Summer Solstice Break

Scales will return 7/3/24

Hello all!

I realize summer ‘broke’ for us on the 20th, but I still had a little fuel in the tank before I needed a break. So, here we are! I’d like to do what I usually do when the season changes and reflect on what’s next for the series.

I tend to write Scales in the early morning. I hold a lot of anxiety and dread as the day starts and my eyes open. It often feels as if I am in a head-on collision every morning. And that same anxiety bleeds into what you read.

Some things, I can feel, are actively changing. My anxiety is, therefore, shifting.

It should be no secret, or at least I am not intending for it to be, that Scales is deeply autobiographical in many ways and wishful thinking in others. It is fueled by anxiety and worry and loss. My fears being the major driver. That sounds obvious in a horror series, but, much like in dance, it matters where the initiation point is. It matters where intention is placed and where that specific movement begins.

Monsters are created. And in this case, avoided at all costs.

I am scared of most things, every day, all the time. Naturally risk-averse, and not particularly spontaneous. I get overwhelmed, overstimulated, and entirely flattened by the casual callousness with which people are allowed to live their lives.

This world does not feel made with me or people like me in mind. And I wish I could rattle a rib cage or two with a roar, shatter an eardrum, or grab a plane out of the air and rip it in half, just to make a point.

I write silly stories instead, but if I could be the 10-ton dino, Godzilla, I would. Or maybe Mothra, I can’t decide.

I suppose I explain all this to say: ‘I have no idea what I’m doing, but here’s a thing I like doing, and I’m not even sure why I like doing it, so thanks for being here while I do it.’

I will see y’all next week for Scales, but stay tuned for our usual Saturday morning poem with the summer revision series. Where I take an old poem I would rather burn in front of its mother, than look at again, and revise it with notes from both the editor and author brain of yours truly! It’s super fun for everyone but me!

That’s not entirely true, but it does feel like I’m being hit every time I open up an old document.

Thanks little ghosts!