Mushroom Cynosure

Not exactly an auspicious start to my daily blogging habit, but giving up won't make it any better. First thing's first. I quit Facebook. I haven't posted anything, or liked anything, or scrolled through the feed in over a week, and once I finish transitioning a couple Messenger conversations to different platforms, I will delete my account, never again to return. I used that website for thirteen years. Thirteen! I was barely cognizant of social media when I started. No Friendster or MySpace or LiveJournal. Facebook was just this silly thing where you could waste a bunch of time playing browser games and annoying people from high school. Now it's an advertising juggernaut (and almost singlehandedly responsible for ruining the internet).  As I began to use Facebook more, I thought it might be "fascinating" to see my whole life documented online. Holy Christ. The sheer naivety of that statement. Of course, I wasn't thinking about privacy concerns, or data ha...

Earlier this year, my first novel, Levels , was published by JournalStone's Bizarro Pulp Press , with the help of friends at Rooster Republic Press . It hasn't received a ton of attention yet, with the delightfully unexpected exception of getting a positive review in Publisher's Weekly , which has truly been amazing. That one review is probably responsible for the book doing any amount of business thus far. In fact, eleven libraries now own copies of Levels , and last I asked about it, over a hundred paperbacks had been sold. That's not half bad for a small press release from a guy no one's ever heard of. And as the title of this post suggests, I'm writing a sequel. Part of me feels like it's sort of ridiculous to write a sequel to a book that hardly anyone has read, but perhaps that's imposter syndrome talking. And on the other hand, I don't really care if it's ridiculous; it's something I want to do. I always dreamt of writing a sprawling g...

That's a joke. I'm actually working to AVOID becoming an irredeemable drunk, something that my biology is very much at risk for, given my lack of regular serotonin and impulse control. I've heard alcoholism described as a social disease, which is a description I like very much. If our bodies and the very building blocks of our biology can become infected, then why not our cognition? There is evidence to suggest that trauma can be inherited epigenetically. It's the kind of finding that doesn't seem surprising. Writers like to brag about how much coffee they drink, but I think I might have actual credentials in that department. I started when I was 10 and graduated to drinking it black in middle school. There was a period, coinciding with late teens/early twenties, when I stopped entirely, saying that the acidity upset my stomach. But I started again after my first job in Portland and haven't stopped since. Now I drink about a pot and a half a day. I used to drink...

My name is Karl. I'm sort of a writer (I have couple of published books), and soon to be a father. I have ADHD and mild OCD. I run a small press called Excession Press with my wife, Whitney.  The purpose of this thing is not to build a readership, or advertise, or any of that other shit. Its purpose is to try, really try, goddammit, to transmute my increasingly unhealthy appetite for social media into something beneficial. It's been years since I wrote a short story. My reading and writing habits have fallen off a cliff. Something has to be done to reprogram my brain. I figure, if I can make myself write on this thing everyday, without treating it like a marketing exercise, then maybe I can be the writer I once aspired to be. Because, right now, I don't feel like anybody. I feel like a fraud.  So, let's get into it. I'm going to be a dad in January. How do I feel about that? Uh, pretty good! This is something I want. Something that Whitney and I did deliberately. I ...