St. John's Day

Pseudonymously baring my soul to the Internet: another quarterly update from EB

To new friends: welcome! To old friends: welcome back! A happy midsummer to those who celebrate, and for those on a summer break, I hope it’s all that you want it to be. Around here we’re about to start our homeschool midsummer term; summer lasts from May to October, inclusive, and even the river is going to feel miserable until well into August. He must increase, and I must decrease¹: yes, please God. Come back at Michaelmas, and I'll have the sprinkler going on the lawn and a cooler full of seasonal cheer.

Garden check-in: Mr. Howard did his usual irritatingly optimistic thing and actually got watermelons to grow this year. This specimen’s natural camouflage helps it to hide from predators in the sun-dappled undergrowth.

At higher latitudes, this is a time of year for basking in the joy of life, or something like that. Watching the little bite-sized testaments to sun-drenched gratitude float by on social media, I find myself stopping to wonder when the last time was that I felt joy. Would I even be able to identify it if I did feel it? Of course I smile, sometimes very enthusiastically. I’ve been known to claim to be happy. But, philosophically speaking, I'm not sure that this counts. Doesn’t real, untroubled joy require a level of simplicity and self-forgetting that most of us wretched mortals can only hope to achieve? On the other hand, Aquinas states quite confidently,

For joy is caused by love, either through the presence of the thing loved, or because the proper good of the thing loved exists and endures in it […]

which would seem to confirm that I'm overthinking this. Joy requires love, and not much else.

Okay, so love, as defined in the wider Christian tradition—

(I kid. I kid. I’m not trying to take all week writing this update. Moving on…)

And Now, The Weather

• I honestly have no idea what the next year is going to look like for me, creatively or otherwise. There’s no outcome I can imagine that involves not writing, but it’s possible that my output is about to drop for a while. I would greatly appreciate prayers for a family matter.

• Since the last update, I’ve launched a new fiction serial in response to an unexpected wave of interest (my own included.) This week I also reorganized my Substack page a little, added a new index post, and officially put Poets and Chess Players on hiatus so that I can catch up with the writing. The fact that I’m sad about this gives me hope to actually get that catch-up done.

• I’m lowkey considering rebranding. The whole thing where I’m intentionally writing things for public consumption now is…weird, but cool and unexpectedly important to me. I think my newsletter could use some adjustments to reflect what I’m actually doing here right now.

• I got back into drawing over the last month, and seeing my own progress with a little preparation and practice has been so rewarding! I’m currently teetering on the edge of attempting digital art; I was passed down a Wacom tablet a while ago, but my OS was out of date and I haven’t really wanted to add another “sitting behind a screen” hobby, anyway. However, as much as I enjoyed breaking out my pens for Radiance 1.2, the panic when I realized that I needed background textures made me wish I was working digitally. So…I’m thinking about it.

Bonus thoughts: on possible roles for sin in a narrative, and on being a bad Christian Writer, or maybe a Bad Christian writer, or possibly just a Bad Writer who happens to be Christian

So, by some miracle, I was actually able to hear and process about half a sentence of the Eucharistic Preface yesterday.²

For we know it belongs to your boundless glory,
that you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity
and even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself,
that the cause of our downfall
might become the means of our salvation,
through Christ our Lord. (Preface III of the Sundays in Ordinary Time)

Spiritual implications aside, after it sparked a post-Mass conversation about how much of our lives we thought we could “fix” without wrecking where we’ve actually ended up (very little), I got to thinking about what I’m doing with my serials right now. After all, they’re both stories about redemption, but also about corruption…but mostly about redemption…or mostly about corruption? In Radiance, in particular, the two have gotten fused together just about inseparably. I had been trying to tone down the worst of the corruption, for various reasons, but it didn’t just struggle thematically that way—based on my worldbuilding, I literally couldn’t make the redemption part happen without it.

I kind of hate that I backed myself into that corner, because I thought I’d finally put together a story where simple heroic virtue could win the day. I mean, it’s a superhero story. If there’s anywhere that I can force myself to let go of my hang-ups and put the laws of narrative in charge, it should be here. On the other hand, it’s kind of impressive to me that I set all this up unconsciously and still can’t find a loophole.

Basically, as I think back on my other longform projects, it appears that there is no narrative for me without the felix culpa. At some point, all of my characters have to choose not just imprudence, not just shortsightedness or an immature response to trauma, but some ugly and damaging sin. Then, if disposition allows, I use the consequences to make them better people with better lives than before. Of course they’ll always have those scars across their pasts, and most of them aren’t great role models, and I can think of several notable cases where the only reason I’ve been able to say, “yes, we’re doing this,” is that I first sat down and reminded myself very pointedly about The Scandal Of The Cross…but they get to be happy anyway.

I don’t journal anymore, but I have been maintaining the same story notes document since 2019, and that’s basically the same thing.

Maybe that does undercut any kind of moral messaging that the reader might expect; it’s the main reason, actually, that I’ve been reluctant to formally associate with other Christian writers per se. It’s been noted that I may have actually lost track of how to define which characters are “the good guys”. From here, I can’t even tell how well I’m doing at avoiding scandal in the sense of ‘normalizing sin’, or if I’m managing it at all.

…now, with Radiance, I am trying very, very hard. I purposely made my protagonist kind and wholesome by nature, and using her to filter the world helps. Christabel has a lot of strength to draw on when it comes to resisting evil, and I don’t expect her to have nearly as rough of a time with it as the “conscience of an overcooked noodle” types I often focus on. I’m pretty sure that the reader will be able to forgive her her well-intentioned trespasses. In fact, what this reflection is mostly about is the fact that I just decided to turn one of my planned chapters into a spinoff…less because of the monster wordcount and more because the tone and content both went right back off the deep end as soon as Lady Radiance walked out of the room.³

I swear, I’m trying.

1. i.e. the days will be getting shorter from now on. Not that it will help much.

2. You don’t know how badly I want the “just sit up front and the kids will pay attention” advice to work for us…as evidenced by the fact that we tried it again despite the 100% failure rate.

3. Ughhhh!! I have fallen so hard for my beta ship and I’m not used enough to this “interacting with readers” thing to know how tightly I should keep my mouth shut before it sails.