Cosmic Voicemail

I haven’t written much this week, and for that, I fucking apologize.

There’s been a lot going on in my life, and for some reason I’ve been really, really tired. My fiancée has opined that the exhaustion might have something to do with my new insulin delivery system, and I’m inclined to agree with her.

One of the problems with turning off the creative faucet, even temporarily, is that the words don’t immediately come flowing back out when you turn the fucking thing on again. Writing is something I normally try to do every day. When I’m in that rhythm, the words are just there. I sit down and they come out.

Stop for a while and apparently they get unionized or some shit.

That’s not to say I haven’t been writing. I have. Just not every day, and I haven’t posted anything on the blog this week.

Instead, in whatever spare time I’ve managed to find, I’ve been putting my head down and trying to finish Undertow, my first collection of short stories.

They’re all queer-themed, with most of them told from a transgender perspective.

I wonder why that is?

Hm.

I like to think some of them are pretty fucking good, but ultimately I’ll leave that up to you guys. You’re the ones who get to decide whether any of this shit is worth reading.

I’m actually really excited to push this one out into the world because it’s incredibly different from everything I’ve published so far.

What do I have to date?

There’s And So, She Rose, the post-death reflection piece I call a memoir mostly because I don’t know what the fuck else to call it.

Then there’s A Survivor’s Guide to Survival, written for a very particular kind of reader: the person going through one of the worst moments of their life. The person waking up in an ER somewhere, pain everywhere, vision blurred, trying to figure out where the fuck they are and how the fuck they got there.

But Undertow is fiction.

Well, fiction-ish.

Stories.

Characters.

Different lives and different perspectives, all carrying pieces of things I’ve seen, experienced, imagined, feared, survived, or wondered about.

And strangely enough, this whole reinvigoration of my writing started with an entirely different idea: a fictional universe centered around Death.

That project is currently lying somewhat dead.

Which seems appropriate.

I’ll get back to it.

After Undertow, though, I plan to put my head down and obsess over a dark fantasy novel. I already suspect that one is going to consume me for several months. Maybe a year.

After that?

Who the fuck knows.

But there will be more.

A lot more.

I plan on leaving a fucking library behind.

And I plan on plowing forward regardless of sales and regardless of readership. I don't have the time or the patience to spend my life obsessing over marketing. If readers come, fucking fantastic. If they come during my lifetime, even better. If they come in the next two to five years, better still.

But I'm going to write either way.

Because the motorcycle wreck taught me a very important lesson, one that was ground into my soul with buckets of sand: Tomorrow isn't fucking promised.

The cardiac arrests should have taught me that.

I walked away from those realizing that my life hadn't meant anything.

That's harsh, but that's how I felt.

No impact.

No legacy.

Nothing I had left behind that said, Kate was fucking here.

And that's where I got stuck. I started looping on those two words: Impact and legacy.

What do they mean?

Why did I get to come back?

Whatever forces govern who we are and what this existence actually is, they gave me a second, third, and fourth fucking chance in 2022.

What was I supposed to do with that?

How could I possibly avoid squandering a cosmic gift like that?

Those questions consumed me for a while.

And then, slowly, I fell back asleep.

Corporate sleep.

Career success has an amazing ability to do that. Promotions. Recognition. Money. Responsibility. Progression. All those little things that convince us we're moving forward because somebody keeps handing us increasingly important shit to do.

And I bought into it again.

I forgot something I'd already learned the hard way: eventually, nobody is going to give a flying fuck what I accomplished for my employer.

That's not an indictment of my employer. The work matters. The mission matters.

But it isn't my mission.

Then came the motorcycle crash.

Apparently I needed a fucking refresher course.

The forces that govern existence can take all of this shit away at any moment. Career. Money. Plans. Tomorrow morning.

Everything.

It was time to get fucking serious.

Time to figure out what I was put here to do and then fucking do it.

So now I ride to clear my head.

I ride to clarify my thoughts.

I ride to drown out the noise.

And I write.

My life has changed in other ways, too.

I now have a beautiful, amazing fiancée. A woman who genuinely cares about my well-being. Who cares when my worries start consuming me. Who cares whether I'm happy. Who wants me to succeed, but doesn't measure that success by a fucking job title.

And that fucking matters.

Maybe more than I knew it would.

And now I find myself writing furiously, almost as if I'm writing for my very fucking life.

Because my words matter.

It took me a long time to believe that.

Maybe I finally have enough life behind me to have earned something worth saying. Maybe my perspective matters because I've spent enough time getting the absolute shit kicked out of me by existence and getting back up anyway.

Or maybe I'm just arrogant enough to believe somebody, someday, might need to hear something I left behind.

Either way, I'm writing it down.

I'm building a cosmic voicemail.

Something that remains after the Reaper finally swings and connects, because I don't think the fucker is going to miss next time.

Books. Stories. Essays. Thousands upon thousands of words saying:

Kate was fucking here.

This is what she saw.

This is what she learned.

This is what she loved.

This is what she got wrong.

This is what fucking mattered.

So I write.

This last week, life jumped front and center for a while. And, unfortunately, I still have to eat, which means I still have to occasionally serve my corporate overlords.

But I'm back.

Dawna is here.

We'll find our rhythm.

I'll find mine.

And then I'll keep writing.

That's my promise to God.