So, how about that weather, huh? Hot enough for you yet? Bit of a sticky one, isn't it?

Summer is my favorite time of the year, historically speaking. This is unfortunate given the state of the climate. I'm one of those freaks who likes the long days and early sunrises of daylight savings time. While everyone else pines for chilly weather and autumn vibes, I want to listen to cicada-song as I melt into the haze of a long Texas summer. Bone-dry. Sun-bleached. Staring up at the power lines stretching overhead. Some real real Texas Chainsaw Massacre shit.

While we're speaking historically, summer usually blows right past me and leaves me in the dirt. My jobs are always busy during the season. Taking SSRIs has made me UV sensitive to such a comical degree that exposure to the sun gives me full-body aches. There's no getting outside or getting away. Fun usually has to wait for the fall, when things slow down and I don't feel sick being out in the sun longer than fifteen minutes.

This year has been…a little different.

For both better and worse.

If you've been here for a while, you might have noticed it's been a pretty quiet summer. Sorry about that. Missing two months of newsletter pieces hasn't been my idea of a good time, given how intellectually constipated I feel when I can't get all my thoughts on the page. I usually skip February or June, maybe both, just to take a small break between projects. The beginning and middle of the year are good for that sort of thing.

But I never miss two months in a row. And that feels weird and bad. At least, it feels weird and bad for me.

For the record, I've been working on two separate essays. One is about the conservative worldview of Scott Cawthon's Five Nights at Freddy's franchise. It's told by someone (me!) who was there from the beginning of the series as an adult, rather than the forgiving child and teen audience it would amass, and followed its rapid evolution into something tragic and, frankly, quite troubled.

The other is about the work of performing art collective Wham City, specifically Unedited Footage of a Bear and This House Has People In It, and sharing difficult art with the people you love. I talk about Heated Rivalry, Twin Peaks, and the strange, vulnerable joys of engaging with challenging or upsetting works as a communal experience. It's an interesting topic that I have a lot of thoughts about.

However, I realized somewhere along the way that if I wanted to talk about art, I needed to talk about some other things first. I've lived a lot of life this summer, and I was pushing that aside to write about fiction instead of truth. That's something I need to work on.

We'll get back to that.

In June, my girlfriend Melissa and I made the trek to Miami to see Patrick Wolf play in a dive bar. A sticky night for a single man in a layered leather outfit, gliding across the stage playing violin, guitar, piano, and keyboard by himself. Wolf, cutting the silhouette of a slim magician, spoke softly and told jokes between songs about heartbreak, magic, birds, and electricity. Standing close enough to touch him when he moved to and fro across the stage, it felt far too intimate to be near someone so confidently vulnerable. Almost perverse.

In July, we went to West Palm Beach to see Tori Amos at the performing arts center. Amos sat between piano and two stacked keyboards, straddling her piano bench in heels to move between each like a marionette on strings. It was a strangely composed show, and I mean that with love. Both for the set list and for my being there at all, in the same room as someone whose work helped shape the way I think of music and language. Decades of imagining the moment made it all the brighter and more surreal.

The drummer couldn't join for the Florida tour dates, so the show was rearranged to accommodate the absence. Songs were sung off the cuff, cut from the set list or moved around because Amos paused to tell too-long stories and speak with the rapt crowd. She made meaningful gestures to her guitarist and backup vocalists as if editing the tracks in real time. She sang joke songs when she couldn't hold up her lyric sheet and play multiple instruments at the same time. What can I even say? It was magical.

We then went to the movies twice to see the theatrical release of Hadestown: The Musical, once on a quiet Saturday afternoon and again with her mother at a packed house. Everyone cried. Songs about walls and enemies held back by borders hit a little differently these days. Each of us hoped that, perhaps this time, this one time, Orpheus wouldn't turn around at the threshold and cast Eurydice back into the underworld. It's a pleasant thought, at least.

There was the 2026 World Cup, too, a wild and electric time with matches happening at the stadium just a ten-minute drive from my apartment. I wasn't into football before FIFA 2026, but I was so fascinated by the games and their players. It was a whole world I knew very little about. I became Erling Haaland-pilled. I was absolutely Norwegian-maxxing. I've chosen Manchester City for my club heading into the Premier League season, coming for Erling and staying for Rodri.

You must understand what a huge deal this was for us. The Tartan Army marched on Miami. Men in kilts partied at our bars and went to the Marlins game. People from all over the African, European, and American continents filled our streets in a way that felt truly joyous. They tried our food and went to our hang-out spots. Local social media accounts were flooded with jokes and memes from these fun cultural exchanges.

What if we could all move so freely between borders? What if we could all travel to meet new people in new countries? Against the looming shadow of armed ICE troops in the streets, it was another pleasant thought.

Colorful banners and barricades lined the roadways. All the potato chips at the grocery store had international flavors. Long summer afternoons were spent curled under the sun and a warm blanket, watching football matches. Evenings were spent out, taking drives up and down the winding coast, listening to Bad Bunny mumble on the radio, like the party was never-ending. The sun was never setting.

Oh, yeah. I lost my full-time position, moved to part-time hours. I lost my insurance with it. Less money, no benefits. And Melissa and I got married.

And then I unpublished my entire body of fiction.

So. Uh. Let's take a step back to unpack all of that, shall we?

Being bumped down to part-time hours at a job I worked for too long was not a shock. The company is in mid-transition, moving to sell to another, bigger company so the founder can wash his hands of it. I've seen two sales already in my time there, to a corporation and then back again when the corporation didn't know what to do with us. We've rebranded, restructured, moved from in-office to remote only.

Me? I just work here. I got no say in the matter. When it pays the bills, I don't ask questions.

This time, for this sale, the plan is to go lean on labor and big on AI. Look at all these automations! Look at all these reduced costs! My position got caught in the crosshairs, with a lot of heads hung low and long apologies. I've been there for far too long, like I said. The founder is fond of me in ways and for reasons I don't fully understand, although I assume it's because we're both on the autism spectrum. I can deal with his bullshit in a way that others can't. Fellow travelers and all of that.

Me? I gained a hefty bit of phantom stock along the way for the express purpose of us grizzled veterans cashing out at the next sale. Those of us with this stock are counting down the seconds until the sale goes through. Our hours and benefits are cut along the way, of course, but such is the nature of delighting the true shareholders. The founder keeps assuring me, I have my stocks. Don't quit. I still have my stocks. The sale will go through. Don't quit.

It's…been a lot.

To say that I've been burnt out working at this job for the last eight years is a laughable understatement. Being a one-woman department whose work keeps the other departments moving and running on time is the kind of thing that casts shadows on the soul. It rots your brain and steals your joy. I'm tired, so very tired, of overtime and rushed deadlines and putting out everyone else's fires. I'm so very tired of being the co-worker everyone calls on Slack and cries to.

I'm so very tired of turning on my laptop on Monday morning and falling into a deep, black pit. Eight hours isn't enough. Forty hours isn't enough. Working from dawn, through lunch, just to keep up. Not even finish on time, but tread water. When I first explained this to my psychiatrist, she misunderstood the situation as me being so overwhelmed by my emotions that I couldn't finish my work. I had to keep from laughing in her face.

For now? I work from 9 AM to 2 PM. I have no seniority anymore. I'm just some guy who comes and goes. If the work doesn't get done, well, that's certainly a puzzle, isn't it? Maybe someone should give me more hours in the day or something. I can turn off my computer and enjoy the rest of my day, not just wait to go to bed and start over at 6 or 7 AM.

You have to understand: I've been working fifty hour weeks while writing books. While writing essays. While chronically ill. While navigating PTSD. While caring for a chronically ill partner. The kind of tired I am can't be cured with sleep. I am so tired. I don't want to write. I don't want to be the person who writes. I want to simply exist, flat, under a weighted blanket. I want to watch the afternoon sun creep across the ceiling and listen to the soft white noise of the fan blowing across my cheek.

As you can imagine, I haven't done shit this summer.

It's been amazing.

Getting married was…weird.

It happened all at once and also very slowly. Best-laid plans kept getting waylaid by other plans made months prior to my losing my insurance. Birthdays, baby showers, concerts. Melissa had her scheduled infusion for her multiple sclerosis medication and the recovery that followed. My car ended up in the shop for a week due to a mysterious brake issue.

Fitting a wedding in the middle of all that was harder than we thought. But we got the rings ($100), the black dresses ($100), the mandatory class ($25), and the license ($90). Cash gifts from many kind friends on the internet more than covered our expenses. Melissa's mother and aunt gave us bouquets for the ceremony. We all took a Tuesday morning off from work and went down to the courthouse. Melissa's mother and aunt were our witnesses and photographers. The lady at the marriage license office performed the ceremony. She was very nice and accommodating of the flurry of tears and anxiety that was our wedding.

Afterwards, the wedding party went to a restaurant across the street and had breakfast. In the evening, Melissa and I went to dinner at a restaurant managed by someone she knows through her job. We sat at a private table with candles and a white tablecloth. We shared a free meal and diet sodas, complete with key lime pie.

And then, that was it. After sixteen years together, eight years of which we've spent living together, Melissa and I were married. We each kept our legal names. I'm on her insurance. Wearing rings every day is the only thing that takes getting used to. I still take my rings off because they're annoying and leave them in random places around the apartment.

Hopefully I get over that before I lose them, but we'll see how it goes.

For the formality of it all, signing paperwork at the courthouse to get healthcare again, it was…strange. Lovely and strange. It was something that we did for ourselves, without the weight of tradition or expectation on our backs. The time, the day, the dresses, it was for us. A little bubble of reality that was just for one another, where the world didn't matter for a day, maybe two.

Together, we accepted the gifts people gave us, be it flowers or a few dollars or a free meal. We accepted the joy people shared with us, too, as alien it is for me to receive that kind of attention. The earnest outpouring of happiness from friends and family, coworkers and acquaintances. It all happened so quickly but everyone was so very kind and supportive.

It means so much.

And now I have insurance again, so that's pretty cool.

There's still some summer left, even as I see the season's end on the horizon. I've decided to take it easy with work as long as it's financially viable to do so. I haven't written much. I haven't pushed myself to do it, either, with two essays sitting in drafts while I poke and prod at their contours. I've taken time to see live music and theater productions and to read books. I'm in the process of getting into club football.

And, as I said above, I unpublished all my fiction.

I didn't delete it. It's still there if I change my mind. I've made no attempt to lie about having written it or scrub it from the internet. It's just…unavailable. For my sake.

The truth of it is I've been publishing, in some form or another, for nearly twenty years. I've published books, novellas, short stories, and anthologies. All of it, all of it, written by a version of myself I no longer know, and almost always under duress.

During fifty hour work weeks. While chronically ill. While navigating PTSD. While caring for my chronically ill wife. While writing an essay every month for this newsletter. Throwing everything I had, every spare moment when I wasn't sleeping or working, into writing books and stories. Hoping that by finishing this one, by hitting the end on the keyboard, I will be okay.

I will be proud of myself.

It will all have been worth it.

Pushing myself aside to work on fiction instead of living.

Looking at the work now, it feels like it was written by a stranger.

And…I'm tired.

I'm just so tired.

I need to heal. I need to live for a while. To live for myself, not between the writing that gives my life meaning. I want to write, yes, but for the joy of it rather than a sense of obligation or fear. I'm still working on a book, but frankly, I don't know if I'll ever finish it. If I do, I don't know if I'll publish it. I don't know if I have it in me to do this again.

If I finish it, it will be because I need to tell it to myself. It will be a gift to me. I'll only share what I want to share, like the essays, when it feels right to share them. Otherwise, the world is not owed my art. It's not owed my words. You will all carry on with or without me, whether I'm here or not.

Based on some calculations and approximations, I've sold and/or given away nearly 20,000 copies of my books and stories over the last two decades. That includes the few publishers I've worked with in that time. I think that's a good run. I think that's a good place to put things to bed.

I turned forty this year. I got married to my best friend. I had a summer break for the first time in my life.

I want the art that I make to reflect this Magen, not a girl who doesn't exist anymore. I want the art that you find to come from a place of love rather than exhaustion or panic or grief.

I owe it to myself to try.