In Summary: * “It. Is. Baseball Time. In. Texas.” Opening words always spoken to start a particular segment of the Texas Rangers Pregame Show. Settles my mind when I hear them.

Spent 2 hours this morning at yard work: mowing, chopping down weeds, carrying and breaking limbs and branches, all in the front yard. Heat index was already over 100 degrees out there when I quit and came inside. Really want to do more mowing tomorrow, but I may have to put that off until Thursday, depending on how I feel in the morning after I start moving around.

Shall work on the night prayers during tonight's ball game, and turn in early.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 238.87 lbs. * bp= 140/85 (76)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:40 – 1 banana * 06:40 – 1 big breakfast taco * 12:30 – mashed potatoes, beef patties with mushroom gravy * 16:45 – HEB Bakery cookie

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:35 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 09:00 – 11:00 – yard work, mowing, chopping down weeds, carying and breaking limbs and branches, all in the front yard * 11:30 – follow news reports from various sources * 13:30 – listening to relaxing music. * 15:00 – listening to general sports talk on 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station.

Chess: * 16:00 – moved in all pending CC games

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Ukraine Path

I was fitted for wonder And grew a giant tree To aging assault A final eviction Thoughts for the unaccord- in the sympathy of day And pestilence We were worried at last That things will be final core And striking the salute Our prayer ambulance

And in this country, the gentry Small arms for the government A tour of the Lord For the singers that be And brominated time Bees to our cast And solely then Did we strike with reason

And pain disappeared For the other mistakes of high fever But Bertolli was new And masses of St. Catherine Made verse to the public

And this day off in reason here Fighting advanced of the forged And to solely forget That we are- still,- The Mother of Time

And in this Eucharist Is the body of Jesus And we came unafraid But to be together For these constant plans And days and things- of a fresh balloon And in Singh rapport We are fighting till ten Keeping merry To solve away our public cure And in this instance to Aberdeen We sat up with the Sun- to make a stand and decision That we were going to Rome,- Federal or not To shake this war- into a barrel.

1. 18. Juni

Endlich! So würde ich diesen Tag nennen. Genau dieses Gefühl beschreibt ihn am besten. Und es ist schon ganz klar, dass es dabei um unsere endlich gelöste Unterkunftssituation geht. Aber fangen wir von Vorne an. Am Morgen haben wir mit Imke über die Pflanzen und Gerüche in Berlin gesprochen, und ich möchte hier meine Eindrücke dazu festhalten. Eigentlich habe ich das bei meinen früheren Besuchen in Berlin nicht so deutlich wahrgenommen, aber Berlin ist unglaublich vielfältig in seinen Gerüchen. Die Stadt riecht einfach sehr unterschiedlich – besonders jetzt, wo endlich Sommer ist. Am deutlichsten erkenne ich den Duft der Linden. Imke hat mir auch von anderen Pflanzen erzählt, die sie beim Fahrradfahren bemerkt: Birken, Brombeersträucher und viele andere blühende Stauden. Und ich habe das tatsächlich auch deutlich gespürt. In anderen Großstädten habe ich so etwas noch nicht erlebt. Selbst neben diesem riesigen Verkehrschaos bleiben die Grünheit und die Lebendigkeit der Pflanzen spürbar. Besonders der Duft der Linden ist für mich unglaublich nostalgisch. Er erinnert mich an schöne Erinnerungen und an sehr liebe Erfahrungen. Nach langer Zeit habe ich dieses Gefühl wieder in Berlin erlebt. Nicht alle Gerüche in Berlin sind allerdings so angenehm. Viele Bahnhöfe, die wir bisher besucht haben, riechen nach Urin. Irgendwie sind fast alle Eingänge, Ausgänge und Zwischengänge in den U- und S-Bahnhöfen von diesem Geruch geprägt. Ich persönlich würde so etwas sogar in Wegbeschreibungen für blinde Tourist*innen erwähnen, aber darüber bin ich mir mit meiner Chefin noch nicht ganz einig. Auf jeden Fall liebe ich dieses Berlin, das so unterschiedlich riecht und so unterschiedlich klingt. Besonders heute – an dem Tag, an dem wir nach der Arbeit endlich eine Unterkunft gefunden haben!

Es war inzwischen schon fast eine Tradition geworden, nach der Zeit in Schöneweide mögliche Hotels oder sogar Pensionen zu besuchen und dort nach freien Zimmern zu fragen. Manchmal sehen wir auf Booking, dass ein Preis für uns eigentlich passend wäre, trauen uns aber trotzdem nicht zu buchen, weil wir keine Ahnung haben, wie das Badezimmer dort aussieht. Mit den Tieren ist es noch einmal eine ganz eigene Geschichte. Ich dachte eigentlich, dass Hunde in Berlin besonders willkommen sind. Aber die Gebühren für Hunde werden, vor allem bei längeren Aufenthalten, schnell sehr hoch. Ein schönes Hotel am Flughafen verlangt zum Beispiel 12 Euro pro Hund pro Nacht! Dabei bekommt der Hund weder ein eigenes Bett noch irgendeinen besonderen Service. Wenn man das zusammenrechnet – 12 × 2 × 55 Nächte –, kommt da eine enorme Summe heraus. Nur für die Hunde wären das über 1300 Euro! Was mich beim Thema Hunde außerdem überrascht hat: Vor vielen Läden gibt es keine Stellen, an denen man sie sicher anbinden könnte, damit sie auf ihre Besitzer warten. Deshalb müssen wir oft Fahrradständer benutzen, aber das ist natürlich nicht immer ideal.

Dann haben wir aber noch einmal beim Hotel am Tierpark nachgefragt, das uns inzwischen wirklich ans Herz gewachsen ist. Außerdem haben wir herausgefunden, dass Erasmus uns doch noch zusätzlich unterstützt, und das hat in diesem Fall sehr geholfen. Da die Gesamtsumme für einen Monat im Hotel für uns dadurch machbar wurde, haben wir beschlossen, auch die restlichen Tage dort zu verbringen. Eigentlich hatten wir unsere Reservierung im bisherigen Hotel noch bis Sonntag. Aber mit dem kaputten Aufzug wollten wir dort nicht länger bleiben. Und dann erfuhren wir plötzlich, dass wir schon morgen umziehen können. Das war eine so große Erleichterung, dass es uns sofort wieder mit Freude erfüllt hat. Deshalb bleibt von diesem Tag für mich vor allem genau dieses Gefühl. Obwohl ich heute auch viel Zeit in meinen Online-Tagebuchblog investiert habe. Ich würde sagen: Wenn man mit einem Screenreader arbeitet, ist es gar nicht so einfach, die richtige Plattform für Online-Schreiben zu finden. Aber mal sehen, wie gut ich mit write.as zurechtkomme. Alle Vorschläge fürs Online-Blogschreiben bekomme ich von meinem Genossen ChatGPT. Bear Blog würde ich auch noch gern ausprobieren, aber im Moment bin ich zeitlich ein bisschen festgefahren. Im Moment klingt jedenfalls wieder alles möglich – jetzt, wo wir endlich keine Obdachlosen mehr in Berlin sind!

I do not think the worst things that happened to me made me better.

That feels important to say plainly. Pain is not a craftsman. Cruelty is not a teacher deserving gratitude. Shame did not arrive with wisdom hidden inside it. It arrived as shame. It took what was soft and young and private, and it put its hands where they did not belong.

But I was there too.

That is the part I keep returning to.

I was there before the wound. I was there during it. I was there after it, carrying what no one came to lift from me, and somewhere inside all that carrying, certain parts of me did not die. They changed shape. They learned to move quietly. They learned when to hide, when to speak, when to become funny, when to become useful, when to become still. But they did not die.

The garden did not make me someone who hides from life. It made me someone who knows that a hidden place can be holy when the open world has become unsafe. I went there because I had already learned that being seen could be dangerous. I went there because the laughter of other children could follow a body like weather. I went there because adults could be near enough to hear and still not arrive.

And yet, in that garden, something in me kept looking.

That is maybe the first true thing about me. Even when I was trying not to be found, I was still looking. At leaves. At light. At the small proof that the world had not become entirely cruel. I was not only hiding from pain; I was studying beauty, though I would not have had those words then. A frightened child under trees, saving evidence.

That is still what I do.

I save evidence.

I notice the slight change in a face when someone is about to lie. I notice the careful brightness people use when they are trying not to cry. I notice the joke that arrives half a second too quickly, the tenderness someone disguises as sarcasm, the silence that is not peace but fear wearing clean clothes. I notice when someone is performing strength because I have performed it so often myself.

People think being perceptive is a gift, and sometimes it is. Sometimes it feels like standing in a room full of lit matches, knowing which one will burn down the house before anyone else smells smoke.

I learned to read people because I had to. In classrooms, in corridors, in changing rooms, in all the places where boyhood pretended to be harmless while sharpening itself on anyone different. I was gay before the word could hold me kindly. Before it became identity, before it became pride, before it became anything I could stand inside without flinching, it was already a weapon in other people's mouths. They knew enough to wound me before I knew enough to defend myself.

So I read them.

I read laughter. I read footsteps. I read who was bored enough to become cruel. I read which adults would look away and which ones might not. I read the room before I entered it because entering without reading had already cost me too much.

That is still in me. I can see behind a facade because I lived behind one. I know the labour of appearing fine while something private is bleeding through the floor. I know how much can be hidden inside a normal answer. “I'm okay” can mean I am okay. It can also mean please do not ask, because if you ask kindly I may not survive the kindness.

This is why I see people.

Not in the shallow way people say it when they mean they are observant. I see the defended places. I see the child still waiting behind the adult. I see pain when it has learned manners. I see joy too, which matters more than people think. Joy is often the more hidden thing. Pain announces itself eventually, but joy is shy after a life of being punished. It appears in flashes: a real smile before the mask returns, a softened voice, a look that says something got through.

I see those moments and I keep them.

Maybe that is why I give.

Some people might say I give too much. They would not always be wrong. There have been doors I should have left closed. There have been people whose wounds became visible enough for me to excuse the harm they were doing. There have been times when I mistook understanding someone for being responsible for them, and hope, stubborn little idiot that it is, kept handing me reasons to stay.

But I do not give because I am empty.

I give because my heart did not become mean.

That is not a small thing.

After the garden, after the classrooms, after the changing room, after the rumours, after the silence in the car, there was every reason for something in me to turn hard and stay hard. There was every reason to become careful with love, to count every gesture, to ration warmth like wartime bread. There was every reason to say: no more, nothing leaves this heart unless the world proves it deserves it first.

But that is not what happened.

I became careful, yes. Watchful, yes. Exhausted, often. But not ungenerous. Not hollow. Not hateful.

The changing room should have taught me that bodies are only danger. It did teach me some of that, for a long time. It taught me that shame can be forced onto you and then treated as if it came from you. It taught me that boys can do terrible things while pretending they are only joking. It taught me that the world can keep ringing its bells after something inside you has been humiliated beyond language.

But even there, even after that, I did not stop wanting tenderness.

That almost breaks my heart to admit.

Something in me still wanted touch to mean care. Still wanted being wanted to mean being cherished. Still wanted love to be clean enough to enter without fear. That longing followed me into later rooms, including the camp, where secrecy dressed itself as intimacy and I was young enough, lonely enough, hopeful enough to believe it.

I was not foolish for wanting love.

I was wounded.

There is a difference.

The army taught me what happens when someone wants the warmth of you but not the responsibility of having touched your life. It taught me that people can hide behind duty, rank, masculinity, procedure, silence. It taught me that a person can be close enough to your breaking to drive you toward help and still not offer one human sentence to sit beside you in the dark.

That silence is one of the things I still measure the world against.

Maybe that is why honesty matters so much to me. Because I know what silence can do. I know what happens when people choose comfort over truth, image over care, distance over decency. I know how a lie can enter a room and rearrange everyone except the person it harms. I know the particular cruelty of being discussed, reduced, misnamed, turned into a story by people who were never brave enough to know you.

So I tell the truth.

Sometimes too much. Sometimes too directly. Sometimes before the room is ready. Sometimes before I am protected enough to survive the consequences. But I would rather be wounded by truth than slowly erased by pretending. I have lived inside too many unsaid things. I have watched silence put on a uniform and call itself responsibility. I have watched shame become gossip because no one had the courage to name tenderness honestly.

I cannot live like that.

My honesty is not a performance of virtue. It is a refusal to abandon myself in the old way. It is the voice I did not have in the garden. It is the sentence I could not say in the classroom. It is the witness that did not arrive in the changing room. It is the word that never came in the car.

I give from the same place.

From the heart, yes, and not lightly. I know people can misuse that. I know some will take warmth as permission, generosity as supply, forgiveness as weakness, patience as proof that they do not have to change. I know this because I have let people stay too long in rooms inside me. I have made beautiful excuses for people who were only offering me fragments. I have called it hope when sometimes it was grief refusing to pack.

But still, I would rather learn boundaries than lose my heart.

That is the line I am trying to live now.

Not less love. Truer love.

Not less seeing. Clearer seeing.

Not less giving. Giving that does not require me to disappear.

Because I am not only the boy who hid. I am also the man who can see. I am not only the body that was shamed. I am also the heart that stayed tender. I am not only the young man abandoned into silence. I am also the voice that finally tells the truth.

And maybe that is the most devastating thing.

Not that I survived.

People survive all kinds of things because the body keeps going before the soul has agreed. Survival by itself is not the miracle. The miracle is that after everything, I can still look at another person and want to understand them. I can still see joy. I can still give. I can still love. I can still be honest. I can still be funny in the dark. I can still make meaning from fragments. I can still find the small hidden light and say: there, that stayed.

No one stopped the day.

But neither did they stop me.

Hoping for a repeat of last night's win.

Tuned in now to 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station listening to general sports talk ahead of the pregame show for tonight's MLB Game: the Texas Rangers vs the Miami Marlins. The opening pitch is scheduled for 5:40 PM CDT. I'll stay here for the radio call of the game as broadcast over MLB's Gameday Service.

Last night's 4 to 3 Rangers win over the Marlins was so nice. Sure would like a repeat of that tonight.

And the adventure continues.

Sullen Win

And on this day we will Flighting aware in rise The simple of hand and ecstasy Fortunes of year And times to know and be redeemed The different forms of day And nights of the amend All that was is still welcome And everything now is vast to know Burlington strength in those we see Pensions for our own and then This country of his will- The penny stops in literal Blinding but not unlike With mustering code Stops of road to hillcrest Nights of no pain and high North The planet we seed is aware A plane to craze you And capture all amends To cure and forthright Diamonds at the envy Limit to our cause Six deletions of all war And betting on that we are peace A fantom paralegal And evidence subsist Our demand in starglow Portions freer and in demand What kept busy is two for the isle In citizen wonder and no collect The different wonder as our way Our stations in state Little bits of blight to wean That capture all of ten Carling’s most and can The able will meet And rise all men For then to have this play And as we are, manifest in field The Heavens befriend us And meeting Christ on our path The year can wait- four seconds more To bliss and the early rise Mayhem for our shore- if only drifted much The heart in early joy And therefore long Night’s befriend And blushing as before Hue to our labour And marking code Money to the filling World And all this window of Hers- Continuous and fair ploy Of speed and early chance We meet the other neighbour- across his sole reaction That there is no enemy in this house And treasure near For unto you,- I offer you my hand Lifting rise Beyond the early rise But four days in plight Testing the age to know- that time is on our map And may be, the greatest hue.

21 June 2026

Saw Shao Fan's show Refrain | 复沓 at White Cube this morning—wonderful work. First time in a while that such large paintings have felt justified. Deep sensitivity in all aspects, a practice of looking and re-looking, and a lived engagement with antiquity that generates work with an intensity that truly honors his subjects both human and nonhuman. There are a few stunners, but Fruit 1924 (2024) and Rabbit Portrait 1025 (2025)—both large ink on rice paper works—are with me the most right now. Fruit has an almost paper-like two-dimensionality; it's an apple sliced in half to reveal a core that becomes a network of overlapping planes and openings. Starts to become a skull-like memento mori the longer you look at it. Rabbit manages to achieve an unflinchingly direct and confrontational quality through symmetry without locking itself off in any way (which is something that usually doesn't sit well with me)—the odd strands of hair/whiskers whimsically trail off beyond their defining limits, and certain elements like the white of the rabbit's ears remain true to the eye rather than an ideal, so my feeling is that the impressive balance comes more from an endearing emotional groundedness than a technical fastidiousness.

In all the kinds of music I enjoy it often happens that I’ll grow to appreciate second-tier productions as much as (if not more than) those generally agreed to be ground-breaking masterpieces. There’s so much to love in what is ‘merely’ excellent music that comes to us less unencumbered with expectation & significance than the canonical Great Works. My latest classical acquisitions have both been in that vein: an album of The Complete Piano Trios of the Czech-born and later French-resident composer Anton Reicha, and a first volume of the Complete String Quartets of Alexander Glazunov which features the Russian's 3rd & 5th quartets.

I wrote a little about Reicha on one of my previous blogs. His output is sometimes simplistically divided between a more eccentric and experimental phase earlier in his career when he worked in Germany and Austria; and a more soberly decorous one after he settled in France. His set of six op. 101 piano trios (1824) belong to the latter, and, indeed they are graceful and mellifluous pieces relatively light on drama & intensity. The fourth trio does perhaps have a little more in the way of Teutonic sturm und drang than the others. Another one that stands out is the second – the only one in a minor key – and also the only one of the set I’d heard before. Very few people had ever heard all of them before as this is the first ever recording of numbers four to six. It's the kind of music that can serve as an agreeable sonic backdrop while reading a book, for example, with moments now and again that will undemonstratively demand (and reward) more engaged attention. The performances, by the Trio Bohémo, and the recording, are beautifully done.

I’d heard very little of Glazunov's music until recently, when I followed up an on-line recommendation to listen to his 3rd string quartet (1886-88). A while elapsed before I obtained it on CD – with performances by the Utrecht Quartet. It's a very appealing piece with strong melodies, especially in the Alla Mazurka part of its third movement. The fifth quartet (1898) is also very good, if less emotive. Again I can't fault the playing or the recorded sound.

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In books it was another poetry-heavy week. I finished a volume of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo and another of the Selected Poems of Attila József. Both were poets who had to struggle against poverty, health problems, & adversity in general. József's life of tragic hardship came to an end under the wheels of a train in December '37. He was 32. In April of the following year Vallejo, in exile from his native Peru, succumbed to a mystery illness in a Paris hospital. He was 46.

Clayton Eshleman's translations in the Vallejo volume are the fruits of a lifelong vocation, and have been done full justice by the University of California Press. They impress even where the poems are obscure to the point of incomprehensibility. Enough meaning does shine through, overall, to make the effort of reading them seem a worthwhile endeavour. Peter Hargitai's translations of József, on the other hand, have had to make do with much less lavish treatment in a print-on-demand volume that could have used a little more editorial attention than it received. The translations are still strong, however. Both Eshleman and Hargitai understandably (being Americans) use American colloquialisms in their translations. I'm not sure why those sometimes felt jarring to me in the context of József's poems where they didn't in Vallejo's – some prejudice stemming from my Britishness perhaps.

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Stationery news: I treated myself to a Kaweco AL Sport fountain pen on Saturday, specifically one with the ‘Anthracite’ finish and a medium steel nib. Several times I’ve been tempted by the pens on display at The Art Shop in Abergavenny, and this time I finally succumbed. I could have acquired the same item more cheaply on-line, but the Art Shop is a local business I’m happy to support.

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Another enervating heatwave is in effect, due to peak over the coming two days, with temperatures forecast to reach 37C on Thursday.

19 June 2026

Attempted a painting today based on the fragmented reflection of a plane on wet tarmac that I saw while boarding a recent flight from London to Venice. Primed the panel with a left-to-right gradient from a bright yellow to a dense black—the idea was to then slowly layer loose/thin form lines over the gradient from bottom to top in a relatively monochrome gray-blue palette and see what rhythms and shapes cohered as the whole thing took on a sense of motion. An okay idea, but it just didn't work, probably because it was too determined. Having a practice means constantly rewriting one's own rules, and it feels like I've done a bit of over-defining in recent days that made me rigid in my approach. So it's time for a break from the studio for a while in the interest of recalibration and refocusing.

But what I can say now, for when I resume, is that there needs to be some kind of reckoning as far as my handling of color and its relationship to the logic I've been discovering. Destruction as well as building, (while it now feels overly representative to me almost eight months later), is perhaps a good work to go back to. That one set a baseline for accumulated tactility in conjunction with early watercolor layers that are constantly shifting underneath and weaving in and out of the topmost oil layers so that there's an optical softness even with clarity of form. And when I think about the work I now want to make, which is work that is free to break away from my visual references by way of every formal element considered in a delimitation stack while still remaining true to an invisible structure of observed logic, that might be a place to restart. Forms that float, reorganize themselves and react to each other, cause friction between background and foreground as well as flatness and depth, and ultimately create a self-regenerating mesh of lived-in experience and presence. Now I'll forget everything I just said.

The sun is out and the walk to the Old Port is warm and inviting. Recently I’ve been drawn to this bench that faces the river, the Grand Quai tower, and Habitat 67. This is my favourite part of the summer: mostly sunny, about 20 degrees, people out with their dogs and their coffees and their tote bags, crossing runners in short shorts with the light eastward breeze pushing through their hair.

The river’s surface is calm, sparkling in the sun.

Fitting: to my far right, a Canadian flag flutters in the wind, asserting its ownership over these stolen Indigenous lands and these waters that hold the remnants of my ancestors.

It was always a lie. I know this because we are still here.

I am still here. Still sitting in the sun on a Tuesday morning with nowhere to be but in the present moment.

Le soleil entaille la brume en faisant un bruit d'usine. Sur la route en terre trottine une file indienne de tourterelles des bois. En bas, un bout de planche sur un reste d'eau qui, plus loin, devient souterraine, fait passer la ravine et remonter [vers soi]. On entend le rire acide et cruel d'un martin-chasseur (Halcyon senegalensis) et quelques notes flutées de bulbuls communs. Le soleil coupe déjà la peau. On ne sait avec précision en quelle saison nous sommes, [le soi, perplexe, se taisant, rendu après la nuit incapable de discerner à même sa propre peau sous le soleil]. Qui coupe pourtant. Le jour et la nuit sont des couteaux qui tranchent le temps dans la cervelle. Il y a des nuages, petits et grands, ou le gris lumineux d’une plaque de fer, comme un écran. [Le soi, distant du ciel, regarde à ses pieds les trous, les ornières, où s’accrochent toutes sortes de choses résiduelles.] Malgré toutes ces choses [en soi, dans la tête, délavées par les pluies], l’on suit un itinéraire grâce au numérotage des rues, qui fait du trou de la ville un livre décousu.

Personne [à part les jambes, les pieds du soi, qui l’écrivent pas à pas] ne lit ce livre ou seulement le feuillette, ni le prononce à mi-voix, dont les pages s’énumèrent au gré du mouvement des populations, des errances particulières ou des ballades au bois. Plutôt : c’est une lecture mécaniquement inconsciente, en même temps que perpétuelle (il y a toujours au moins quelqu’un qui marche, de jour des milliers, sur les chapitres de la nuit) et chaotique, mais aussi déterminée par les points de départ et les points d’arrivée fixés idéiquement par les services d’une administration elle-même désordonnée. Déterminée en principe, car l’on ne parvient pas encore à faire aller les gens de A à B. Le livre de la ville échappe à toute imposition du plan.

Personne [à part les jambes, les pieds du soi, qui l’écrivent pas à pas] ne lit ce livre ou seulement le feuillette, ni le prononce à mi-voix, dont les pages s’énumèrent au gré du mouvement des populations, des errances particulières ou des ballades au bois. Plutôt : c’est une lecture mécaniquement inconsciente, en même temps que perpétuelle (il y a toujours au moins quelqu’un qui marche, de jour des milliers, sur les chapitres de la nuit) et chaotique, mais aussi déterminée par les points de départ et les points d’arrivée fixés idéiquement par les services d’une administration elle-même désordonnée. Déterminée en principe, car l’on ne parvient pas encore à faire aller les gens de A à B. Le livre de la ville échappe à toute imposition du plan.

#Fenêtresurville #Didascalies

The Long Journey to Finish a Three Novelette Trilogy Series

Note: This article is written for my Ernest Ortiz Writes Now Substack. But you have the chance to read it before they do.

It seems like a long time ago. Every 6 a.m., I sat in my Toyota Camry outside someone’s house, sipped my iced mocha, held my camcorder, and waited for my subject to do something.

I was a private investigator specializing in workers compensation. Long hours, including weekends and holidays, lots of waiting, in extreme heat and cold. Most of the time boring. Until, everything happens in a blink of an eye.

I’ve worked in several states, got to see the beautiful sights and sounds. More importantly, it taught me many things about human behavior, specifically how people behave when they thought no one was looking. Those two lessons always stuck with me whenever I wrote fiction.

Now, I’m a stay-at-home dad of two boys. The stakeouts replaced by school pickups, cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, and emotional negotiations. But I never stopped writing. The jobs change, but the struggle to write always stays.

The story I’ve been working on

Since late 2018 I’ve been building a sci-fi trilogy called The Package. Most of it in my head before putting it down on paper a year later. Created multiple drafts with dozens of revisions. Even hired someone on Fiverr to create two ebook covers for the first two novelettes, until I got tired of the project and put them on the backburner.

It wasn’t until I created my blog ErnestOrtizWritesNow.com last December that gave me the drive to finish The Package. The first two novelettes are out now on Gumroad. The third and final one drops in August.

Here’s the setup:

Malcolm Diego is a cyberjacker. Think hacker, but wired directly into computer and comm systems via an implant at the back of his neck. He lives on Unity Station orbiting Earth. Work is scarce and money is tight. His ex-girlfriend shows up and asks him to deliver a package to her mother on a colony in the Asteroid Belt.

He says yes. He shouldn’t have.

What follows takes Malcolm from Earth orbit to the Asteroid Belt to Jupiter, through smuggling runs, corrupt officials, pirates, and a conspiracy that turns out to be much bigger than one package.

I wrote the kind of sci-fi I wanted to read: fast-paced, character-driven, no technobabble, no fifty-page prologue explaining the political history of the solar system, not even a timeline. Just a guy trying to make it through the next problem without getting killed.

Originally, it was supposed to be one short story. But it turned out bigger than I expected. Sometimes, ideas can expand more than you can handle and the best you can do is to contain as much as possible.

Why short fiction instead of a novel

Each installment is a novelette, around 5,000 to 20,000 words. The third story, Sovereign, is almost 20,000. You can read one in a couple of hours.

I’m a stay-at-home dad. I don’t have time to read novels or nonfiction books anymore. My readers are probably busy people too. Short fiction that respects your time feels right to me.

There’s also something I love about novelettes and novellas as a form. It’s long enough to build real characters and real stakes, yet short enough to stay tight. No filler. Every character, every scene, every sentence earns its place.

Where to get it

Both novelettes are available on Gumroad, both PDF and EPUB included in a ZIP file, no subscription required, just a one-time purchase.

The Package (Novelette 1 – 10 chapters, 10,800 words) > ernestortizwritesnow.gumroad.com/l/thepackageone

The Package: Foul Run (Novelette 2 – 13 chapters, 12,600 words) >

ernestortizwritesnow.gumroad.com/l/thepackagefoulrun

The first book is $1 while the second is $3. Both ebooks are less than a premium coffee, as I keep saying, because it’s true and I’m not above using it.

The third installment, The Package: Sovereign, lands in August or sooner. Subscribe here and I’ll let you know the moment it’s live.

What to expect

I’ll be posting here about writing, the craft, the process, what it’s actually like to write fiction and nonfiction as a stay-at-home dad, and former private investigator, with limited hours and no quiet. I’ll share behind the scenes on the trilogy and whatever comes next.

Until I say otherwise, I will post two articles on Substack every month, one free and the EOWN Letter for paid subscribers. It’s $5/month and $45/year.

If you read The Package and want to tell me what you thought, reply back. I read everything.

Thanks for being here. Until next month.

• Ernest L. Ortiz, ErnestOrtizWritesNow.com

Thanks for reading. This first issue is free for everyone. If you’re interested in more of The Ernest Ortiz Writes Now Letter, it’s $5/month or $45/year.

As I reach my mid 30s, it keeps getting clear to me that I cannot train as I used to earlier in my life.

During college and later when I joined the workforce, I could workout for 2 hours everyday and still could function well throughout the day. The recovery was never an issue. I would still be able to active throughout the day. Never had I felt the need to stretch, although I always did because I liked doing so. This is what has made me hyper flexible.

Now it appears I cannot do the same. Lately It is becoming clearer to me that I should change my plan.

This knowledge has not been made available to me without charges. For past few years I have been struggling with being active at the gym. I would go for a few days, workout and then something would happen. I would pull my shoulder, or sprain it or my back would give out.

Thus I would again have to take a break and rest till it heals.

For past few months I have been reading more about training and nutrition. A very important part of that is recovery. A part that earlier I would never think and would train 7 days if had time.

Now I only workout 3 days a week and rest of the days I only walk or do light cardio. This helps me keep my heart rate up and keeps the blood flowing. More blood flow helps in recovery much more. Even with all this, I can’t simply come out of bed and start moving. The way my son does. :D

I have to do small movements before I do the big ones. Ones like moving my toes, then ankle, pelvis, shoulders. If I get out of bed, without doing these, the body does not feel the same. It moves hard, with minor pains here and there.

A big weapon I am finding is taking warm shower after getting out of bed. You have heard of cold shower. Two times I took those and it froze my shoulder. I was walking like Robot for 3 days. Warm shower all the way.

Never had I thought the mid 30s would be like this but I have had years of bad posture, over training. The bill is coming now.

Find me on Hevy

I got an email yesterday that was somewhat unexpected. My former hosting service asked me to send an email about why I had closed out my account. This is something I haven't experienced before… A company that wants an actual email, they don't just want some form or survey filled out. They want to actually hear everything that I have to say… Well, I decided that I would take them up on it.

And now, I am presenting this email to document all the gory details. But, let's be clear: I spend a lot of it talking about their service, and one issue that I had. Most of that was a minor annoyance, not something that pushed me to make the decision to switch. As I document in the second half of this message, the primary reason is the enshittification of WordPress.

Hopefully you enjoy the parts of this where I get completely unhinged when talking about certain topics. ;)

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You know the saying: “It's not you, it's me?” Typically, it's a lie, right? Well, in this case it's about 90% percent true.

There's very little that I had a problem with from the standpoint of your infrastructure. I think you've done an excellent job of designing a system that is well integrated, and provides the services that are needed to manage a professional environment.

However, where I did run into some friction centered around one of the plugins that you provide. I don't recall which one it was, but almost every time it was updated it kept breaking the image rendering on my site's home page. One of your support people found the issue: it was the JS optimization one of your plugins that was breaking things. The annoyance was every time the plugin would update, I would have to go back into my site and fix the issue. It was only recently I found the feature that allowed me to snapshot the settings so I could apply them quickly without having to look up the support issue to remember how to fix the problem.

The real reason this was quite annoying: I was always using the current default WordPress template. I didn't need anything too fancy that the default theme didn't offer. Personally, I really think that your Q&A process should be testing against several configurations of the default template to make certain that it isn't breaking things. (Although, in this case, that might not have worked… IIRC the problem was the plugin overwriting the settings the user had implemented, instead of preserving them.)

The pricing was more than I really want to invest. When I looked at things, your service was running me over $800/yr. When I add the additional services I required, that expense jumped to somewhere between $1000-1200/yr. There's no way I can justify spending $300-400 per website, that's excessive for me. This wasn't helped by the changes in your pricing structure over the years.

My replacement solution has my expenses down to $200-250/yr to run five websites. It's not the same as having a full infrastructure setup such as yours, however, it will meet my needs better (which I'll explain more about later.)

The other thing about your environment was: it's like using a sledgehammer when all I really require is a screwdriver. I'm not in the business of website design. I'm in the “business” of writing.

This means that features like having a staging environment are, mostly, non-features for me. If anything I just require a test environment for making changes to the layout of my sites… I don't need a full mirror of my site, there's nothing so complicated that I have to be concerned about major side effects. (Honestly, the whole staging environment was one of the most attractive features that sold me on your service initially. It was surprising to me that I never used it because it wasn't necessary.) There are several other features of your environment that were like that.

But the single biggest issue has nothing to do with you. It is the fact that Automattic has done everything they possibly could to turn WordPress into a steaming pile of horse manure over the last eight or so years. And now, with the addition of AI integration, the enshittification process is complete. WordPress is no longer a tool for writers. It's a tool for visual web development, and the spreading of as much slop as possible.

I tried to give WordPress a chance with the Gutenberg editor. But block editors are just not for writing, they are for page design / layout. Look at the tools that writers use: Google Docs, Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Write. Hell, George R. R. Martin is still using a copy of WordStar from the 1980s, and there are other authors that are still using WordPerfect from the 1990s.

The thing is, the editor is getting in the way of the writing process. It puts things in the path of the writing process that just shouldn't be there. I shouldn't have to think about inserting a heading, I should just be able to hit a quick shortcut and have it done. And, if I want to select text across two paragraphs to join / edit a couple of sentences, it shouldn't be a five-step process (try selecting the last word in one paragraph and keep selecting into the next paragraph see what happens… One of the most annoying things to have been forced on writers in the last decade.)

But it's not limited to the editor itself. It's the whole block based website layout. It just gets in the way, and it makes things a lot less efficient and quite a bit more annoying. I just went and looked at one of my other websites that is still using a pre-Gutenberg and pre-Block layout configuration, and I couldn't believe my eyes: this site that I hadn't looked at for over a year was a lot more responsive than anything I've worked on with any current theme. And this is still a current installation of WordPress: the host that site is on is performing similar services to yours: providing automatic updates to the current versions of WordPress and any plugins, full backups, etc. While there are still a lot of differences (from the plugin stack that it's running, to the network infrastructure itself), the fact is that the older theme was just a lot easier to render.

And then, over time, the whole block and patterns system in WordPress has just made things even worse. I tried recently to reconfigure my home page to make it into a minimalist layout: simple image, title, and date for each post, with the title being the link to the article. Would you believe that I spent two days trying to get the layout that I wanted, and failed? Why? I don't know, I'm still baffled. I just moved things around in the homepage template to make a simple list. Furthermore, I found there were things that should have been extremely simple that I couldn't get it to do, like make smaller, thumbnail sized versions of the featured images. And for some reason the date for all the articles on the homepage were the current date — despite me not moving the date element outside the query loop.

So now, things I had been able to do in previous versions of WordPress were breaking in the latest version. And then I found this fucking bullshit:

WordPress AI Connectors screen.

And I lost it. I had been considering moving off WordPress for years, and now (as I previously stated) seeing that the enshittification was complete, I decided that I needed to dump WordPress. (And don't even get me started on emDash.)

I had been thinking for a long time about moving my sites to a static website generator. However, I wasn't completely happy with what it would take to integrate one into my tool chain / working environment. However, a little over a week ago I tested out a couple of really simple platforms that offer a middle ground between a static generator and an online environment. After a little testing and evaluation, I ran the numbers and determined that it would be very effective at reducing my expenses. And, because it integrates into my working environment, I can ensure backups are handled properly (I have a triple-backup system, that includes offsite physical backups).

So, I migrated all three sites that were hosted with you over a period of three-four days, and shut down everything last weekend.

No looking back now. Thanks for the service you provided.

George