Hey! So 2024’s about three quarters of the way over and I fell off the face of the Earth again. My bad. Been a really peak mid-20s year for me, not in terms of quality but just how mid-20s it felt. I was really 24 this year.

I was halfway done making a post about a trip to Portugal I went on in June, a trip I wasn’t super keen on doing in the first place but did anyway. At the very least, I figured, I’d come away with a ton of nice photos with my new DSLR. Then I found out that my SD card had at some point corrupted, so all my photos were lost, and the whole thing left me very sore. So, that draft got scrapped, and I kept up my radio silence here for a while longer. 

But I haven’t been lying around like a slug, I’ve been up to plenty creatively and in real life. I learned to drive and bought a car! Big win, probably done it later than I should have, but transit got me around well enough when I was younger.

Oh, yeah, I got a car. Loads of freedom with that. So this year I went camping for the first time in my life. A raccoon in the Canadian wilderness (well, 45 minutes to an hour out of town), right in my natural habitat. Come camping with me!

the setup

I am not a physically capable person. I dunno, I’ve always been weak and slow and dopey. Hell of a strong swimmer, though, chalk that up to the autistic power of pretending you’re the titular sea thing from The Water Horse.

So I’m not great at carrying everything to and from my car and setting up the tent, canopy, big folding table. You know, even those tents that promote themselves as super easy to set up are still a good amount of work.

I’ve been putting in a good amount of work, too, in my personal life. Online I’ve become a bit of a recluse again—I mean, y’all haven’t heard a peep from me since the holidays—but I think it’s worth me looking a bit harder at my real life.

So, more time outside, more effort spent on building things up and figuring out what I want. Sorting out my mental health more than anything, maybe I’d be in a spot where I could really talk about that someday. I mean, probably not, my psych said I have avoidant traits.

But, camping! My setup is dead simple. Car stores the food and garbage, a little tent, air mattress and sleeping bags, a folding table with a canopy as the kitchen, and a camp stove. Breakfast is bacon and eggs and tea (made with a stove top whistling kettle that I will always find delightful). Dinners are way simpler than my usual multi-step multi-ingredient fare, kebabs or hotdogs cooked on the open fire the way God intended.

campfire

Of course, my favourite part is setting shit on fire. Also eating. Everything tastes better cooked over a fire, and I had an irresponsible number of s’mores.

My first outing was in early August, right in the middle of a heat wave. It was so humid the firewood had a hard time keeping lit. Still, even a shitty fire is more enthralling than TV.

One of the main things I wanted to do while camping was zone out and eat marshmallows. I promise I’ve been busy—over the last month and a half, I’ve written two novellas and a (short) novel. Probably about 90k words between all of them.

No, I’m not announcing them now, but I am hyped to have finally written something from start to finish and share it with you guys soon. One novella’s set in Apricot Bay, and the novel and other novella are set in Pinede’s world. 

I kept up a pretty frenetic pace while writing, putting down a good 2–4k words a day (suck my dick, Stephen King), so it was good to just relax. I mean, I still wrote on that first camping trip, finishing my second novella not too long after I came back home. I’m even writing this on my second camping trip, Labour Day weekend. Currently, I’m watching the campfire die down before I tuck in for the night.

sleeping on the ground

Dude, I love camping. There’s something really fun about sleeping in a tent on an air mattress. Also cold and a bit uncomfortable, but fun. Our first campsite, especially, was private, dark, and quiet.

I’d pass out by 9, 9:30, and wake up naturally around 7 or 8 the next morning. It was the best sleep schedule I have ever maintained. Almost like going outside is good for you, or something?

I think my sleep schedule will be one of the next things I’ll fix. I don’t drink coffee anymore, just a cup of tea around 10 am every morning, and the first few weeks after quitting hot bean juice was rough as hell. Now I manage to get to bed around 11, usually, which is solid, but with work I don’t get all the hours I need.

Getting older, I gotta start looking after myself. You know, Ontario is really, really fucked when it comes to doctors? I haven’t seen one since before I left my mom’s at 19, five years ago now. Not for a lack of trying, I’m on a dozen waiting lists but haven’t gotten a call back.

Man, I should move to Scotland. I bet they’ve got doctors in Scotland.

Anyway, I’m a person who’s chemically incapable of achieving a sense of peace. But sitting outside early in the morning drinking tea is pretty close to it, I think. 

the wilderness

I went canoeing down the river on my first camping trip. It was hot as hell and I fried a bit in the sun—I’m thinking May, June, and early September are safer bets for camping—but I loved it. Good workout, which is something I don’t usually do. I poked around little islands on the river and enjoyed the breeze, since that was the coolest place I could be that weekend.

My second trip, I explored some of the local trails. I’m not much of a hiker, but hiking is mostly just walking without falling over so it’s not very hard to be good at. The trail directed me up to a lookout, where I caught the most gorgeous view of power lines I’d ever seen.

Since these are well-trodden camps I went to, wildlife was pretty minimal. Have yet to see a raccoon, but so far I’ve seen loads of woodpeckers, chipmunks, groundhogs, snakes, and turkeys. I saw one specific groundhog very often because he was chilling by the road near our camp for hours, completely unbothered.

My dad always said he wanted to live in the woods, which is something that makes more sense the older I get. Not that I want to ollie out of society entirely, but hanging out in the woods? Hell yeah.

It’s probably my best bet at ever owning a house, at least in Canada, getting a place out in the middle of nowhere. At least right now, my job is kind of forcing me to stick around where I am, and it’ll probably stay that way for a long while. I’d like to do something remotely, live somewhere quiet, and have more time to work on my projects. Mostly Wisp, natch.

oh shit it’s september

Speaking of Wisp, in-story the first chapter takes place on September 24, 2024. I had kind of hoped to have it start publishing this month, but I still have to get the website set up and ideally build up more backlog, and then two novellas and a novel happened this summer.

So it was a bit on the back burner, which I feel guilty about, because guilt is my primary emotion. I mean, I’m writing act two now which is a pretty big deal! I’ve produced a chunk of chapter two, chapter one’s entirely ready to publish, and I’m hoping to get together a couple one shots to act as sort of pilots for publishing. A lot is moving, but Wisp’s a big project and I’m a perfectionist. Also, I’m employed full time, so I’m not really able to dedicate the 40+ hours a week I wish I could.

It is funny, in light of some talks with a psych, realizing that Wisp lies in “special interest” territory for me. Writing in general I’m very obsessive about. I suppose this year I haven’t been quite so productive, but I’ve been doing a hell of a lot of introspection. I think I’m coming up on a pretty big fork in the road as I approach 25.

Hey that’s just like how in Wisp—

no one knows just who they are at 25

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you right now, one very disorganized and rambling post. I’m in my Outdoorsy Era, I’m a bit of a hermit again, and I’m figuring my shit out right now. Such is life, especially in your 20s.

Oh, but I did participate in Art Fight ‘24! On the losing team, as always. It’s late for it now but maybe I’ll throw together a summary of what I’ve done art-wise these last few months. Or maybe I’ll forget and the next time I post here, I’ll be announcing the publishing of Desertbound.