Why I'm Writing Into the Black
Writing into the Black defines the stories I must tell. I am compelled to respond to the universe's underlying entropy that moves all things toward chaos and decay by facing it. Stepping into its dark abyss that frays relationships, turns lives to dust, and devours stars. I will wade into its vast and unseen cosmic ocean in which we all float.
I have raised a lamp before me and shone it against the darkness in the woods, or enveloping from the edges of our hearts, or threatening us from beyond our periphery. I will draw my fountain pen to map the gravitational force of this wondrously terrifying influence.
My pen will write into that which is unsettling and unwell, and we will return to the tribe with knowledge as we escape the Black's intention to consume us.
As a child, I read as if I were drowning and books were a lifeline.
Reading was a passion gifted to me by my mother. I was reading a the age of three, because she made time to read to me every single night. My grandparents were always reading. My grandfather brought so much of the world to me with his subscriptions to Discover, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, OMNI, Reader’s Digest, and others. My grandmother was a librarian. The gentle hush of the branch where she worked felt like a refuge for a little boy with a chaotic home life who rocked back and forth on the edge of his bed until the knot in his stomach untangled before leaving home every morning. By twelve, I discovered the sanctuary of downtown Portland’s Multnomah County Central Library. Its massive fortress-like architecture protected those within as they sought comfort and knowledge from the endless towering shelves of literature.
Around the same time, I also found the wonder of Powell’s City of Books. In its café, surrounded by the smell of coffee and books, I found a similar contentment that also came with an ever-changing community of fellow misfits losing themselves in their books, too.
Collectively, these were places I could safely escape the chaos. Where the Black was held at bay.
Within these fortifications, I also discovered a passion for writing. If books were lifelines, what better than to weave your own?
My favorite writers were men with broken places, failures, accomplishments, fears, and loss. They had lived lives. They had gone into the Black and come back with tales. My writing read like a boy trying to write like his heroes.
I grew up in a rough situation, but I had not lived enough to perceive it with meaningful context. Good writing comes from the honesty that distance from your experiences provides.
Writing evolved into engineering. An expertise centered on staving off decay and disorder. For two decades, I tamed complex systems with logic and code.
Clint Eastwood sat on Unforgiven for a decade after buying the script from David Webb Peoples. One of the Western genre’s most iconic actors, he intuited that he needed to be an older man before he could earnestly portray William Munny, his regrets, and the hypocrisies of Old West mythology.
I was not waiting for my time. I had passed over the obsession and interest. Writing was a childhood trinket. A toy you remember fondly but have no room for in your adult world.
Eastwood understood a principle I had yet to learn: you have to live first—walk into the Black and let it seep into you—before you can find that voice.
By forty, I had built enough to step away from my career. The universe, cynical and indifferent, found humor in resurfacing chaos during this transition.
I cut friendships in response to a brutal betrayal. I lost pets and then dear family. The passion and ambition I had evaporated. Reading, writing, coding, and even gaming lost their appeal. The Black swallowed everything.
I had seen people settle for contentment. Surely, I could set aside aspirations and find peace in acceptance and quiet solitude?
Whatever peace I thought I was finding was brief. Your body keeps a perfect accounting of your health in a ledger that eventually demands balance. Soon after, the bill came due for the way I had lived my life since I quit wrestling. I had operated in the red too long.
I collapsed and became confined to bed, like Charlie Bucket's grandparents. Later, I wound up in the hospital and returned home, tethered to a machine. My memory of that time is condensed around the machine's mechanical drone, daily redressing of deep wounds, and a slow, painful ritual of healing.
I wasn't against the ropes. I was on the damn canvas, being counted out.
I struggled to my proverbial feet, more out of primitive drive than intention, but I wound up back on the floor of the ring several more times in the few years after. I lived between a hospital bed at home and in a hospital. My mind was consumed by the static of survival and the fear of not surviving. Try enjoying your favorite book with your toes out over the edge of the Grand Canyon and a strong wind at your back.
Time separated me from the latest emergency. I pivoted toward accepting a quiet life of passive consumption. I was always driven by projects, so this was not comfortable, but other than a small coding project I was toying with, I did not see many other options. There was a life of tea, YouTube videos, and an enormous Steam backlog that I could occupy myself with.
Yet, none of these satiated me. I could not endure any of them for long stretches. My body was confined, my soul was dehydrated, and my mind was agonizingly deprived.
It seemed the universe was sneering at me. Or giving me the finger. My oldest friend had published two books and was working on a third. I had family who were writing. Even YouTube dripped another string of writing craft videos in between its rage-bait and drama. It was like when a guy buys an Acura TLX and starts seeing other Acura TLXs everywhere he goes.
Things had changed a lot since I was very young, and the only two people I knew with a passion to write were the boss at my job when I was twelve, who let me read her manuscript for a brutal spy thriller, and, years later, another boss who was writing a sitcom that took place in a fast-food restaurant that he titled "Burgers n' Fries."
I dismissed this for months. Writing is rarely a viable career. It certainly wasn't as financially rewarding as engineering. It was an interest from the past. An escape for a kid who otherwise had none. That was then. This is now.
I could not shake the persistent dread that I once had when I was very young, contemplating that my life might be filled with drudgery. I might face decades at a job that underutilized my mind, posed no interest to me, and provided nothing but a long tunnel under a more meaningful life of "could have been," only emerging at the far end with a gold watch and a social security check. Despite the hardships of my youth, only envisioning that as a potential timeline for myself ever made me imagine a world in which I would consider self-harm a viable solution.
I had no idea if I had another year ahead of me or fifty. Could I settle if it turned out to be the latter?
I logged out of RimWorld and fell down another YouTube rabbit hole. More videos about writing craft agitated an itch that I felt in rusted joints. Then, a sudden clear and sharp signal pierced through the dread of a life potentially spent traveling to the end through a meaningless tunnel—I could write again.
I don't need a career.
I don't need income.
I need purpose.
That purpose is Writing into the Black.
This is the ledger of our expedition into what calls to us from the dark. This is not a field trip. It is you and I. Explorers, stepping into the abyss of genre, craft, literature, human-nature and returning with the stories that become our maps.
If you, too, feel that pull toward the vast and the unknown, grab your gear and subscribe. Let's venture into the Black together.
Coming next month: Break Your Story or Readers Will