2023: Wounds and Words

A love letter to BLOOD/INK/BONE

In the customary NYE fashion, I woke up this morning to reflect on 2023 and all that has transpired. I’ve been ruminating a lot on the ways in which it’s been a challenging year—many uniquely difficult growing pains punctuated 2023. There was an enormous storm in late February that lasted until early March we were unprepared for, and sustained a lot of damage from as a result. We spent months just restoring the property to where we’d gotten it the former year. We lost a handful of animals including my beloved emotional support pigeon, and we rehomed two additional animals we realized we weren’t the best possible home for after much deliberation. Neither of these transitions were easy to do even if we knew they were the best possible course of action for everyone involved.

There’s been a lot of grief, loss, and setbacks. Homesteading is always difficult but 2023 was a firm and unrelenting reminder of that. A one step forward, two (or ten) steps back sort of year. It’s nearly January now, and I’ve been seriously ill since October. First Covid, then bronchitis, then tendon issues from the antibiotics then a broken rib from coughing and now, a series of mysterious injuries and symptoms left in that storm’s wake. I am not better, and I don’t know when I will be again. The universe and my body are begging me to slow down, and I’m reluctantly, (maybe even resentfully), listening. Yesterday I took two baths and spent hours alternating between reading Brideshead Revisited and the Raffles stories, both of which felt ridiculously indulgent. I know I need many more of those sorts of days, but I have never been good at resting.

This is 2023’s message, loud and clear: stop. listen.

Last December, I remember knowing and discussing with my wife how ridiculous and unintuitive it is that the calendar year places NYE in the dead of fucking winter. We’re supposed to eat food and hibernate and celebrate in winter. Seasonally and energetically it’s just not a good time for making resolutions or making changes or starting projects. The soil is frozen, we cannot plant anything now and expect it to flourish. That’s what spring is for! And despite this at the end of 2022, I still got caught up in the external pressure to take stock of the year and begin again with a blank slate come January. My wife and I built a fence on the first day of 2023. We embarked on an insanely ambitious deep clean project to purge all the synthetics and plastics from our home and replace them with sustainable materials, and organize our mess of a library. I somehow convinced myself this counted as resting.

Before we could finish any of these projects (of course) Mother Nature in all her wisdom and humor dropped the worst storm in twenty years of North Fork storms upon us. Our fences were decimated by falling trees. Our horse pasture was a labyrinth of oak branches. We were without power or water for ten days, snowed in. Truly forced to rest, as Nature intended.

This was 2023’s message, loud and clear. STOP. LISTEN.

My initial flippant insolence set the stage for how I proceeded to deal with (ignore) this message for the remainder of the year. I was like, “yeah, yeah,” and kept about my merry way, busting my ass because no matter how much I claim to love coziness I am an ass-buster at heart and will find something, anything, to not sit still about. Nature kept slamming me down each time I rushed the process. Cracking my rib. Cracking it again. Cracking it until I could hardly breathe. Finally, here, now—I am weary. I get the picture. I can’t get up. I’ll probably spend today lying on the fold out couch reading about historical gay Englishmen again because I physically cannot do anything else. Finally, I’ve listened to what the universe and my body (they’re the same thing) are telling me instead of simply hearing it and willfully forgetting it.

No one is above the laws of nature. I know this, I live my life by it. Or at least I try to. It’s been humbling to sit in the realization today that even in spite of all the times I repeat this mantra to myself, I still find ways to fight what I know to be true.

But I’m done fighting. The floor is muddy from yesterday’s rain and the sink is full of dirty dishes and there are so many loads of laundry that need to be done, but I am not going to lift a finger to remedy any of this. I’m going to stop. Listen. I’m going to lie down, and take a bath (or two) and read. Maybe, if my heart takes me there, I will write, which leads me to my next point and the true heart of this letter:

If I examine 2023 holistically and generally, it was a hard fucking year full of hard fucking lessons. But if I look at it as a writer? This has been, without a doubt, the best and most successful year of my life. (It’s almost like good writing requires STOPPING and LISTENING).

This year, I launched BLOOD/INK/BONE, my hobby writing class. I did it because I was tired of seeing every writing advice account online behave so negativity. The pervasive air around the condition of being a writer is one of struggle and blood and pain and sweat and tears and forcing yourself to write even though you hate it. And that never resonated—writing is my greatest joy in life. I love doing it. When I’m not writing I’m thinking about writing, it is truly the thing my heart most loves doing, the thing I am meant to do. And that was the sentiment I wanted to pass on to my students: that writing didn’t have to be a chore, it could be a reprieve.

I was not anticipating how much sharing this love for the craft would affect me. Maybe I’d become arrogant—thinking I had no room for growth, that I couldn’t possibly learn to love writing even more than I already did. But teaching BLOOD/INK/BONE unlocked something in me and altered my relationship to my writing practice so fundementally it seems insane that only a year has passed since I first embarked on the process. Before every class I would get so eager to lecture and after every class, I felt so energized and inspired. I could not wait to get to my notebook or computer and implement what I had just lectured about, which seems so silly to confess—I mean wrote these lectures, clearly I already knew the material! This wasn’t new information to me, but it was information I was sharing in a community. And I could see it affect my students, who also left class excited and inspired. I fed off that energy, it didn’t matter that I had created or facilitated it, the mere act of witnessing it reflected in other writers allowed me to benefit from and take my own advice as if it had been bestowed to be from some master. It was alchemy, transmutation. In sharing what I already knew, I could do more than just know it. I could live it. (Sort of like how knowing winter is a time for rest doesn’t actually mean you rest during winter until a giant snowstorm MAKES you rest for winter).

This year I planned, plotted, and completed an 120k original fantasy manuscript in less than six months. I also planned and plotted the following two books in this trilogy.

This year I wrote and edited two complete original horror anthologies, and published one.

This year I began countless other short stories and novellas, as well as a nonfiction collection of essays on nature and death and homesteading.

This year I planned and plotted (using my own exercises developed for BLOOD/INK/BONE) two more novels, a post apocalyptic sci-fi/nuclear horror story and a dark fairytale/ horror fantasy.

This year I took on and completed a number of lengthy commissions, one of which led to me meeting people I now consider dear friends.

This year I was able to write original fiction and fan fiction and oscillate between the two without ever losing sight of my goals in either medium.

This year I had so much interest in B/I/B I decided to do it again next year, and write the curriculum for a brand new lecture series.

This year, in spite of the hard lessons and challenges and illness and injury and loss and grief, was my most successful writing year ever. And not just because it was prolific and lucrative, but because I found so much joy and learned so much during that twelve month stretch. I knew I loved writing more than anything else in the world (except my wife :) but now, I feel like I can truly live that.

Which leads me to an announcement: this year, I will be formally stepping back from tattooing to prioritize being a full time author.

This isn’t the point of this newsletter so I won’t go into detail (I’m sure I’ll make a seperate post about this one day) but in short, the tattoo industry has changed tremendously the last few years, and become overrun with moral and ethical issues that have me questioning the extent to which I want to remain involved with it. I love tattooing and have loyal clients I will continue to work on as long as they still want tattoos (if you’re wondering if this means you, the answer is yes), but I have no desire to continue putting energy into marketing myself to new clients or keeping up with current trends in that world. It has been a wonderful career for eight long years, but I’m no longer happy considering it my full time job.

I want to write. That’s it. And I wasn’t brave enough last year, or the year before, to admit that was my heart’s true desire. I am so lucky and so privileged that I can actually pursue my heart’s desire as a career, and it seems like a waste of that luck and privilege to not do that. So, here I am.

I owe this to BLOOD/INK/BONE. Not the class itself or the material or the curriculum—those existed before this year—but to those of you who attended. To my students. In teaching you, I taught myself. In seeing you grow, I grew. In giving you space for true inspiration and fearless risk taking and self indulgence, I allowed myself the same. Thank you for trusting me, and here’s to true rest: stopping and listening all winter long.

There will be a time to plant new seeds and hatch new resolutions, but not yet. Not this moment. I will be sitting in this moment considering the lessons I’ve learned and truly celebrating all I’ve accomplished without feeling the need to move onto the next adventure, and I invite you to do the same with me. Sit, a moment, in gratitude.