Lately I’ve been wondering what I’m doing here.
I spend a lot of time composing posts in my head, in other words, wasting time, because I don’t write them. What prevents me from writing them is that I feel they’re futile — and a distraction from my real work: a novel-in-progress.
Then recently I came across a note that asked the question, “Why do you write?” And everyone had good answers, some quite revelatory. If I had put up an answer it would have been:
“I write to keep from going crazy.”
But writing drives me crazy, too. So, I’m cooked either way….
I thought of putting up another ‘Stack, for pay, with excerpts of the novel-in-progress. I created and then deleted it. I just can’t work that way.
I thought of making this baby for pay. I’ve seen worse Substacks that charge. But I just don’t want to do that. I would feel beholden to putting something up here at least once a week and opening up my comments to paid subscribers. I get comments from antisemites, and people who accuse me of antisemitism and disloyalty because I go my own way. But I just remove them because, hey, it’s free and they can go spew somewhere else. If they pay, they have… equity. Nope.
So, here’s my compromise. Like Alex Berenson, I’ll be putting up friendly prompts, but unlike Alex, I won’t be studding posts with them. Just at the top and bottom. Here’s the first.
My content is free and always will remain so. But if you want to support me, you can donate at Buy Me A Coffee.
In my case, you would be contributing to a laptop fund. My old one is on its last virtual legs.
Now for the new chapter.
The book is called Somewhere Else. The title draws from Rimbaud’s “Je suis un autre “— “I is an other.” Rimbaud, the rebel poet whose behavior scandalized not only the bourgeoisie but the bohemians. Whose light burned bright for a few furious years only to sputter into incoherence and obscurity.
Not that Rimbaud. The Rimbaud who fascinates me is the one who abandoned writing at 21 and remade himself as a trader and adventurer in Ethiopia. The one who never wrote another line of poetry. He doesn’t appear in the book, but his shadow falls across it.
The story begins with a death. July 3, 1971, Paris, France. Dan Jamison, the Raptor King of Rock, is found dead in a bathtub. No autopsy, no corpse. A hurried funeral. A junkie girlfriend with secrets.
A month later, Blake William Carroll turns up in Greece — alone, unsure, frightened. A month after that, he’s chasing a woman to Addis Ababa and working for a Greek family firm importing supplies for NGOs in Haile Selassie’s phantasmagorical, tragicomic, doomed empire.
What follows is a life built through transformations across revolutions, betrayals, and reinventions. From Addis Ababa to Tel Aviv to Rome, Blake survives, adapts, disappears, and reappears. But who is he, really?
I hope you join me.
And again, here’s that link to Buy Me A Coffee Laptop