Surveys have just been sent out. Use the link in your survey to pay for shipping on the nerves store and shipping will begin as soon as the books reach me, which will probably be mid January just because of the holidays.
If you have any questions, please reach out to [email protected]. I'll respond to emails as soon as I can.
Thank you all for your support and I hope you're enjoying your pdf (which have also just gone out)!
Thanks for the support. We've reached the end of the campaign and in the next two weeks I want to share more sculpting progress with you, get you a pdf, and wait for the money to hit my account so I can print the books.
That's a busy two weeks. But YOU don't have to do anything until then. Once I send the files off to the printer, I'll start collecting shipping and stuff like that from y'all, and then it'll just be a waiting game. My guess, with it being the holidays, printing might take a little longer? So maybe early January? I'm not sure, but I'll let you all know when they give me a printing timeline.
Wanted to do a quick update with a few things I've been making for the new printing.
Firstly, here's the new cover, which has been a large part of the art I've been sharing:
Woah, so cool.
I've also designed some borders for pages in the book:
These would not be on the same page like this, haha, just easier to share it this way.
I also made this weird little guy:
This will find its way onto a page. Along with a few other things I'm cooking up. But yeah! So the book is getting a strange, clay-formed touch to it.
The new writing is coming a long as well. I want to share that soon to backers, probably after the campaign closes in a few days. I'll be out of town tonight and tomorrow for turkey day, and then we'll be down to the last 48 hours of the campaign.
Thanks again for the support and have a great rest of your week.
Wew! We funded sometime this morning. It's really cool to fund in 48hrs and just be able to chill for the rest of the time. Thank you all, I mega appreciate it and I'm so excited to get this printed. I posted about Lilancholy on my patreon, but I'm going to copy-paste it here for y'all to read. Thank you again.
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I was possessed by a ghost from my childhood. It came to me in a dream and took from me my sanity. Briefly, I existed elsewhere in a very different body. There was a familiarity with it, like riding a bike, you never forget being a kid. It lives in you, no matter how many times you move, pack it up, and store it further and further from the present. And in this different familiar body, I saw a spider in a sandbox. I was to keep the spider within the box without letting it bite me. Biting me wasn't, like, a rule of the dream, just a desire of my body. I awoke from the dream knowing that the dream took place just beyond my backyard. It was, in my head, still "my backyard" even though I hadn't lived in the house with that backyard since I was six or seven years old. Just beyond that backyard was my best friend Paul, who lived in the kind of christian household that refused to allow Rugrats, let alone the more violent but far more interesting Beetleborgs. In those moments of just awaking from the dream, I held two truth in my head: that Paul was my best friend who lived behind me in a much larger, scarier house, and that I had not talked to Paul in over twenty years and he was, I had to admit, a stranger.
The dreaming jet lag is something I can get lost in. Existing in two places at once. In two times at once. Two bodies, two brains, two sets of memories that contradict. Two sets of puzzles being squished together. Discomfort. Blegh. There are times I awaken paralyzed from a night terror, still numb from sleep, unable to move. As a child, I thought I was paralyzed with fear. I didn't understand why I was frozen and the nightmare so vivid and pure that the fear stayed. I would lie still for so long after the paralysis faded, afraid to see anything. A dresser, my closet, the clothes on my floor. All of it too much for my eyes.
After awaking from this dream I found myself able to move and be free of the fear of the spider in the sandbox in the sandbox beyond my backyard, but I was unable to be free of another fear. Something older. Outside of my body. Another part of my interior world was illuminated by the flash/bang of this dream, and I was left with its silhouette, unable to make out what it was or what it was doing. But it was there and it lingered. Beyond the getting up and walking around. Beyond the 2am snack and 2:03am youtube videos. Beyond the remaining sleep and the True Morning. Beyond that day and evening and further sleeps. And beyond the week still. It stayed. It was there and had always been there and just slept still until the box it was in, on some dusty shelf deep within the spiraling labyrinth of my mind, was nudged by my sleepwalking corpse.
It possessed me.
And in its possession, only one thought translated. I had to go back.
So I returned. I packed an overnight bag, kissed Emily goodbye, and drove south from Chicago, passing through the gates of Champaign an entering the land of the past. The flat plains of rural Illinois were no different than any I had seen in my adult life, but there were tinted with the understanding that I had not seen these particular plains in this particular part of Illinois since I was a child. The rules of spatial memory dictate their importance when near and demand reverence when within.
There's a truck stop in Effingham, IL that my family would stop whenever we took a long car trip north to visit my grandparents. I realize now, as I write this, that I still have not stopped there. I feel like a coward. I didn't stop at the time of this story. I told myself I would. Prepared for it. Needed gas and lunch. But when I saw the exit and the truck stop off the interstate, I couldn't. I can't say why here, both because at the time of my trip I did not know, and because now, a few years later, I simply don't want to. Sorry, but some secrets can't be written lest they lose their power.
When I got to the exit I needed to take off the interstate, I turned off the gps and allowed myself the freedom to explore. The quickness with which the animal of my body took to the roads, as if it had been waiting since childhood to snatch the wheel from my mom and steer (even if the one time it was allowed by my father it backed slowly down the drive and into a ditch), was not all that alarming to me. The animal revealed to me in its secret ways that it had been tracing these roads ever since The Move. Tracing them over and over, running itself ragged.
At the fork, where right would take you past the park, the high school, and towards the Hucks gas station where I would always get a bag of cheddar popcorn before a trip, and left would take you over train track, the animal guided left, bump-bump, and towards the graveyard. You have to hold your breath going past graveyards or you'll be cursed. I sucked in and held like I did many times as a child on the school bus or in the backseat. I remember being in the backseat of my mother's car, too young to understand. The memory stirred in some dense fog that rippled out to reveal the shapes of others and others beyond that. Whatever, who cares.
Past the graveyard and past new housing developments and right all of a sudden, towards a narrow bridge over a crick where my father rescued a large box turtle sometime after my fourth birthday (fourth? Can I remember that long ago?) and through the train tracks that lead out of a large processing facility that is mostly empty parking lot now, and a train sits parked at all ours, abandoned or perhaps just very tired, and I stop the car.
The house I was raised in is now lived in by a Trump supporter who is loud and proud. The driveway no longer goes beyond the house into the alley and it is well maintained. The tree I climbed is still there. The side yard where the hornet's nest stayed even after my father knocked it down is fenced up. Somewhere across the street is a house that will forever be an overgrown backyard echoing with an elderly, hoarse laugh. Down the street a ways is an old train yard where either a red or blue engine would be parked on the weekends and I decided blue was my favorite color, not because I liked it or thought it was better than the red, but because it was more rare.
I did this for a while, letting the animal guide me down roads to places I remembered always but never actively. I don't wish to list everything I saw, for that's not the point. The point of all of this is that the ghost possessed me to return and in returning I found myself uncovering things in the fog. All these metaphors are being twisted but they were all happening simultaneously. They are all the same yet different. Various locks to a secure safe, holding within it the see of Lilancholy, which itself is another lockbox, the writing of which only popped a few of the security measures aside.
In a bookstore in Champaign, IL, I wrote the first sentence of Lilancholy. It struck me as divine inspiration at the time, but looking back at it now, it was this process of returning that brought it out. And it brought it out slowly. And when I wrote it I felt its power so pure and terrifying to me that I knew I had to continue and I knew I had to write it all and write it right and I had to share it, it needed to be shared and put out there for people to see, and it needed poems and spells and games and it needed to be broken up by ramblings, fearful terrible rambling about the person left behind in that town, rambling of a girl that was nothing but a shape in the fog. Lilancholy is that fog. Lilancholy is that space in the past. It exists in old places. It exists for you to return to. It exists to be remembered, even when you don't want to.
I fear that I have remembered so much more since that original trip and even more since the finished manuscript of Lilancholy. Looking at Lilancholy it feel like a warning, or like a provocation to do the work yourself. To explore it and find the hidden things, because the book tries so hard to not reveal its hidden things. It tiptoes around them like a child on creaky floorboards, afraid of the house that is meant to protect them. Lilancholy is a work that is afraid. It is a work written by an egg and it should be read as a work of egg-fiction. Something with a shell, but you only see the outside. You aren't allowed to plunge directly into it, but, if you pay attention, it's there.
You never are told why the girl's name isn't revealed, but it should be obvious that it was stolen. Because that's what fairies do. You are never told why the girl and her mother left so suddenly, but it should be obvious that it has to do with her father, who, in his one appearance in the book, steals her away and doesn't allow her to return and leaves our narrator alone in the backyard. I know what happened in that house. Without evidence the body knows the world. The animal understands beyond the complexities of human nature.
Lilancholy is for the animal. The leaps in logic. The understanding that is merely felt and can never truly be known for fact. There are things the body feels that are real and can't be hidden with lies, or obfuscation. There are things the body remembers that it has no language to speak of. But it remembers. It hides them all around and you walk through life with your body remembering and it makes you who you are.
Lilancholy is the fear of seeing behind that curtain and not being able to handle what it is you are. Not being able to handle what made you. Lilancholy is fear. The fear the mind has of the body. The fear the body has of the mind. The fear of yourself.
