#attic — Public Fediverse posts

Ok how about dragon version Silverbeard?
Cryptid in the Attic!
- that's not the rake, that's just grampa Silverbeard hanging out there. Inspired by a spooky video that scared me as a kid but now it's funny. #spaceRARt #furryart #cryptid #attic

Ok how about dragon version Silverbeard?
Cryptid in the Attic!
- that's not the rake, that's just grampa Silverbeard hanging out there. Inspired by a spooky video that scared me as a kid but now it's funny. #spaceRARt #furryart #cryptid #attic

Cryptid in the Attic!
- that's not the rake, that's just grampa Silverbeard hanging out there. Inspired by a spooky video that scared me as a kid but now it's funny. #spaceRARt #humanart #art #cryptid #attic

Cryptid in the Attic!
- that's not the rake, that's just grampa Silverbeard hanging out there. Inspired by a spooky video that scared me as a kid but now it's funny. #spaceRARt #humanart #art #cryptid #attic

A Halloween Party in my teen attic, 1970s. Watercolor and Markers, 2020. #art #artwork #arting #artist #watercolor #watercolors #watercolorpainting #watercolorpaintings #watercolorist #watercolorists #halloween #autumn #fall #halloweenparty #1970s #1970sdecor #interiordecoration #1970sinteriordecoration #attic #attics

A Halloween Party in my teen attic, 1970s. Watercolor and Markers, 2020. #art #artwork #arting #artist #watercolor #watercolors #watercolorpainting #watercolorpaintings #watercolorist #watercolorists #halloween #autumn #fall #halloweenparty #1970s #1970sdecor #interiordecoration #1970sinteriordecoration #attic #attics

A Halloween Party in my teen attic, 1970s. Watercolor and Markers, 2020. #art #artwork #arting #artist #watercolor #watercolors #watercolorpainting #watercolorpaintings #watercolorist #watercolorists #halloween #autumn #fall #halloweenparty #1970s #1970sdecor #interiordecoration #1970sinteriordecoration #attic #attics

A Halloween Party in my teen attic, 1970s. Watercolor and Markers, 2020. #art #artwork #arting #artist #watercolor #watercolors #watercolorpainting #watercolorpaintings #watercolorist #watercolorists #halloween #autumn #fall #halloweenparty #1970s #1970sdecor #interiordecoration #1970sinteriordecoration #attic #attics

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

One big surprise #lastweek was learning my #childhood #home has gone #OnTheMarket again.

The Kendall House in #Kenora #Ontario (1895) is one of those grand #OldHouses with #gingerbread trim, cast iron radiators & #livingroom #windows looking out on Main Street.

When I lived there, the unfinished #attic was filled with boxes of children's books & I would sit in the dusty #gables leafing through them in the afternoon sun.

#northernontario #canada #realestate #architecture #FensterFreitag

Superman copy found in mum's attic is most valuable comic ever at $9.12M

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e9rp0knj6o

#HackerNews #SupermanComic #Superman #Attic #Find #ComicBookHistory #$9Million #Discovery

Design Milk : NOA Transforms an Innsbruck Attic Apartment into a Traveler’s Haven https://design-milk.com/noa-transforms-an-innsbruck-attic-apartment-into-a-travelers-haven/ #InteriorDesign #interiordesign #blackinterior #blackkitchen #slantedwalls #residential #glasswalls #apartment #Innsbruck #penthouse #austria #attic #Main #noa

Attic fire in Bedford under investigation, officials say

MANCHESTER, N.H. — A fire broke out in the attic of a home on…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #BreakingNews #apple|googleplay #attic #atticfire #bedford #crew #download #fire #firefighter #freewmurapp #go #GreenfieldParkway #Headlines #Home #Investigation #NewHampshire #NH #official #one #p.m. #smokeinhalation #Topstories #TopStories #tuesdaynight #WallaceRoad #WindingRoad
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/194047/

Attic fire in Bedford under investigation, officials say

MANCHESTER, N.H. — A fire broke out in the attic of a home on…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #BreakingNews #apple|googleplay #attic #atticfire #bedford #crew #download #fire #firefighter #freewmurapp #go #GreenfieldParkway #Headlines #Home #Investigation #NewHampshire #NH #official #one #p.m. #smokeinhalation #Topstories #TopStories #tuesdaynight #WallaceRoad #WindingRoad
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/194047/

peter chauncey’s SONG OF THE WEEK: “Radar Love” From the depths of a mossy psychedelic swamp comes peter’s remake of Golden Earring’s “Radar Love.” RIP George Kooymans (1948-2025), long-time most excellent guitarist for Golden Earring.

https://peterchauncey1.bandcamp.com/track/radar-love

#radar #radarlove #goldenearring #howlinwolf #captainbeefheart #motherofpearl #psychedelic #swamp #swamprock #chains #stomp #attic #peterchauncey #jackson #mississippi #sanfrancisco #artrock #bluesrock #johnnyjblair

peter chauncey’s SONG OF THE WEEK: “Radar Love” From the depths of a mossy psychedelic swamp comes peter’s remake of Golden Earring’s “Radar Love.” RIP George Kooymans (1948-2025), long-time most excellent guitarist for Golden Earring.

https://peterchauncey1.bandcamp.com/track/radar-love

#radar #radarlove #goldenearring #howlinwolf #captainbeefheart #motherofpearl #psychedelic #swamp #swamprock #chains #stomp #attic #peterchauncey #jackson #mississippi #sanfrancisco #artrock #bluesrock #johnnyjblair

One area needing some help is the #loft (#attic which only has a few old suitcases, a bag and a roll of carpet, assuming that’s what it is, but between us we could do with someone better at lifting them up and down the #ladder while being more stable on the ladder. We also can’t now get the ladder back up. It’s attached to the hatch, folds up and needs to be pushed up with its stick and then swung inside. It’s still dangling halfway down. We can walk around it 🤷🏻‍♀️

Dr. A.N. Grier’s Top Ten(ish) of 2024

By Dr. A.N. Grier

If I were to rate the year of our Lord 2024, I’d give it a solid 4.5/5.0. No, I joke. FUCK 2024. Good riddance, fuck off, goodfuckingbye. This year, the layoffs continued (even affected some of our writers here), the prices skyrocketed, the World Series was bullshit, and landfills across the States are twice their capacity thanks to useless election fliers. This year has resulted in practically zero time to work on AMG efforts, write reviews, or listen to music as I continue to try to keep my job. Yay. Cheers to you, 2024—you sack of horse shit. Let’s go, 2025, you sassy bitch who suggests great things to come but probably won’t deliver. If only you could promise me more time doing the things I love—listening to metal, writing about it, and pretending to edit the other writers’ reviews while completely hammered. If so, I’d kiss you as the ball drops, take you to the back alley during the after-party, and promise not to poison your coffee the next morning.

But we aren’t there yet. We are still stuck in the past, looking over a mediocre year of metal, regurgitating the same shit we already wrote for each album on our lists. That way, you all can praise, argue, and whine about each choice and its placement. Thankfully, my lists rarely overlap with anyone else’s and no one actually gives a fuck, so my sleep patterns remain the same. Having passed the ten-year mark at this amazing madland, my tastes remain the same, and no one will be surprised that most of the selections here are the items I alone reviewed. That changes occasionally but with no time to think about music this year, you’ll be treated to odd takes and albums that only scored a 3.0. Oh no!1

Thank you to the AMG staff for their lackluster productivity and overrating tendencies. To Dolph, Kenny, and Sharky for introducing new segments and keeping legacy ones alive. And to Cuervo and GardensTale for the additional year-end contributions they deliver. I also have to give a huge shoutout to the top bosses—AMG and Steel Daddy—for all they do2. I guess I should also thank all of you for your continued support. I guess. May this list find you well as we are thrust into 2025 and the potential nightmares that it’ll bring. Cheers.

#ish. I Am the Intimidator // I Am the Intimidator – What? You fucking knew this was coming. When Steel told me to review an album about NASCAR and Dale Earnhardt, I couldn’t not do it. I mean, this one-off, self-titled record from a one-off band was a perfect opportunity to unleash my rage. And then… wait, what the fuck? It’s actually kinda good? In a weird year where I reviewed two racing-related albums, I Am the Intimidator sports3 six wild tracks that combine Dio and Iron Maiden with Ministry. What the fuck? And, somehow, the lyrics would be fucking hilarious if they weren’t so passionate. OK, the lyrics of the surprisingly delicious and crushing “Gasoline” are fucking hilarious, and a regular, all-caps attack in the AMG channels. After all the chaos and wild influences that make up this tight, six-track album, the passion for “The Intimidator” is true, even if it’s weird. But, I can’t stop listening to this album any more than I can stop drinking beer.

#10. Dust Bolt // Sound & Fury – Like so many other Grier lists, there’s always an album that becomes the most frequented in my shit-filled ears. Yup, I know, you all fucking hate it, and I couldn’t care less. For the band (and style), Sound & Fury is a brave effort that I find addictive, fun, and hilarious trolling material when Steel talks shit. Is it thrash? No, but that didn’t stop me from proclaiming Load as Metallica’s best album. Shifting away from the overused thrash concept and mediocre record releases, Dust Bolt chose the unconventional route of cleaner vocals, smoother production, and catchier choruses to remove themselves from their past outings (and, some would argue, from thrash and metal in general). For you naysayers, there are plenty of headbangable moments on Sound & Fury, so you don’t have to feel like a poser singing these new songs in your mom’s shower.

#9. Midnight // Hellish Expectations – Perhaps one of the most prolific metal bands out there, what can I say about Midnight that I haven’t said already? Oh yeah, they’re badass and if you don’t like them, you’re shit. Also, fuck you. Like previous releases, Midnight continues to speed through riffs that bring to mind classic outfits like Darkthrone, Motörhead, Venom, and Celtic Frost at a relentless speed. While other Midnight records are better, Hellish Expectations joins its compatriots in a discog that can do no wrong. Unless, of course, you don’t like this band’s style. In that case, read above regarding that “fuck you” thing. What makes Hellish Expectations great in this frustrating year is that it caps at twenty-five wonderful minutes—which is the same amount of time it takes to shit out your morning coffee. So, this is a chance to correct your poserness. If you like this band, you already know Hellish Expectations is a fun ride that’ll keep your spikes sharp and your leather pants shit free.

#8. Bombus // Your Blood – Like another band on my list, this Swedish heavy metal, hard rock band has seen a lot of ups and downs in their career. And, for some reason, their co-founding vocalist and guitarist walked. But that didn’t stop Bombus. Not only did they find someone to fill those two slots, but they also added another guitarist to round it out to three. With these new additions, the skill displayed on Your Blood is superior to anything the band has ever done. There’re solos, harmonizing leads, and riffs up the fucking wazoo. I’m uncertain if it’s due to this new skillset or an increase in motivation with five years between albums, but Bombus held nothing back for Your Blood. While there are plenty of the bangers you would expect from a band of this caliber, like the addictive “Take You Down,” there are also other interesting inclusions that I should hate, yet love. For example, the weird, Spaghetti Western qualities of “Your Blood,” the Nick Cave-meets-The White Stripes musings of “The One,” and the bizarreness that is “Carmina.” With Your Blood, the band has found their groove and passion again, delivering their best album yet.

#7. Vanessa Funke // Void – This year brought a surprising new addition to my favorite bands of all time. In this case, it was the newest release from the multi-instrumentalist, Vanessa Funke. With a small but stellar catalog, Ms. Funke continuously dabbles in new influences and song approaches with each album and Void is no different. Coming off last year’s acoustic masterpiece Vanessa Funke rewinds to her debut record, Solitude, alternating between rasps and cleans, acoustic and distorted guitars, and her perfectly molded combination of folk, melodeath, and atmospheric black metal. The textures created by the vocals, guitars, keys, and piano take Void down into some incredible depths, engulfing its listeners in blankets that can be both soft and stabby. Albums like this are rare for me these days, so when they do completely submerse me to the point that I can’t think of anything else, there’s no doubt it’ll make it on my year-end list.

#6. Crystal Viper // The Silver Key – Maybe not everyone’s favorite Polish act,4 Crystal Viper’s founding vocalist and guitarist, Marta Gabriel, has been knocking around her blend of heavy and power metal for nearly two decades. But, it’s been a rocky road of great, mediocre, and rage-inducing records. Where Crimen Expecta shines like a bright star in the sky, Tales of Fire and Ice is a dumpster fire that topped my most disappointing album of 2019. When I approached this year’s The Silver Key, I was expecting another mid album (or worse) but was immediately engrossed—maybe even more than Crimen Expecta. Though many of you dislike the vocals, Gabriel is in top form. But, her vocal performance is only one aspect of the Crystal Viper sound. Her guitar work is some of the best of her career, lending new ideas to the song structures and album flow. While plenty of bands are—and are not better—than Crystal Viper, The Silver Key is undeniably one of the best albums of their career.

#5. Sidewinder // Talons – Most likely one of the only overlaps I’ll have with the cunts that work here,5 Sidewinder’s newest release, Talons, threw me for a loop. Not expecting anything from a band I’ve never heard about, Talons immediately got my noggin’ bobbin’ in the most pleasing way. I can’t pinpoint exactly why I like this style of heavy, bounding stoner metal, but every time I hear it, it clicks. And nothing is better than diving right into a record where one of the band’s best pieces is the opener. “Guardians” is a quintessential Sidewinder piece that personifies the band and everything they stand for. But that’s only the beginning, as the guitars cruise down the road and the bass rumbles through the gravel. Clocking in at a mere thirty-four minutes, this eight-track beauty never reaches beyond its means, ensuring the songs are straight and tight, allowing Jem’s powerful vocals to direct the varying moods. While the band resides in the lush and beautiful landscapes of New Zealand,6 if a sound could represent the harsh desert lands of my home, this would be it.

#4. Aborted // Vault of Horrors – As many know, death metal is not my cup o’ tea. Once upon a time, death metal was my life, but that ship sailed when my favorites grew old and repetitive, and what you all call death metal these days bores me to tears. But the one band that continues to make me salivate is Aborted.7 And, boy, did this year’s Vault of Horrors deliver. With tracks like “Dreadbringer,” “The Golgothan,” and “Malevolent Haze,” this new release offers some incredible depth and relentless brutality. Aborted has always delivered good-to-great albums but after nearly thirty years, how can these lads continue to improve and produce such quality releases? Vault of Horrors is a great record and arguably one of the band’s best. It’s been several months since this beauty was released, so if it passed by you, rectify your posersivity.

#3. The Vision Bleak // Weird Tales – I don’t know what it is about The Vision Bleak but they fucking hit me and hit me hard. On the surface, their style is quite simple, but it’s the layers, stories, mood, and damning vocal performances that draw me in like I’m viewing a Vincent Price horror marathon. Combining their Type O Negative vocal characteristics with atmospheric moods that can be depressive at one point and ethereal at another, The Vision Bleak took a massive leap by releasing Weird Tales as (technically) a one-song album. Eight years since their incredible The Unknown, Weird Tales doesn’t skip a beat, maintaining the duo’s title as one of the greatest bands in gothic metal. With magnificent builds, eerie transitions, mind-bending fluidity, and heart-wrenching passages, the haunting nature of Weird Tales leaves you contemplating your existence in a world controlled by the fate instilled in it by the late, great H.P. Lovecraft.

#2. Kingcrow // Hopium – For fucking months, our progressive cunt, Dolphin Whisper, tried desperately to steal Kingcrow’s Hopium from me—somehow thinking he’s better than me when it comes to describing the lushness of Kingcrow. The fuck. Even though Kingcrow hasn’t released an album in six years, there’s no way some flipper fucker would take this from me. Sure, I’m not a huge fan of progressive metal, but at least I know what’s good progressive metal instead of lazily making love to everything with the tag of “prog.” Anyway, Hopium continues to deliver gorgeous tapestries painted with soothing vocals, synthy atmospheres, and impressive performances for all involved. Though I consider Eidos their best, Hopium is not far behind. While tapping into common influences like Dream Theater and Spock’s Beard, this Italian outfit is very much on a level all its own. If you like prog, you’ll find Hopium—with such wildly varying tracks like “Vicous Circle,” “Parallel Lines,” and “White Rabit’s Hole”—to be the most diverse prog record of the year.

#1. Borknagar // Fall – Goddammit, I love Borknagar. Few bands have such high album scores for a career that spans thirty years and a dozen albums—especially with a constant rotation of players and vocalists. Though, how can you be pissed off about having any of the great vocalists Borknagar has employed throughout the years? Since the beginning, the band has continuously introduced more melody and keys in their music, but Fall is special compared to the output in the last twenty years. Though this new album hasn’t hung up that hat by any means, Øystein G. Brun, Lars A. Nedland, and crew dug through the ashes of the past to bring some of those old-school black metal moments back into the mix. From the blackened assault of “Summits” and the Dimmu Borgir-esque vibes of “Northward,” the band continues to shock and surprise, avoiding a repetition from a previous album. So, dive into the best album o’ the year in all its glory.8

Honorable Mentions

• Portrait // The Host – While I didn’t like the production of Portrait’s The Host, I’m still a slut for King Diamond and Meryful Fate-adjacent metal. Especially when it comes to Portrait, who continues to be less like a copycat and more like a pioneer of the style.
• Attic // Return of the Witchfinder – More King Diamond-core! Easily one of the best examples of the sound, Attic continues to keep me coming back with each release. As their predecessor, Return of the Witchfinder brings a new story, more twists, and those pleasing falsettos that trigger my “O” face.
• Sarke // Endo Feight – Sarke (the artist) and crew have had one hell of a busy couple of years. This year, in particular, sees not only a new Sarke release but also a new Khold record (see below). Endo Feight is a wonderful addition to the band’s catalog and, by god, it’s wonderful to see the man himself back behind the kit.
• Khold // Du dømmes til død – See? I told you it would be here. While 2022’s Svartsyn was better record than Du dømmes til død (and a fantastic comeback), Du dømmes til død still has those elements that make the band so unique and fun to listen to.
• Blood Red Throne // Nonagon – Three years ago, Blood Red Throne released not only one of their best albums but 2021’s best death metal record. Unsurprisingly, it’s difficult to follow something like Imperial Congregation without some hiccups. That said, Nonagon is still a brutal piece of work worthy of mentioning.

Disappointments o’ the Year

• Darkthrone // It Beckons Us All……. – Like Sarke, Nocturno Culto has also been busy this year. If that’s part of the reason for the utter bore that’s It Beckons Us All……., I don’t know. But, this new record feels like Darkthrone is going through the motions. While I respect that they don’t care what the fuck any of us think, this is one of their worst albums.
• Exhorder // Defectum Omnium – After Exhorder’s incredible comeback album, Mourn the Southern Skies, I was more than a little excited for this new one. Unfortunately, like Darkthrone’s newest, Defectum Omnium is a dreadfully boring record that lacks all the passion of Exhorder’s comeback, leaving me confused and pissed the fuck off.

Songs o’ the Year

• Kingcrow – “White Rabbit’s Hole” – With an album full of great songs, there’s just something about the energy of this track that makes me so happy.

• Sidewinder – “Guardians” – This song represents some of the best stoner metal of 2024, and I can’t stop listening to it.

• Bombus – “Take You Down” – This song is just badass. I couldn’t care less what you think. Die.

Show 8 footnotes

1. Fuck off, this happens every year. ↩
2. Don’t call me Steel Daddy ever again! – Steel Daddy ↩
3. See what I did there? ↩
4. They can’t all be Vaders, ya fucks! ↩
5. Love you, GardensTale. ↩
6. Well, that’s what the Lord of the Rings movies tell me. ↩
7. Yeah, yeah, bitch all you want about including this band into my collective bubble of “death metal.” ↩
8. Also, stop listening to “Nordic Anthem” by itself. Fucking idiots. ↩

#2024 #Aborted #Attic #BlogPosts #BloodRedThrone #Bombus #Borknagar #CelticFrost #CrystalViper #Darkthrone #DimmuBorgir #Dio #DrANGrierSTopTenIshOf2024 #DreamTheater #DustBolt #Exhorder #IAmTheIntimidator #IronMaiden #Khold #KingDiamond #Kingcrow #Lists #MercyfulFate #Metallica #Midnight #Ministry #Motörhead #NickCave #Portrait #Sarke #Sidewinder #SpockSBeard #TheVisionBleak #TheWhiteStripes #TypeONegative #Vader #VanessaFunke #Venom

found in the attic

#Attic #OrnateBox #BlueGlass #IntricateDesign #MacroPhotographyStyle #RusticBackground #SoftLighting #MysteriousObject #DelicateDetails #HeirloomPiece
#Img2img #AiArt #AiArtists #StableDiffusion #AiArtCommunity

hardcopies: https://aieris.art/featured/found-in-the-attic-eris-and-ai.html

#brain #mind #BrainWork #storage #memory #attic #basement #garage #shed #pantry #pa #pan #pant #ant #try