Well, this is it. I’m moving on from Paradise of Storm, restructuring, refocusing my efforts at another Paradise of Storm, over on Substack. I hope you’ll join me.

This was always supposed to be a side project, a place to find my voice as a writer, because doing my best to mimic whatever writer of that month I wanted to be like—Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Louis Ferdinand Céline—it clearly wasn’t working. There is something to be said for these more distilled essays than the larger opaque intimidations of the projects that takes months. I still have novels and plays and screenplays in various stages of completion or progress, but for now, what I put out into the public, stands here. I’ve looked back through some of my own archives, and if I’m being honest, I’m moderately ashamed that there isn’t so much more, that it isn’t more mature and fleshed out, that there’s still a tonal undeveloped adolescence to some of it. But it’s gotten better. I’m much more confident in my voice since I began this thing. And I hope by at least realizing that fact, it means it will only continue to improve. The only thing I’ve wanted in life is to be a writer and painter. And when I read a book like McCarthy’s Suttree, or Blood Meridian, or Melville’s Moby Dick, or Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, or Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, I think, this is it, this is the holy grail of life, at least the holy grail of my life, and I want nothing more than to try my best and see what I can pull of from the boggy depths of my own creative desires.

Besides which, WordPress seems like an antiquated platform, a sort of Tumblr of Myspace, an old relic that twenty-year-old nerds were committed to and then left behind to rot in the digitized annals of the internet. And now, as a thirty-five year old, who’s getting married in a couple of weeks, I’ve seen more and more writers I admire moving over to Substack. So, if you’ve gained anything remotely insightful or entertaining, or see a glimmer of potential of what this could eventually become, please subscribe there, and send it to your friends who could indulge in this sort of thing, because I hope to be doing a larger, far more consistent, more articulate version of this there.

I know there are countless more talented writers than me. At times, I am overwhelmed that I won’t get to read a worthy fraction of all that I want to, that I’ll die not having experienced those grander mightier worlds. That is to say, I am grateful for whatever readers I do have, because I know there’s many other essayists and novelists you could spend your time with. I hope to make it worth your while. The great literary critic, Howard Bloom, could famously read a thousand pages an hour at his peak; he would sit down with four or five books and read them all the way through in one sitting, consuming the greatest works at a maniacal pace. And he would somehow memorize much of it, quoting great lengths of outstanding books whenever called upon to do so. I wish I had that skill. I’ve tried to read quicker than I do, and sadly I don’t have that magical gear.

But things develop, time moves on, and hopefully you can articulate something worthwhile before you finally slump over to die. Oscar Wilde famously said “If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; and if you cannot think well, other’s will do your thinking for you.” That’s what much of this is about, I suppose. Thanks for reading.