There’s also the fact that in the moments in between, I’ve been trying to settle in this new country; I have a bank account now, but no debit card or means of looking at my balance short of visiting a branch (though I should add that this isn’t a problem; I’m just impatient). I have a state ID, where my pre-haircut head looks twice its usual size. I have a social security number, albeit on a card that has the words VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION stamped above it, because god forbid I actually be considered a viable taxpayer. I even registered with Selective Service, effectively consenting to conscription, even though something like that is meaningless; if the US ever tried to bring in a draft, the first thing I’d do is flee the country. Unless it was a war made entirely of donut bullets. Or the sort of fight where it’s over when you pull a flag out of your opponent’s pants. I’d go for that.

This all sounds overwhelming, and it is, but I’m also wonderfully, ecstatically happy. Being constantly alert to new things, as I have been, brings with it a certain level of stress that I’m unaccustomed to, but it’s all surface-level chatter. At the root, I’m smiling. I feel ready to face anything, and that’s a relief - because I have so much more to face.

2014-01-06

Nearly nine months ago now, I asked Evan to give me some insight into the kind of films that get him ticking, because his essays on film (and, lately, Teen Wolf) are the sort of thing that I aspire to have the depth and wit to write at some point in the future. He sent back a brilliant reply, with a cluster of recommendations, and because my brain has been in a totally scattershot condition over the last year or so I completely ignored it.

I came across it again today. There were a few films by David Gordon Green, who I talked about recently, and others that I’m not so familiar with. I plan to make it a soft New Year’s Resolution to follow up on them all.

I think I’d also like to engage with others on the internet a little more. The explosion of Tumblr as something For Everyone kind of shoved me onto a pedestal in terms of my self-awareness; regardless of how friendly I present myself, there’s a sense that the version of me that exists online is a pre-packaged form of me, not really something for social consumption. I’d like to remedy that, maybe. Re-connect with some from whom I’ve grown apart, and maybe forge the odd friendship here and there. I don’t think it should be that hard. Just needs a little investment.

In the first few months of this year, other than getting settled in the US (and married! Can’t forget that) I want to write more indiscriminately. I poured so much time last year into working on Dystopolis that the idea of any other creative outlet was unthinkable; now that it’s mostly out of the way, I want to just write what comes to mind, no matter how unfinished or outlandish. At some point, I’ll develop something further, but I have a brain bursting full of ideas and too much repression. I think it’s time to get past it.

I suppose something that ties into both of the things above is the spirit of collaboration, which I’ve somewhat lost; I used to write with others, but as I’ve grown distant from my friends in the UK and suffered the awkwardness of Google Docs, that practice has fallen by the wayside. Exposing myself to the style and imagination of others is the single most powerful thing that’s improved my writing, and I hope I can find it again.

I don’t know what all of this. Call them alternative resolutions, maybe. Or just ideas on how to be a better person. Now is the sort of time where every facet of my personality is up for review.