I just cut 7,000 words from my third book, reducing it from 27k words to 20k. Most of the mundane content is now gone. When I reach even more material, I will do that again. That is how quality literature comes into being. If you save everything for the final edition, you will have a far worse experience available to your readers than if you had refined and culled content from your work before publication.
It tirelessly takes tremendous time to tell truly terrific, trustworthy, timeless tales to talented, tenderhearted, talkative trans women to tactfully turn their tremulous, turbulent troubles to temporary tranquil transformative tears.
I am considering dedicating a few pages of my upcoming third book to original tongue twisters. I am certain my narrator will adore that.
Beauty should not be simple symmetry. It should not be what merely pleases the senses.
It should be in the Sublime.
The Sublime includes horrible things. It includes the asymmetrical "ugliness" of humanity.
Beauty extends beyond the senses.
A beautiful, hopeful smile on the disfigured face of a landmine survivor.
The juxtaposition of beauty within struggle, within the trials of life...
That is far more moving than any supermodel pose ever made in history.
The will to survive.
The courage to question.
There is no light without darkness.
And a beauty without flaw is simply geometry.
I want to see the whole picture...
I am now reviewing the finished audiobook production for my first book, Beyond Description. Once I determine there are no changes to be made, I will approve it, and it will go through a final review before going live on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. Thank you to Sarah Decker for being so wonderful!
The book of Sartre, the book of Søren, the book of Beauvoir... All bibles to me. All prime movers of the existentialist body of literature.
Somewhere truth is found in the questions but not in the answers. The questions are often more interesting.
But neither questions nor answers come.
Only no·thing·ness.
Just within the edge of consciousness lies a speck of awareness that what came before all this coincides with us and leads us to return to it one day.
One "day?" A heliocentric assumption.
Our foundations are often assumed. Because without them we cannot function. To change a precept of our foundations creates a cascade effect upon all that rests on it.
Without the Sun as we know it, we no longer have a day as we know it. All follows from below, and above reflects the sequence that precedes it.
There are veritable subatomic structures to every belief we hold. Ignite a fusion to exceed the melting point of everything for miles within your mind.
That is how I perceive the deconstructive impulse. That is how I see the process of finding truth: annihilate all it rests on, study the debris, and imagine a new underlying cosmos.
I may write about my life in detail into my books, but I also believe in the virtue of privacy. For all that I surrender into the public sphere, there is easily as much unspoken about my life within the sphere of privacy.
Privacy is sacrosanct. But balancing it with communicating what needs to be known is an art form. Privacy and communication form a competing set of ideals.
Security provides privacy. Trust is the currency upon which security rests. And communication requires varying levels of trust based on what is to be known and not known.
Privacy does not just involve information. It can also involve the security and unseeable space of someone's home. Even if there are no secrets within that space, the mundane still has a value in private expression.
Being secret is not the same as being private. Secrets hold power. Privacy brings peace of mind. You cannot adequately have secrets without their privacy, but privacy need not involve secrets.
Everyone deserves a sanctuary space to call their own—one free from influence or prying eyes. It brings balance to an otherwise heavily surveilled life. It provides a place to heal from the onslaught of human awareness.
One interesting fact of my life is that there is no shortage of events that upset me. But the key is that memory fades about each one. By the time the next upset happens, I will have partially forgotten the one before that.
The transitory nature of memory and emotion creates an interplay of constant recovery from past pains. Pain comes as it comes.