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A Literary Self-Assessment of my Work

July 11, 2022

I had a bit unorthodox idea: I thought to write a post featuring a literary self-assessment of my work. In particular, I wanted to self-critique all the novels I wrote in the past eight or so years.

This might sound like an incredibly arrogant thing to do, but you can also see it as a teaching point. As you might recall, authors are the sole authority of their work, so you might want to do something similar for your own novels, taking this post as an example.

A literary self-assessment of my work can show you how to do the same for yours, highlighting your evolution as a writer.

literary self-assessment
A literary self-assessment of the seven novels I’ve written in the past eight or so years
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Books with Music: Why I Made a Post-Rock Album for The Perfect Gray

February 14, 2022

Not counting a collection of short stories I recently wrote, The Perfect Gray is my most recent literary work. It’s a literary-fiction novel dealing with concepts such as conflicting emotions, empowerment, impossible choices, and risks. The book’s protagonist, Hecate, is basically carried through life like seaweed on the surf, coming and going without a destination of her own, until she meets a strange man. But what does all this have to do with books and music?

More still, as the subtitle reveals, why did I bother making a post-rock album for The Perfect Gray?

The quick answer is, because I wanted. The more elaborate answer is, because art is complex.

books with music
This is the cover of Hecate’s Dream, the post-rock album inspired by The Perfect Gray
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Tell Me, Mariner – a Collection of Transcendent Short Stories

October 4, 2021

Tell Me, Mariner is a collection of short stories I’ve recently put together. More still, it’s a collection of what I refer to as transcendent short stories. If you remember “1992”, that I recently published here, it’s part of this very collection.

This collection features The Mariner, a character who is very special in my work, for reasons that become clearer to readers of this volume. In a nutshell, The Mariner is a character that is, quite literally, central in many of my novels. He’s not a main character in any of them, and he’s not even literally present in all of them – though he is figuratively present. Recall what we’ve said about style and authorial trademarks.

If all this sounds abstract, remember that this is a collection of transcendent short stories. Part metaphorical, part magical-realism, part Kafkaesque.

transcendent short stories
Tell Me, Mariner is a collection of transcendent short stories – stories where “what it feels like” is more important than “what it is”
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