Something Beautiful Is Going To Happen

Late February, a conspirator prods me to throw my hat in the ring of this grant joint due mid-March. I scrambled, two back to back snow days delivered me a soup and coffee only diet that propelled all the writing to its natural conclusion in the span of forty eight hours. I spent the next weeks doing revision, surgery on sentences till I could recite the whole proposal backwards. Clicking submit vanished any understanding of the work undertaken on my part, not that I wasn’t putting down some top shelf up to snuff grant proposing but what I wanted to fund felt pale in comparison to everyone else’s synthesizing nanoparticles and whatnot. Slim if any. Weeks later, a week before expected, I got the news. Jumped for joy. Jumped.

I didn’t write anything for the Stack while I wrote the grant; didn’t write anything after I was done writing it, waiting for a definite fact. After the fact came a tepidly received review of Sirāt, The New Critic reached out to see a review of the Backrooms1, I wrote a short story about Bison and an essay about browsers which I am both immensely proud of. A week after I post this I’ll be posting an essay about political organizing that I’ve been working on since before the grant. This post that you’re reading right now is a little buffer, so that the Substack algorithm will reward me for my consistency of posting.

Originally, when I got in the lab knowing I wanted to throw something silly at the wall so that I could throw something serious a week after I wrote something about roadkill and left it in a document for later editing. Weeks passed and when I finally looked, I loathed it. I hated it. I hadn’t written it because I wanted to write it, I had written it because I wanted to post something on Substack. It’s nothing new, some of my most well received pieces over the past two years have been things that I feel no emotional attachment to, making their receptions with my audience on Substack feel at best pleasant and at worst alienating. I mean no disrespect to those who’ve enjoyed those pieces but personally speaking, man, I cannot stand some of the words that have come out of my head.

I did not want to leave you all, my audience, feeling spurned. For the record, I love what Substack has opened the possibilities for, but my future feels more immediate with each passing day. I’ve just finished up a screenplay for my senior thesis film that I’ll be shooting sometime within the next few months. I just finished a commission for a the first painting I’ve done since probably one of those mugs in a pottery studio that makes 90% of it’s annual revenue on mothers day. I just wrapped filming on one of my best friend’s sets where I gaffed a movie I co-wrote. A week after that I was on set again. I’ve received a grant for a sum of money to do a sum of things that to this day I cannot wrap my head around and I feel that despite all of these windfalls, like the world will come to a halt the second I set any one of these things down. I must keep my sails full, and at the moment Substack, for better or for worse, has no place filling them.

Substack has given me Kindness, paid me pints for cartography, introduced me to all manner of friends; some of whom I’ve had the chance to meet. It’s gotten me paid for my writing!? It’s gotten me a healthier understanding of the ways people will let life slide right by them. Even though I will not be writing for Substack anymore, this is not farewell, far from it. I’ll still read your writing, leave a like or a comment, still post vague notes and sometimes, post an essay or story.

Till the next,
Thank you for reading.
Nadav Asal
Hummingbird Outlaw