Hello, it’s me, that author you used to like until he disappeared from the world.
I released the conclusion of the Warm Bodies series in 2018. Since then, I have written some *cough* Instagram poetry, sometimes with little videos and music. I shared a very long song that I made with my friends in a band that was most likely a one-off. But mostly, I’ve been quiet. I lost my grandma. Then my dad. Then my grandpa. The family that has been the foundation of my life changed shape abruptly and radically. I sold my cabin and moved even further from civilization, to a bare patch of land in the eastern Washington desert, which someday soon might have a house on it. Also, civilization kinda collapsed? Life has been weird, the world has been weird, and I haven’t had much to say to it.
But throughout all of that, I have been writing. I really can’t seem to stop, even as it feels more and more like an obsolete craft moving to the fringes of a society that no longer knows how to sit still.
In some ways, this book is about that. It’s about a musician clinging to the art she loves while society devalues and discards it. It’s about a sensitive bundle of anxiety stumbling through a world where everyone is literally shouting. It’s about a young couple trying to hold onto each other while the culture around them mutates faster than they can adapt. It’s about a new internet technology that connects the world and transforms the economy with the unfortunate side effect of constant, inescapable, steadily rising noise. It’s about the terrifying relentlessness of progress, and finding a way to survive it.
It’s called:
干ℍℰ Ø√€尺ℵΘᎥ$ε
Yes, that’s the title, and if you find that fragmented jumble of unrelated unicode symbols a little overwhelming, you’ve already entered the story.
I finished this book last week. By which I mean, I wrote the last scene of the first draft of many drafts to come. A novel isn’t “finished” until it’s published and you’re reading it in your bed with toast crumbs in the sheets. But the story is now there, messy but complete. Next comes the editing and the waiting, the search for a new publisher, the glacial grind of getting a book into the world. But the story is there. And I’m pleased.
I’ve never written anything like it before and I probably never will again. It’s not quite realism, not quite sci-fi. It’s an urgent expression of an overwhelming feeling that is very very NOW.
I’m happy to have purged it. You may relate and find solace in it. You may think I’m wrong and regressive and throw it against the wall. Either way, maybe you’ll pause and think for a few seconds. That’s all I can ask anymore.
Many updates to come as I get closer to bringing this to reality. All the biggest ones will come to you here in emails. The richer backstory will continue to be on Patreon. And anything aesthetically pleasing will find its way onto Instagram.
I’m glad you’re still here to read this. I’m glad I’m still here to write it. I hope we’re both still here when this book stumbles out into the world.
Your friend,
Isaac
