the enflamed vowels.

there was a pretty aged naked fellow engaged in animated conversation near my gym-locker the other day. so of course i could’t help but over-hear. he was telling his equally aged and equally naked friend all about his enflamed bowels. the fact that he repeated the term over and over, and over, was off-putting for sure. but what really shocked me was that he’d apparently written an eight-hundred page book on the subject.

that may have been a real page-turner for his neighbours back in whatever retirement home the fellow lived. but i just kept thinking about something a teacher in college had once told me: writers often make the mistake of being too wordy. 

i’ve never been a particularly prolific writer and i’ve never been accused of being too wordy. years can go by in-between books and they’ve never been more than a couple hundred pages. my latest two: ‘the legend of anson minor’ and ‘unprotected sects’ are the result of a couple years worth of sporadic work. a friend recently asked how it felt upon their completion and i responded that it’s not like i now feel i could die happily. that’d be going too far and kinda stupid. but, i added, it’s on the spectrum. 

i’ve always written about what i know. just like the aged gentleman in the locker room, albeit four-hundred pages less so, my books are very personal to me. even the fictional short stories in ‘the legend of anson minor’ are personal, each in their own way. ‘unprotected sects’, however, is fiercely personal. and, while it has created a tremendously soothing sense of satisfaction deep down in me, i’m aware it will irritate the heck outta some others. some may even end up with enflamed lower extremities because of what i’ve written.

obviously i thought about that a lot, debated the pros and cons of it for ages. but, at the risk of sounding too new-agey, it was a book that positively demanded to be written.