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Despite what the title of this post suggests, I’ve been rather productive this year. Right now I’m writing a sequel to Saudade, the story published in FIYAH fall 2018. I’ll be the first person to tell you sequels are usually unnecessary, but as a writer, it’s sometimes easier to dive back into a world you know than one you don’t. The characters can grow, usually for the better but sometimes for worse. I can pick up on threads I touched on in the original novelette, but didn’t take time to flesh out. And maybe I just want to write something for the hell of it, a story I can enjoy. That’s good enough reason for me. Continue reading “Climbing out of the doldrums”

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I’m not dead yet!

I’ve started watching The Mandalorean on Disney+, which my wife somehow managed to get for free through her Verizon account. Very inspiring stuff. The show features a protagonist with a mask on, which I didn’t think would be engaging but it works so well. It’s recharged my writing batteries! I know I can crank out stories again. Continue reading “2020”

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Last weekend I moved to another apartment. While my old neighborhood wasn’t terrible, there were things about my former apartment my wife and I had grown tired of over the past two years. We were on the third floor with no elevator, and the rooms were ungodly hot during the summer months. The laundry machine downstairs never seemed to work. Snow plows would trap our car in during winter, and the groundskeepers rarely shoveled. The garbage truck would wake me up at 6AM. We had a package stolen. These are all “first-world problems,” of course, but now that I’m in much better financial straits, we decided to move. Continue reading “Merrily”

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Although the Myers-Briggs assessment has fallen out of favor for the Big 5, I’ve derived a lot of personal insight from knowing I’m an INTJ. In recent days I’ve found myself revisiting the nuances of my type in order to understand how I cope with stress. Continue reading “Energy”

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My wife and I went down to NY this weekend to celebrate my 28th birthday with friends. I wanted to eat ramen as that’s become a favorite of mine, but soon after we were seated at Yama Ramen, the power went out. We waited for Tom, who accidentally went to another eatery, to meet us there. When we learned that much of midtown Manhattan had also blacked out, we went for the restaurant Tom had just left in the hopes of dining on ramen there. We arrived at Ippudo and made a reservation–and then the power went out! Upon realizing this blackout would only get bigger we chose to head for the subway tunnels, until Tom realized that we may get stuck underground if the railcars stopped running. My wife ordered a cab at this point, and the five of us chipped in for a ride back to Queens. We arrived at a restaurant my friend Noelle recommended. This place did not have ramen, so I ordered katsu instead. One pork dish later, we headed for my friend Leslie’s house and proceeded to drink until yelling and playing video games and swearing ourselves to sleep.

Happy birthday to me 🙂

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I went out to Long Island last weekend with my friend, Tom. We spent a couple nights in a tick-riddled home in the middle of Southold, where a bulldog next door kept rushing at us with friendly intent. The weather was sunny during the day, and mostly clear at night. We traveled to the local observatory, and I got to see Jupiter through a telescope for the first time. The purpose of our trip was a creative retreat, a respite from the business of lives that otherwise do not pause without intervention. Continue reading “Mid Year Jolt”