Month: May 2026

The Decline and Fall of Western Massachusetts

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This is a project that’s been floating around since my high school days in the late 80s. It’s gone under different names over the years (Belief in Fate is the one I’ve mentioned the most, dating back to 1988-89) but Decline and Fall was the title I came up with in late 1995 after the dreaded move home from Boston. It’s a title that maintains a certain Gen-X flair: it’s a riff on Penelope Spheeris’ documentary series about rock and roll excesses, The Decline of Western Civilization — itself a riff on Edward Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — but it’s also a riff on the frustration and ennui of growing up in a run-down small town that one desperately wants to escape. It’s not that I hated my hometown, I’d just outgrown it yet had to wait my turn to leave. It’s jaded humor because that’s what we Gen-Xers do best.

Mind you, this was never a project like Isaac Fitzgerald’s 2022 memoir Dirtbag, Massachusetts — interestingly a book about my same hometown, though I’ve never read it — as that is not the kind of book I want this to be. It was never going to be about partying and taking drugs and underage drinking because there’s fuck-all else to do. Sure, that definitely existed then as now, but that wasn’t my life. I did my best to avoid that because I’d seen firsthand where that road led and I was just too damned stubborn to give into it. It’s a big reason why I latched on so tightly to college radio and writing at that age; if I needed that escape, music and creativity was where I went. The depression and confusion and frustration ended up on the page, always with a soundtrack.

Decline and Fall might have started out gloomy, but as I got older and wiser — and calmer and happier — I started realizing that this story would benefit not as a dire memoir or a gloomy roman à clef focusing only on all that bad stuff (which it originally did during its Belief in Fate phase), but as a story about finding a way out of all that. Thus it’s about that brief time when I discovered college radio (and myself) and found friends that changed my life considerably. [Come to think of it, this might explain my current obsession with the manga The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity which has a similar plot, in which Rintaro’s life is changed for the better when he finds his own solace of love and friendship.]

I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about finally taking it off the back burner to give it another go. Hell, I’ve even made multiple playlists for it recently! It’s become somewhat of a companion piece to Walk in Silence the book project which focuses on the ‘college radio’ music of the mid to late 80s. It’s a story idea that’s never quite completely left my mind, even despite being trunked a few times. That tells me that this isn’t merely an obsession with a half-baked idea, but an idea that needed a lot of time and distance (and maturity) between now and the time it took place. It’s no longer just a story based on vibes but one that speaks of a deeply personal moment in time.

Now, I’m hoping that it doesn’t stall again, but I’m going to be optimistic.

Theadia: So what happens now?

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Soon after I wrote last Friday’s post on Thursday evening, I thought I’d give the duology idea a try.

As soon as I found a perfect cut-off point a few chapters previous, I cut everything after that, typed out ‘to be continued’, and pasted those into a new Word document and saved as Theadia II. The change was palpable: I no longer felt that sense of constriction, like I needed to bring this story to a conclusion now. Just like I’d expected: it gave me breathing room, and also gave me more space to come up with what comes after answering the defining question of this project: if you could…would you do the right thing? I’d always felt that while I could conceivably wrap up the novel with our heroes winning the day yet still dealing with the fallout that comes after, I was always constantly worried that I wouldn’t give it enough time and space to happen. Like I’d said previously: I wouldn’t be happy with the ending.

So where am I at now? Well, considering that one of the main plot threads was the growing dread of Nima Federation forcibly reannexing the world and station of FairIsle and taking away their hard-earned freedom, I now have the ability to examine that a bit further. Perhaps they reannex, perhaps they don’t, but that threat has lingered in one form or another since FairIsle gained their independence. And now the threat is about to enter local space. This opens up a lot of interesting ideas, and not just one regarding near-space battles. This project has always been about the civilians and not the military, so it suggests all sorts of things: levels of patriotism, grief and loss, fear and uncertainty, compassion and bigotry. And those are extremely important reasons for Theadia (the collective) to exist. It’s what has driven them all this time, and continues to drive them into this second book.

I’m still not sure if turning this into a duology will work, but I will say that I listened to my instincts, and I’m glad I did.

Theadia update…?

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I’m still floating in a stasis on this project, mainly because I’m having an issue with these final scenes of the book. Rereading the novel-so-far is feeling more like a distraction than a help. I’m almost thinking that perhaps I should start in on another project in the meantime, just to take my mind off it for a bit, and come back to it when I feel more refreshed and ready to approach it.

However, the other day I was also revisiting those perhaps this is actually a duology thoughts I’d had off and on throughout this project. While this could conceivably be a standalone, at the rate I’m going it feels like I’m rushing the ending, or alternately I’m tying up all the plot threads a little too cleanly. And it occurred to me: if I stop where I am now in this book and follow through with said thoughts about a duology, that would give me the space and the breathing room to work on the rest of the project. And it’s a perfect cliffhanger at that.

To be honest, this is close to how I’d decided to finish A Division of Souls back in the day. That book is different in that I’d already decided it would be a series and not a standalone, but all the same, by the time I got to that final scene, I actually had a much better sense of where I actually was in the entire trilogy’s layout. Souls was all about Denni coming to terms with being the One of All Sacred, and her final ritual in that book was her acceptance. That meant that the next two books had to be about what she had to do next and how she had to bring it all to completion.

So, back to Theadia: I’ve said before that this book is indeed about taking responsibility when it’s needed, even when it goes against the rules. But it’s also about a bigger story as well: what happens when one’s way of life is threatened for the most dangerous (and frustrating) of reasons. And in the context of this story, I don’t think it’s one that I can successfully tell within the confines of one book. There’s a much bigger story being told in the background, and that is the story that needs more room to breathe.

Perhaps it’s time to make this duology idea happen.

Won’t you be my dictionary, won’t you translate fun

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I am absurdly gleeful that I finally bought the twelfth edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary! I picked this one up at the Barnes & Noble in Corte Madera, just over the Golden Gate Bridge, on our way back from a visit to Petaluma. The last edition I owned was the tenth, which I bought back in 2003 at that bookstore in Harvard Square that I used to frequent. [This was the one at 30 Brattle Street across from the small plaza, just around the corner from Million Year Picnic. It’s a stationery store now.]

I often think about that store, even though it’s been gone for years now. I found a lot of really great stuff to read there. It was part of my weekend jaunt into Boston and Cambridge in the summer, hanging out near the Pit, people-watching and listening to the street musicians, hitting Newbury Comics and Million Year Picnic and HMV and that store before taking the Red Line back up to Alewife Station where my car was parked. This was back when you could park there all day for a super small fee. It was the perfect place to keep your car during Boston day trips like these.

I’d take these trips every now and again in the mid-90s after moving back home, often on Saturdays when I wasn’t working at the record store, but they became more frequent during the early 00s, at least once or twice a month. This was during the peak Belfry Years when I was writing the trilogy, which meant that those bookstore visits were a mix of revisiting my recent past with a lighter heart, looking for inspiration in the science fiction section, and wanting to learn more from writing reference books. Two reasons I remember buying that book there: a) the price sticker had the store name on it, and b) I bought it in early 2003, and on that day the store was playing Beck’s Sea Change album, which I’d been obsessed with even then. I distinctly remember having it hand while browsing, a customer a few aisles away quietly singing along to ‘Lost Cause’. I’ll think about that store every time I listen to that record.

That dictionary got one hell of a workout over the next several years. Cracked spine, worn edges, dented cover, slight water damage and all. When I heard the latest edition was in fact out late last year, I finally retired the old one. It’s somewhere in the garage with the rest of my writing stuff, having kept it down there when we moved house last year. [This is why I don’t remember the store name off the top of my head. Perhaps if I dig it out at some point I’ll edit this entry.]

And now I have a new one, not yet used, shrink wrap just taken off, already placed on my black bookshelf next to my copy of Kipfer’s Flip Dictionary, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Sure, I could use MW’s website — which I do every now and again if I need a quick confirmation that I’m using a word correctly — but sometimes it’s fun just to pull out this big book and do some old-school referencing without any pesky pop-ups or online distractions.

Vacationing

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I mean, anything to avoid finishing this dang novel, right? Heh.

Seriously though…we’ll be taking this week off from the Day Jobs to relax a bit, see a few local sights, do some shopping, do a bit of long-needed cleaning and other house errands, visit the dentist to fix a cap (which I am doing this morning), and catch up on some much-needed sleep. And somewhere in there, I will try to make a concerted effort to plan out the rest of Theadia.

I’ve accepted that I am now at the very same point I was at with The Balance of Light: I need to finish this novel once and for all, I just need to figure out how to do it. Which means that I’ll have to spend an afternoon or two here in the office working out a planned outline, just as I did with that previous novel. I’ve got a vague idea of how it should end, but the getting there is eluding me. Well, maybe not eluding, perhaps I’m really just playing the old avoidance game. Whether that’s because I’m worried that I’ll duff the ending or that I’m already itching to move onto something else, the fact remains: I need to finish this damn thing!

I have also made it a point to start working on a few non-writing projects and catching up on some long-delayed house-related things as well. I have a few pieces of framed art that are still sitting in the office that need hanging. I have a garage storage room that needs rearranging. I have several bins of writing that have been sitting in said garage for a year that really should be more organized considering I’d stuffed them in there with no real organization other than ‘get it packed because we’re moving soon’. And I have a few art notebooks (both digital and non) that are gathering dust on my desk that I want to crack open.

Oh, and there are also all these books in my TBR pile that keep getting ignored due to my nightly ingestion of online manga (not that I’m wasting time with that, just that I’m leaving no time for reading anything else in the process). I’m going to need work on that a bit. I should also do another book purge…not that I have a ton of them like I used to (I got rid of a TON just before our move), but there are some titles I’m willing to part with and donate to one of the few sidewalk book libraries in our neighborhood. Perhaps I need to create a Read This NOW pile — not just ones I’ll get rid of afterwards, but ones I’ve been wanting to read as well — and get cracking.

But most importantly…? It’s my vacation. Time to slow down and enjoy it while it lasts.