Just a Minute Now

Okay, this here is a list of big changes. First off, the timestamp between the last post and this one sure is a change; I think it’s about four years? At least. Four years since my last post. That’s plenty of time off, plenty of time to clear my mind… or lose it, in one way or another. Change is inevitable, but the moment lasts forever, blah blah blah. Yes, lots has changed over these years. My living situation, for one thing. Four different living situations, to be exact. And a move across the entire state being one of those, one side of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains to the other—I have lived on the east side of those mountains for my whole life and now I live on the west side, which is a major change in lifestyle I wasn’t quite prepared for. Friends and relationships have unfortunately been lost, but new ones have been carved out and flourished from unexpected places, many of which have proved to be lasting and deep. A new job here and there has popped up, landing me as a second-grade teacher all of a sudden, which has far and above been the most difficult professional endeavor of my meager twenty-seven year lifespan. Mostly, I have blamed this occupation as the main source of my long quiescent spell away from my writing, the long days and confrontational situations leaving me drained of all creative vigor, spending each evening slopped like a wet noodle on my couch, consuming trivial memes and Dark Souls streams ad nauseam.

Just about the greatest things that have happened to me over these last four years is that I am now an uncle of a tremendous and beautiful little niece, I really did make a lot of stupendous friends and go on a couple more lifechanging vacations, and I have gotten more tattoos. Otherwise, life has been rather hard to deal with.

And through all of this, writing hasn’t left my side. I write a decent amount, in notebooks, on the disparate writing apps on my phone and laptop, sometimes on receipts and pads of paper and whiteboards so I can remember the things I determine to be important. Writing is as much a refuge now as ever before. And so, I apologize for not writing more. Not in the way I would choose to, anyway. I am apologizing to my nascent fanbase, I am sorry (fanbase here really having the meaning of friends and family, of course). I’m sorry that I will work for a time on writing projects, share them with all the alacrity of a new parent showing pictures of their child, and then go dark for provably years at a time. I don’t want to be so flighty of a person, I want to be more consistent and open and creative.

And still, I need to apologize to myself more. I am not being the writer I know I can be. I am not living up to the potential that lives within me, that screams to get out when I lay idle on the couch, work-shy for fear of what, failing? Writing something bad? The older I get, the more that mood stinks of an excuse to me. So, I’m sorry, Austin, but this indolent attitude is not going to cut it anymore. Write. Write and fail, write something short, write something long, write something bad, and through that, figure out how to write something good, dammit. Your potential is in reach, but you gotta reach for it.

So how do I change this? Write, of course. Write more, write all the time. If I wrote as often as I prayed and talked to myself and my higher power, I’d have a library’s worth of literature by now. But of course, I need to flow with the times. Change has happened. So what exactly is the change that has happened? What’s different?

Well, for one thing, I am writing by myself now. And in fact, I have always been writing by myself. So really, there is no change. And yet, the more I ponder this, the more I think that there was more to Ethan P. Usher than I previously thought. Every bit of light has a dark in it; every heaven needs a hell.

Ethan P. Usher does not exist, and never did exist. He was a fabrication for… for what? I think it was genuinely just to make me seem more interesting. I don’t fully understand my reasoning, but I know that my intent with Ethan was to make him seem like a more important person than myself, and then, at the “end” of all my work (whatever that means), have it be revealed that he was not real, and that all the effort was on my part. Really then, my goal with Ethan was to diminish my own ego only so that I could later turn around and blow it back up to inhuman proportions… is there really any wonder I discovered myself to be addicted to alcohol in the last four years?

(I have done much work to kick that habit, all thanks to those aforementioned great friends.)

There is a history to Ethan’s name, by the way. I feel as though I will tell that story another time. Stay tuned. I worry that his is the story of my own devil; it’s hard to explain, irascible and bone-deep, but I want to confront it someday.

More to the point: I will write more. More often, when I can, where I can, for fun and satisfaction. It is the best use of my time, after all. And it isn’t as if I have been entirely inactive from fiction, either. I have written over these years; I claimed I would complete a book by the end of 2020, and while I didn’t make that goal happen, I did complete that book by the end of 2021. I am well on the way of the second one now, having “plotted” it—for what that’s worth—and written three chapters of a supposed ten. I like the characters and substance of this second one much more than my first.

Fiction, essays, poetry, even my little vignettes like the Study in Graphite I was doing. I am elated to continue, about where I left off, after picking up the pieces left from this old blog. I am not going to delete anything, just edit and update to reflect the truth of who I am and what I am doing. I want to update my friends and family on my escapades and effort I clamor into this lifelong hobby that I sometimes sleep on but never want to give away. Watch this space, if you are so inclined. Thank you for supporting me, no matter how you have.

With joy, we move forward. Easy living,

Austin S. Huber