I know I keep dancing around the fact that I can’t share the working manuscript, but I have finally decided to omit what I think is a banger of a piece because it doesn’t mesh with the rest of the work, so I can offer that much to the curious.

“You, mad scientist. You, practitioner of improvised alchemy. You, mercurially minded, melting into a malt. Brown sugar syrup in a vial, adjacent to another vial of brown liquid in a centrifuge. Muddied salt and vinegar. A caustic sodium chloride contrasting the saccharine sweet.

This is the closest approximation of necromancy you can manage now. This is an imprecise science at best. Mysticism by any other name at best. You carved sigils on both coasts and got stuck in the Midwestern mud. You land-locked child of the oceans, son of Pacific and Atlantic. What was supposed to be a circular map is instead a spiral. What was supposed to be a gateway west is now an anchor-arch, catenary in how it captures and captivates. Evenly distribute weight. Evenly distributed guilt.

You’re in a laboratory. You’re not in a cathedral. You’re measuring the gradient of ions. There is not an iota of doubt that this is fine. Your mother’s tongue withers and squirms on the table.”

It just overlaps too much with too many other elements and there’s just not a home for it. Maybe that could change. I don’t think it will though.

I’m about a week out from sending my book out to various readers (if you want to be part of that group, you know how to contact me), and I’m still making changes and I still haven’t finished the capstone piece that miraculously needs to tie everything together with a bow, but there is something… relaxing about being this deliberate with my pace. There is something nice about taking my time.

As discussed at length, a lot of this project was planned around countering my usual habits. Instead of doing several things repeatedly over a relatively short time span, do one thing over a relatively long time span. When you forcibly change how your brain typically operates, it changes your perspective and also makes you appreciate how the different parts of your brain play.

The part of me that loves doing a thing a day loves playing. It loves when a particular stanza or paragraph has a rhythm and energy to it, when it feels good to say out loud with some oomph.

That part of me that’s in charge right now though is viewing this from a mile high vantage point. And this part is constantly parsing what is cute and what is needed. This part is thinking about babies in a shed, which is a lovely metaphor to type every time.

As I continue editing my manuscript, the phrase “kill your darlings” keeps popping up in my head largely because while I am attached to some things, not everything can make it. Not everything should make it. And I don’t know. I think about all the time in undergrad where me and my friends would ponder the brutality of burying things in hopes of necromancing them later. How at some point, we tried to shift the metaphor to something slightly less awful, but maybe is just awful in a different way? Whose to say.

I could have been done with projects weeks ago. I’m glad I’m being deliberate and taking my time. I’m glad I’m sitting with all of these things. I’m glad I’m letting a different part of my brain make these decisions for a spell and I feel like I’m being rewarded for it.

But there is still one more page to confront and a bunch of copies I need to make and send. But ain’t that fun? And in a year that has been objectively rough, ain’t having fun a victory in and of itself?