Notebookery, Backstory of yr hmbl Satrap

There are difficult transitions. I was in a PhD program when medical stuff happened, and kept happening. Consequences included being a stay at home parent for a couple of years, moving to a new state, divorce, terrible roommates, learning to live alone and rediscover who I am when I'm not in a dyad or a group. I learned something I never figured out as a grad student: how to write.

Having kept notebooks and sketchbooks all my adult life, an obvious tactic in trying circumstances was pouring myself into writing and ideation for myself, with no expectations of relationship or audience. Just my own interests, concerns, resonances, my pleasure in, e.g., world-building, monsters, spaceships, the human condition. Iterate for some five years, and the result is the mound of notebookery in the images. There's a lot in there that nobody else need ever see, but too much for an alienated survival habit.

The current wave of updates here are a step toward bringing my art and writing out for publication in the normal sense: just getting what I am happiest with out into the light of the Daystar, transcribing and doing a stage of editing. I cannot stress the mass of material I feel pressing the bounds of notebookery. So, in sha'a-llah, there may be a lot of these posts in weeks and months to come.

Completing things for a viewer or a reader is quite different from dipping into the ocean of stories alone, and that is a discipline I am beginning to practice away from this blog.