the muse has been calling me

on absences that aren't really absences at all

This is a direct message to all of you wonderful people who have signed up for my Substack.

When I started this newsletter, I had a lot of intentions to deep-dive into some philosophical and personal writing and share every idea as the Muse came to me and called me to write.

Some surge of inspiration, however, hit me in such a way that I am going a different direction, which is why I have not posted in months.

I spent all of October researching, and in November I began writing a novel. I’m about 100 pages in already, and I’m extremely excited about the form it’s taking. It is consuming a lot of my bandwidth and energy, and I am being very deliberately secretive about it. I haven’t told a single soul what it’s about, and I don’t plan to until I’ve got a second draft under my belt.

The Muse spoke to me and gave me explicit instructions to hermetically seal this book away from the world, and, well, what can I do but obey?

This is all to say that I will likely not be posting to this Substack for a long while because of this novel project. I will, however, alongside my partner, Jake, be creating a multi-media publication for our project “Death in The Garden.”

Here we will be posting our podcast, interview clips, long-form essays, book/podcast/video recommendations, and overall creating a space where we can share all of the nuance and complexity of our thought process when it comes to “Death in The Garden.” The film itself is an insane undertaking in that our philosophy has always been to show the breadth of complexity of these converging crises rather than narrowing our focus on one particular phenomena. We feel strongly that we’d be doing a disservice to our project if we didn’t express it in all of its interconnectedness, context, and holism. This is a way for us to abandon the sputtering hells of other social media channels as well, which we believe to be a bottleneck to expanding on these ideas in the detail necessary to be impactful.

Therefore, this project in its broadest sense is inherently multimedia. My novel, in essence, is an accompaniment to “Death in The Garden”, expressing things that can only be expressed in narrative. Jake has joked about creating an animated comedy series to express the absurdities we’ve confronted in a more comical light. There is a place for all of these mediums in this conversation, and we’re grateful to be part of the conversation at all.

Incidentally, “Death in The Garden” has become more of a way of life than a project, which I think was always the subconscious point. We wanted to endow ourselves with a worldview, and well, these creative pursuits are the fruit we are bearing.

All in good time.

In the meantime, I would be honored if you all would sign-up for our new Substack, which we will be launching in the next couple of days. It will be completely free, but there is an option to pay if you would like. All proceeds will go towards us being able to live and complete these projects.

I really sincerely hope to see you all there. Thank you so much for being here and giving me airtime in your email. Have a beautiful day.