No wonder father was always so pissed, Keigh thought. Perhaps Mahlyra would have acknowledged me before I… no—not like this. He shook off the thought. The time for regrets had passed, laying on the beach with the stone seat of his ancestors.

He did not want it to mark his grave.

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There was not even a murmur beneath the full Autumn moon. Clouds shifted, obscuring what little light snuck through the treetops. It was a hot night despite the time of year, and beads of sweat had begun to form on the brows of the younger recruits, save the lieutenant. She had been drawn to service from the Dry Sea itself—a place even Thancred Lhyon had never tread—where she once killed fifty bandits in a raid on an encampment west of the Glass Palace. The lieutenant held the leftmost flank, assuring no one would dare flee her line of sight, even her own men.

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This week’s post probably wasn’t what you guys were expecting from me, but I’ve got some things to explain—namely what’s been going on and where I’m at creatively.

Weekly content creation is a bitch, and I have no idea how the South Park team has done it for so long. That’s nothing against you guys—I love and appreciate any support I can get. However, add in an injury and some real life stress and things start to pile up something fierce. I haven’t been able to do a lot of edits and drafting that I otherwise would if I were healthy and on a normal schedule. Being your own editor, publicist, and straight-up everyday hype man is no easy task. I won’t use the term “burnout” because it’s everywhere these days, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t the kind of tired that sleep can’t fix.

I don’t want the quality of the work I do to suffer, nor the prospect of the book and its publication to be squandered. Taking a little time to heal and to put myself right has really shown me the amount of things I had on my plate. That plate has since been broken and swept up. What was supposed to be my favorite time of year has now turned into a time of wondering how accessible certain buildings and bathrooms are to me in my current state.

All of this is to say that FOR NOW I’m shifting over to posting every other week in order to protect my creative integrity and make sure that I’m not going out of my mind. Autumn tends to be when my creative energy kicks in the most, so perhaps expect a few surprises from me then. Until then, I’m going to take this opportunity to heal and to use some time to create a backlog of new works and edits that I’ll talk about at a later date. This Halloween will be a fun one, you can count on that.

It took being injured for me to realize how much I’ve been just barely getting by the last few weeks. It’s not fun, but that feels obvious to say.

Thank you to every one of you who has been patient and stuck with me this far, either by attending writing groups I’ve done, reading my stuff, or even just checking in on me to make sure I’m still alive.

I have to stay alive—there’s a lot more baseball to watch.

Have a happy All-Star Week and an even better second half of the summer.

Go Phils, fuck the Mets, and fuck the Braves.

Light and shadow
twist and turn,
candles flicker,
on they burn,
trees and blossoms,
broken and torn,
graves uprooted,
souls to mourn.

O Summerland,
O Summerland,
how near are thee?
O Summerland,
O Summerland,
o'r starry sea.

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I had a conversation the other day that brough up the subject of endings and talked about how lousy they often are in the modern age of storytelling. Too often, we become distracted by a sense of incompleteness somewhere within our work and lose track of where the story was going to begin with. It happens organically, as the work sometimes strays from our original outline and begins to take on a life of its own, characters and plotlines becoming what we believe the ending needs to succeed rather than the rest of the story itself.

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My father tried to tell me they belonged to wolves. My mother said I had imagined them.

Only my sister believed me.

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Happy May Day, Beltane, Walpurgisnacht, and whatever else you may celebrate.

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Poetry is a genre flooded with clichés, lackluster writers, those trying to capitalize on fads and social media clicks, and pretentious motherfuckers who think scrawling lines about a pond they visited will change the entire trajectory of their life. Some of them might even find some success in their endeavors. It takes a lot to sift through it all and find something of value. Many of us are more victims of poetry than readers of it, having been forced to read it in school and not finding its value. I do believe that it’s a shadow of its former self, no longer used to woo someone or effortlessly convey a deepness lost in mere conversation.

But it’s still here.

Thank you for humoring me this month. Here’s to the conclusion of National Poetry Month and to the Phillies finally snapping their losing streak.

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Enjoy.

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Hey, y’all. Since the last time I wrote something like this I’ve gotten sick again, baseball season has kicked off, and Leon Kennedy returned to Raccoon City. Feels like it’s been longer than it probably has. Oh well. Go Phils.

When I was back in school, I identified more as a poet than anything. Poetry and I had a special relationship because I felt it was the most well-equipped genre in terms of metaphor and hyperbole that one could use to tell their problems to go to hell. I loved the works of Bukowski, Gertrude Stein, and Walt Whitman. Each time poetry class was in session, I had something scrawled in my notebook to share. I was so disillusioned with school as a senior that I once wrote a poem about how all I wanted out of that day was a bowl of goddamn Frosted Flakes and school wouldn’t even let me have that. Add a lone spotlight and a red curtain backdrop and you would’ve thought I’d written a Shakespearean soliloquy with the way my classmates and friends reacted to it.

I had toyed with the idea of some fantasy works during that time, but lady poetry was too enticing and I found myself writing poems even when I felt I didn’t have the words. I filled google docs and notebooks with each and every emotion I had, cloaked in a layer of pretentiousness and melancholy. Re-reading that stuff really drives home the fact that I was eighteen and depressed.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve still admired poetry, albeit from a distance. I still respect the classics, but I’ve discovered that I would rather write fantasy and create worlds out of concepts rather than concepts out of the world like I did when I wrote in stanzas. My poetry was based solely on how things affected me rather than how I could affect them, which is why I believe I fell out of love. I didn’t want my initial publication to be poetry, but as it’s been pointed out to me, as long as you’re known—who cares?

This month is going to be spent as a very humbling look back and a very optimistic look forward at poetry and its contribution to shaping my style, prose, and perspective. Maybe it can be the same for you.

While poetry tends to be forced upon us by school and the academic types online, it doesn’t have to feel so obtuse and burdensome. Comedian Doug Stanhope once remarked that poems are beautiful to their creators alone while others find them silly or irritating. While it’s easy and even enjoyable to poke fun at the genre, it helps to remember that it hasn’t lingered on through humanity for all these centuries for nothing. The permanence and impact a single line can have on a person is a power beyond all reason and text—to cut through intangible experiences with a blade of truth turned spiteful lover when the line is read and the moment inevitably passes. To quote Whitman, “…re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”

…and what writer doesn’t have that in them?

So to cap things off, I’m going to share the first of many poems you’ll get from me throughout April. These have never been viewed by another set of human eyes until now.

Enjoy.

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As previously mentioned, mankind rose from the deep clay and water of the earth and mastered the mystic arts under the paragons that were the First Blessed. In their wake, society has formed its own opinions and conclusions about magic and the type of influence it holds over the greater world. As expected, religions were an unavoidable eventuality of the First Blessed’s rise to power.

To begin, let us examine what is present in the world today.

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Above it, swirling in patterns and waves of multicolor strands, lay the weave. It wound and circled the length of the plane, spiraled in others, then continued on out into infinity.

There was nothing and no one to reach out to, not even the familiar sight of the moon in the sky above. And yet, the mage wasn’t afraid.

The ground below was a watery mirror, polished and shadowed, reflecting the stars and the light of the weave. It seemed as though there were two infinities present, or perhaps more. There was only so much the eye could capture, and this place was well beyond the bounds of normal human reach already.

As the mage stepped onward—or floated onward, as it appeared—he sought the weave’s end. Foolish, perhaps, but there was an end to all works of needle and thread.

A seam.

Something.

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Brennus stood at attention, his hands firm at his sides. His plate, a shade of blue like freshly heated steel, fit him snugly and made it easy to stay planted in one spot. The other guards were Azure Shields from his regiment, two men stationed at the door. No royal guard had been assigned, or even named. Crownprince Raley was convinced that with Brennus beside him, there was no need for one.

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A popular sentiment, I know, but winter to mean represents more than just five-ish months of a lack of sun and air too cold for human comfort. Winter means no baseball, and that is just the perfect kick in the ass to start my seasonal depression.

I realize I talk about baseball a lot, even to those who couldn’t give a shit about it. Half the hyperboles I use in person are baseball metaphors. Like it or not, that’s how hyperfixations work. It’s been my thing ever since I was a kid and I did not like who I was when I neglected such an essential part of myself.

Borrowing a cheap segue: allow me to explain.

Growing up the way that I did, sports were an equalizer. Kids could aspire to play in the big leagues if they were good enough, so it gave you a goal and an interest to keep some semblance of structure in your young life. Sports stars were easy to look up to because they were constantly battling wins and losses, scoring more often and in grander ways than anyone else, and pumping their stats with record-breaking feats of athleticism.

If I’ve lost some of you by now, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Some fans just watch sports to see their team score and to drink beer with friends. That’s all well and good, and I’m sure your team of choice is happy to have your support, but I’m not that guy. I feel too many things and I’m competitive as hell when it comes to sports, so I will be the person screaming at the umpire on a bad call, “THIS AIN’T ABOUT YOU, BLUE.”

Baseball in particular is my game, and for good reason. Well… reasons. Namely Jimmy Rollins, Chase Utley, and Ryan Howard.

If you grew up in Philly or paid attention to any Phillies game from around 2006 to 2012, you knew what this triad of dynamic infielders were capable of. This was the deadliest shortstop-to-first-base lineup in the sport at that time. Not only that, but every at-bat by these guys was a must-watch. Ryan Howard in particular still holds the current record for most home runs in a single season by a Philadelphia Phillie. The Big Piece was a stacked player until his career was impacted by a torn Achilles tendon at the end of the 2011 season. Utley is still hated by the Mets to this day and has a corner of their field named after him. Rollins just made the Phillies Wall of Fame the previous year and has a decent case for the HoF alongside Chase.

All of that is to say, these guys were my idols.

I played baseball growing up. It really was my equalizer as a kid who mostly stuck to reading books, writing stories, and playing video games. When you were playing, whatever happened on the outside of the diamond was irrelevant. Catch, throw, hit—that’s all that mattered. Pat Burrell had me playing left field and was my absolute favorite slugger until I got moved up to shortstop around fourth grade. Then J-Roll took over and I learned to use speed and timing more as both the hits and life itself came at me faster.

So what does baseball have to do with writing?

It’s plain to see that there are wins and losses to deal with in competition as there are wins and losses in life. Post-college, I was in a slump both creatively and spiritually, as I’ve stated before. My first book that I had been so invested in was shelved, I wasn’t where I wanted to be, and I was trying to wrap my head around my next great idea. The Phillies hadn’t been a winning team at that point for almost a decade. Bryce Harper’s free agent signing in 2019 had resulted in a spike in jersey sales for the Phillies, but his original team—the Washington Nationals—won the World Series that year without him.

I was minding my own business at work when I overheard a co-worker from Philly say we had made it to the postseason. That hadn’t happened since I was a kid.

“Who are we playing?” I asked.

“The Cardinals are the first wild card team up. Then we’ve gotta play the Braves after that. My brother texted me his code to watch the game online. You wanna pull up a seat while it’s slow?”

Indeed I did.

From that point on, I watched the my hometown team kick the asses of every opponent they faced in the 2022 postseason right up to the World Series against the Astros.

And then they lost.

But they had made it back to where they had been a decade prior. And they put on a damn good show doing it.

Something about this sequence of events resonated in my head. It was as though I could feel myself thinking, “Where have I been all this time?”

Many people think that the average person watches sports to anesthetize themselves against the bigger trials of the world and because it is so ingrained in consumer culture.

Like all viewpoints from people that didn’t grow up with certain things—and pardon my French—that’s shallow as shit.

Watching that World Series took me back to a formative point in my life where things seemed brighter, moved faster, and where one good turn meant the world even if it wasn’t a massive event. Dancing on My Own became a mainstay on my anti-tilt playlist in the car and at karaoke—a song the Phillies had turned into an anthem that hit me where I lived at the time. When it was announced that Trea Turner was signing with the Phils, I bought his jersey immediately and wore it every week of the 2023 season. It was like I had found something I’d forgotten in a childhood toy chest. I had favorite players again, memorized stats, and could tell you roster moves and trades as good as anyone. Baseball to me was like watching the plot of an adventure movie. You celebrated the highs and nursed yourself over the lows, waiting to bounce back during the third act.

I even read more in-between games. I wrote better stories. I finished a book, albeit with many edits to make. My home team had helped to rejuvenate my spirit where more common spirituality had fallen flat. It made me feel like things were possible for myself again, even if what was going on around me wasn’t ideal.

A distraction from reality? Maybe, but not one that distracts from the truly important.

There’s a popular saying that John Kruk likes to spout when something heartwarming or game changing happens, no matter the team:

“How can you not be romantic about baseball?”

There’s a reason sports movies tend to do well. Baseball’s definitely got some memorable ones in Major League, Moneyball, A League of their Own, and 42. Everyone loves an underdog, everyone loves a hero moment, and everyone can celebrate the prospects of hard work and dedication—the everyman’s bread and butter.

In Major League’s case, everyone just loves Bob Uecker (rest in peace, Ueck).

Seasonal depression may hit a little bit harder now, but it gives me a timeline to produce something of value. I can re-watch highlights from the season and check out new merch until pitchers and catchers report to Florida again the next spring. In the case of this past year, I started this Substack, finished another draft of my novel, wrote a handful of short stories, and am still keeping my writing group going week-to-week as best I can.

I even got an offer to play for a bar league team, but that’s another story.

And so I post this on the first day of televised spring training for the 2026 season. Bryce Harper deserves his ring and I sincerely hope this is the year he gets it. As for me, I’ll be watching and wearing both my red and powder blue regular season uniform, just like my boys. Another year of Phillies baseball means another year of chances to be taken. And if this year isn’t to be, there’ll be another one. And another after that, and so on.

Baseball is so much cheaper then SSRIs.

Go Phils.