This is my official "writer's blog", where I publish updates on my work, and just sort of reflect on the nature of reality. As you may have noticed, visitors to this page are greeted by the happiest snake anyone has ever seen. He's kind of based off of a green parrot snake, but really, he's a creature of the mind. At any rate, I'm happy to have him as my mascot. Let's call him Malcolm the Happy Blog-Snake.
My main-page has an even more intricate design, perhaps you've seen it? It's an old-fashioned fountain pen with two entwining cobras. The specific variety of cobra is "Indian spectacled", which is both feared and revered in Vedic literature. The pen-and-snakes are also supposed to be reminiscent of Hermes' scepter, the caduceus. The two circlets on either side are the eyes of Ra, if you can believe that. Those coupled with the infinity symbol stand for, well, infinity.
Anyway, that's all for now. More to come!
2022 Update
The website looks different now! And it has a new "about" page. For the snake of posterity, I've saved the old webpage emblem and introduction...
"About" circa 2019
Zounds! This is the "about" page of my writing-website. It's supposed to say something about who I am and what I do. Well, I'm a scribbler--or scrawler, if you prefer. I'd say that my genre exists somewhere between satire and psychedelia, with just a dash of horror.
I live in Brooklyn, it's a pretty cool place. I've been working on a bachelor's degree in classics and religious studies. I pick up pennies from the sidewalk. They say that life is short, but isn't it kind of long? Aren't there too many species of crab? Or are there just enough? (i.e. spanner, fiddler, Chinese mitten, etc). I think that since Laozi wrote of the myriad creatures, I shall write about the myriad crabs. I wrote the code of this website too, can you tell?
I have some ideas about writing, these are them:
I don't think that books need to be very long. I happen to really like little books. They fit over your heart. They can be read in one sitting, then again soon after. For this reason, Penguin's Little Black Classics are a treasure to me. Some other short reads that I particularly enjoy (that I can think of right now) are Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, The Bhagavad Gita, A Clockwork Orange, Plato's Symposium and Thomas Ligotti's Last Feast of the Harlequin. Some people enjoy long-reads a whole of a lot more, this is good too. When I sit down to write, I intend on making my story just as long as it needs to be. I would rather agonize over a few words, and make them excellent, than type out several thousand words that I feel so-so about. Kurt Vonnegut had this to say about writing short stories: that they should "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel that the time was wasted". That being said, so that I don't waste any of your time, libellī, in this context, is just a Latin word that means "Little books".
For a few years now, I've been experimenting with a sort of hyper-realism in my writing. What I've found is that real life is actually a lot stranger than anything that I could come up with on my own. Internal musings pale in comparison to the eternal fancies of the universe at large. To achieve this end, and capture some of the anomalistic qualities of life, I did a lot of fieldwork, interviewing people to study their speech patterns, and keeping a journal to record my adventures. Going forward, I would like to keep what I've learned, but focus more on dreams. Dreams are actually a lot like reality, they happen to be based from it. I saw a Belgian minister in a dream recently.
The goal is to make each work better than the last. I strive, not for perfection, because doing so may give one an unhealthy complex, but for being really, really good. It is a joy and a privilege to share things online and publish my libellī independently. In the future, who knows, the Lord of Mysteries wouldn't tell me. S/he is very fickle!
My latest book is Apollodorus Lost His Bright-Eyed Canary. It's about solar eclipses, friendship, isolation, racism, communism, existentialism, pugilism, the futility of isms, the ways in which we connect and disconnect through technology, the art of being nervous, and other such salient topics.
My next project is called Sweet Grass and Noxious Poppies. It's about four college friends who accidentally find themselves in the midst of an evil hippie death-cult who are hell-bent on summoning a giant space-nautilus. It will probably be my last first-person narrative for a while.
Being independent means that feedback is A1. Peer-review is possibly the most important part of the writing process. I get a lot of excellent notes from my friends and family, so I'm very lucky. If you yourself have feedback on anything that I have written, please email me:
MontgomeryQStewart@gmail.com
Cheers,
-MQS
2023 Update
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