Livia Llewellyn

I’ve been thinking about doing this for some time, and now seems a perfect start: from tomorrow, June 1, to September 7 (the day after Labor Day), I’m going to be offline completely. This doesn’t just mean no posts. It means: no tweets, no Facebook updates, and no comments on any of your tweets/posts/blogs, because I ain’t gonna be reading them. I’m disconnecting my online access at home, so other than checking my Yahoo email (which many of you have already) at work, I’ll be spending the bulk of the summer IRL.

There’s a couple of reasons why I’m doing this, the primary being a need to deal with what has become a rather unmanageable fight against a deep and crushing depression, which has been eating away at my life for several years now. That probably won’t come as any big shock to people who know me and/or who read my blog. Since I’ve never believed that writers (or any artists, for that matter) need to be miserable in order to be creative, I plan on fighting back. I’m tired of feeling as if I’m constantly pushing against the waves of some all-consuming ocean of darkness, so I need to start fixing it – otherwise, I will drown. And, that’s all I’m going to say about that.

I also need to work on time management – for some people, cutting out TV is the solution. I actually don’t watch that much TV, but I spend upwards of 4 hours (between morning and evening) online daily, and that’s just fucking ridiculous. No wonder I haven’t finished a novel since 2005. [::insert your well-deserved ridicule and mocking here::] So, I’m just going to nip that habit in the bud, as well as some other habits that cut into and/or hamper my writing. It’s not that I think I’m going to become some great name in literature, or even a little name – I think we all know that’s not going to happen. I’d just like to finish a few projects that have meaning to me.

There are some other reasons I’m shutting down for the summer, but they’re of the boring personal sort, not the exciting “I haz a mental problems!” sort, so I won’t bother to list them. I think mainly, I want this to be a summer in which I get things done and do things that make a difference in my life, instead of simply sitting glassy-eyed for three months in the heat (and the ant hills…), waiting for it to be over. I’m already more than halfway through my life, and I’ll never get another chance to live again, so I think it’s time to stop waiting. There’ll be plenty of time for that, and in only thirty years…

So, I was going to post something about writing, but most of today has been spent just trying to get through it without falling over – again. On my way into work this morning, I stepped into a wee, stealthy pothole outside of the Hoboken terminal, and promptly pitched onto the pavement. The damage? Small cuts and bruises on both palms, bruises and swelling on both knees, and a rather spectacular swath of chewed-up skin on the left knee. The worst part was laying on the filthy pavement, watching my precious, precious coffee spill all over as it rolled away from me. Noooooo! Well, actually, the worst part was suddenly realizing this evening via a small voice in my ear – er, which would be my mother, scolding me on the phone – that I need to get a tetanus shot, because my knee and palms hit water-covered pavement that was so filthy, it was probably the equivalent of diving into a septic tank. So that’s what’s on the table for tomorrow – that is, once I get up and start screaming from all the aches and pains that will have finally manifested throughout my body during the night. And also assuming the spiders don’t first catch the scent of my blood, aaaaaand I’m not even going to finish that thought, and instead pray that Herbert protects me from my many snack-happy arachnid guests. I guess I should just be glad I didn’t knock my teeth out. The hillbilly look doesn’t work for me. Or maybe it works a little too well…

Oh, yeah: still writing. Still working on the novel. Oh, and the heat is out in the apartment again. God DAMN, my life is good.

Why is it unofficial? Well, this is why – here’s the review:

Gabriel Hunt’s Hunt at World’s End, as told to his friend Nicholas Kaufmann, is such a great read that one of my fellow employees at work stole it from my cubicle before I got a chance to finish it. Yeah, people – it’s that fucking good!

My official review of the novel will be posted once I get the replacement copy I ordered from Amazon.

The novella is now online at Subterranean in its entirety:

Her Deepness

Part Two of “Her Deepness” is up at Subterranean:

I am the Stone the Builder Rejected

I’m assuming that the third and final part will be up next Monday.