I wanna just give you this today. Next week I’ll talk a bit about how I made it.

Suggested musical accompaniment: Theatre Of Nature by Anna Von Hauswolff

(even me using those dashes in that last sentence is likely to get this flagged as AI, but I’ve been using those fucking dashes for decades and I’m gonna keep writing however I fucking want)

I’ve seen comparisons to witch hunts, where writers (particularly Black women, which indicates how the outrage is being aimed) have had their careers damaged because Pangram identified them as using AI in their work. There’s no way of knowing if that’s true, and if these writers say it’s not, then there’s a good chance it isn’t.

To my mind, most of the people who are using AI have no shame about it. Most of the people who aren’t using it (ahem) have really strong opinions on it (AHEM). The amount of people using it in secret and hoping no one will catch them is probably small. These people are furtively trying to run a scam and as far as scammers go in this particular historical moment, someone trying to rip off Dungeon Crawler Carl is the least of our problems. Remember the billionaires and politicians and corporations who are scamming us out of our drinkable water, breathable air, and ability to trust a single fucking thing our government tells us?

Okay. Deep breath.

photo by me, taken while leaving the beach last week

The process is the point. That’s the thing. Making art is a process, honing your craft is a process. Your experience, your aesthetics, the art that resonates with you, what you understand and what you don’t, it all gets filtered through this attempt to express an idea. To have generative AI do some of that for you isn’t just lazy, it’s missing the point entirely. It’s mistaking the product for the purpose.

I make art because I’ve never felt able to make myself understood any other way. The process of writing and rewriting (and rewriting and rewriting…and rewriting a few more times) and editing the novel I serialized here was a process of self discovery, and the final product - abandoned, not finished, as the saying goes - represents the clearest communication I am currently capable of.

My promise to you remains the same as it was last year when I started serializing: I will always give you the most idiosyncratic entertainment I can possibly create and I will always push myself at the level of craft until I can’t see a way to make it better. Then, when you read it, I’ll know that you saw the world through my eyes for a while.

***

Art is a spiritual practice and I am a multidisciplinary mystic. Stop by on Thursday for the reveal of my novel’s cover. It was made by me, using a photo I took and drawings I made and I really like looking at it.

Howzitgoin?

Are you regulating your nervous system? Hahahahahaha! ICE is murdering with impunity and the horrors in Gaza and Iran go on. Zohran Mamdani is proving that politicians actually could improve our lives if they wanted to so the wretched, bitter slug in charge wants to make that thought process illegal.

Have you been in the water? The ocean feels amazing. Mars has an incredible laugh and it’s easy to get it out of him. He tells everyone who makes eye contact with him that he’s five and a half. We made a book yesterday and had Mindy read it at bedtime. He did his first non-improvised play the other week and his cousin and grandparents came to watch. We spent this past weekend playing outside with family. We spent the fourth in my Aunt’s pool. In Wakefield, with some of Mindy’s family, we walked to get ice cream and saw baby osprey getting fed. Some baby bunnies had a nest in our yard and we checked on them every day while they grew. After they left the nest, one got hurt and we took it to the wildlife rescue. A couple weeks ago, we watched the full moon rise at Narragansett beach.

Summer.

I walk around barefoot a lot. I sit outside and look at trees and clouds.

My dear friend once posted some pics of her own adorable little gremlin (currently aged four and a half) and observed that it seems obscene that such joy and beauty is allowed to exist. Like many things she’s said over the past twenty years, it’s something I think about a lot.

Sometimes I think it’s that particular dichotomy that so many people can’t wrestle with. There’s no moral or ethical explanation for why her family and mine were born here, and get to live in relative peace (for now, anyway). We humans tend to want to construct a justification for such imbalance. Some people can’t accept that there isn’t one; they cling to a god or a flag and twist their souls into knots convincing themselves that everyone is getting what they deserve. It’s an ugly way of looking at the world but it is easier than realizing the flags and gods are just excuses and you don’t actually deserve what you have anymore than the kids in that school in Iran deserved to get blown up.

Summer in Rhode Island is damn awesome. I’m in it. Beach days and backyard fire nights. I’m surrounded by amazing, engaging people. I can’t guarantee Mars’s future but I can give him a good fucking day. I can’t solve anyone’s problems but I can enjoy the fuck out of their company.

Here are some songs I’ve been digging. (Fuck Spotify, by the way. Audio quality sucks and they don’t pay the artists. Tidal doesn’t do half as good a job at finding you new stuff but you can hear the texture in the music, they banned AI music from monetization, and they pay better. But…no ethical consumption and all that. I took a picture so you can copy it over to your music service of choice. It’s at the bottom.)

What did I say up top? No AGENDA, just VIBES.

“…right now, the jury’s out, there’s only one thing I care about…” - from High Grade, on the playlist.

Oh, hey!

Thanks for reading Return To Swan Point! Seriously. What a privilege to make human art and share it with other humans. I’m changing the title and I’ve settled on a new pen name. In the next couple weeks you’ll see those…when I send out the (drum roll) COVER REVEAL.

I love you. For real.

It was a warm summer night and the smell of the sea rode in on a breeze from the south. Karp sat at a table on the roof of the old city hall. The table was tucked in between two blueberry bushes right at the edge so Karp was looking out over the flooded downtown. It was the same table he’d sat at with Lance two—no, almost three years ago.

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Suggested musical accompaniment: Windswept by Johnny Jewell. Listen on Tidal or Youtube.

Of course it was as spring transitioned into summer that she discovered me. Her golden eyes showed no surprise. She walked slowly into the clearing as if she’d already known I was there. She probably had, but the surprise lay in what I’d made for her.

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Suggested musical accompaniment: All Gone (No Escape) by Gustavo Santaolalla. Listen on Tidal or Youtube.

#

There was nothing. I was aware of it, but it was…nothing. Nothing to experience, hold onto, or remember. Just awareness.

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photo by me

Suggested musical accompaniment: A Warm Place by Nine Inch Nails. Listen on Tidal or Youtube.

I heard Stacey saying, “Wynn, oh thank God, Wynn,” but I wasn’t looking at them. The soft clover between my fingers was such a vivid green. I still couldn’t seem to stand up, but I realized I’d rather lie down anyway. I couldn’t get my backpack off either, so I pushed myself up against a tree and looked around.

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Wynn jerked away from me. “You said—” he blurted.

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The man in the Richard mask watched as I approached. Keeping enough distance between us to be out of range of any sudden movements he might make, I reached the lawn and stopped. I still couldn’t see inside the eye holes.

“Wynn?” My voice was the first sound I’d heard in the place that wasn’t distorted.

The man shook his head. He didn’t make a sound. I couldn’t even hear him breathing and it was dead quiet in the neighborhood. For a moment we stood just looking at each other. I was afraid of this guy, the same way I was afraid of the house. Despite his passivity, I had a feeling I was looking at someone dangerous.

Or something. Because he wasn’t a “guy,” I realized. Whatever was under that mask was an it, not a he.

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I became aware that I was standing. In front of me was a house, then nothing, and then the house again. The house appeared grainy and the colors seemed slightly off, like an old photograph. I couldn’t move. The house flickered then and I glimpsed a street. Two streets. The house was on a corner where one wide suburban street connected to another. The place looked familiar. I tried to look around, to look for Stacey, but nothing happened. I couldn’t even move my eyes. Gradually, the scene in front of me settled, though it still flickered occasionally, as if it was only a projection.

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It was clear, though, that there were things in this place we’d need to protect ourselves from, and I didn’t know if Stacey’s pistol would be effective. “Hold up,” I called. Stacey turned and waited with the familiar expression of impatience in her posture. I cleared my mind and tried tracing a pentagram in the air. The blue flame burst to life on my fingertip and trailed behind my motion. Satisfied that it worked, I let my concentration lapse and the flame flickered and disappeared. Stacey’s face had been lit clear and blue for a moment but now faded back to the vaguely defined features left visible by the darkness. In the split second I could read her expression, I saw a confused mix of emotions. “Okay,” I said, and we started walking again.

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Suggested musical accompaniment: Song For Jesse by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Listen on Tidal or Youtube.

The pine forest was an unwelcoming place. The overwhelming color was brown, and the only green was at least thirty feet above our heads where the fir trees saw the sun. The air felt listless. I sweated profusely when we were in the sun, and, when we passed back into shadow, that sweat became a damp chill inside my clothes.

About a hundred feet or so down the trail, Stacey stopped and took a seed from her pouch. She brushed aside layers of brown needles and shoved it into the ground before stepping back. A thin sprig of life popped out. For a moment it seemed to be struggling to grow, but then it curled up and died. As if in echo, an odd croak sounded somewhere off in the pines.

“Guess we’re on our own,” I said.

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photo by me

Suggested musical accompaniment (and this one is a real good fit): The Alien by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow. Listen on Tidal or Youtube.

The mushrooms shrank into the earth and disappeared. I stood in a clearing illuminated by a fat, low, red moon. The glow of moonlight seemed to prism into beams of colored light criss-crossing all around and beneath me, overlaying and intertwining with the forest around me. I felt queasy looking at it. Everything was vibrating.

“Kunnunnous, Lance Williams, Kunnunni?”

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photo by me

“I guess it’s good we don’t need Summer to tell us when to plant the acorns anymore,” I said, looking around at the vibrant forest, its fall colors ablaze in the sunset. We’d been walking in silence for a few minutes. The school was farther than I remembered it being, but nothing about the landscape was predictable today.

Suggested musical accompaniment: What Have We Done To Each Other by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Listen on Tidal or Youtube.

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Thank you.

Let’s talk about what’s happening here.

Wynn seems to have fallen through a hole in the world. So many of us do. We don’t fit the mold. We get told, by everyone and everything around us, to be smaller. To be less. To like what everyone else likes. To talk how everyone else talks. To love how they love, to play how they play, to value what they value. We’re not seen for who we are and the real us falls out of the world so even we forget who we really are.

I got into punk at a young age and it gave voice to the way I’d been feeling as a result of all that. So did some of the other weird art I found. Then I found a punk scene. I made some great friends and tried to be part of the group but as a whole, that punk scene had its own set of rules and I didn’t know how to fit my whole self into them. I found a cool weird art scene too, but it also had rules I didn’t understand. A lot of those weird art kids had a gatekeeper attitude that I couldn’t acclimate to.

I only ever found individuals who I could be myself with. Who I could see and who could see me. The most exhilarating sense of acceptance I ever felt was when my partner said yes to marrying me.

Over the years since then, her quiet, continuous acceptance allowed me to do what I’d never realized I needed to: start accepting myself. I’m not perfect at it. Anxiety has gotten switched on and I’ve looked outwards instead of inwards to see why.

But…when someone you respect looks at you and likes what they see, it puts a little spring in your step. There’s a quote I can’t find right now, about loving the version of yourself that you see through your best friend’s eyes.

It’s not a substitute for loving yourself as you are but it’s a damn good start.

I want you to meet Amanda. She’s a shy kid who’s more comfortable with animals than other children. Every time someone talks to her, her brain falls out of her head and into her feet. From way down there, it can’t get words back up to her mouth, even if it knows which ones to use.

Art by Brianna Hickey

About a year ago I was deep in my head, struggling with the way a childhood wound was showing up in my adult life. There was a friend who I knew had a way of unconsciously triggering that particular wound, but this person needed real support and I knew I could give it to them. Within the last few months, I finally learned how to quiet that wound myself regardless of what anyone else does. Showing up for a friend was another damn good start.

When Amanda meets someone who’s in trouble, her brain forgets to worry about itself. It doesn’t panic. It leads with kindness.

Art by Brianna Hickey

The first person who ever gave me a sense that the way I was might actually be an okay way to be was just another kid who liked the same things I did. I was eight years old but I remember our first interaction perfectly.

Phyta the mermaid has every reason to be even more wary of Amanda than Amanda is of other kids, but once the two of them start talking about their love of animals, they fall into easy conversation.

Art by Brianna Hickey

As an artist, I don’t want to dwell too much on what my work means; I’m afraid too much self awareness will get me writing from my brain instead of my heart. Sometimes, though, things jump out. I make this stuff to communicate, and if you’ve read this far into Swan Point, I think you’re probably hearing me. As different as Amanda Meets A Mermaid is from the work I’m posting here, they both come from the same place. Life imitates art imitates life imitates art again.

(If you really wanna get weird, though, ask me sometime about what happened six months after I finished the second draft of Swan Point.)

Amanda Meets A Mermaid is available now in paperback here. When I get the ebook version done, I’ll send a download to all my paid subscribers. Thank you for your support.

Next: Return To Swan Point Continues!

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