Forgotten Ink
I forget sometimes about my tattoos. I have close to forty, it happens. 😀 Not all of them though. The ones on my hands and arms are things I see daily (and were put there for that reason). Others I forget about until I catch a glimpse or someone asks about them - the TARDIS on my ribs, the Japanese kanji for Ma behind my right ear, and for some reason the extremely large piece on my left calf with Tolkien's poem on it.
“Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.”
If you want a decent in depth explanation of this Hobbit walking song, you can go here, I'll wait. This is, in essence a farewell song, at least as I see it. Frodo knows he's going to take the ship and he's ready to do it. Sam doesn't yet understand that Frodo is leaving when he hears him singing it, but the knowledge comes soon enough.
Everything ends. It's one of the things our modern society struggles with a lot, especially in the West. But there are very few solid truths of the universe and one of them is this - everything ends. Things that endure through the ages are rare and even those will one day vanish. Time is relentless and it is patient. The apples I should have eaten that are on the counter will decay. Homer's the Odyssey will one day pass out of the realm of remembrance.
The knowledge of this doesn't make me sad, at least not most days, admittedly there are the occasional moments where the grief grips tight and I just have to sit with it. But most of the time this awareness that all things end means that being here now is so important. Far more important than anything else we do. Living this one singular moment is wonderful and challenging all at once.
It's easy to get tangled up in things, especially right now. The world sucks, frankly, and evil people (who are so very afraid of their own mortality) are doing their best to make it worse. I have been struggling to keep writing in the midst of all this, struggling to find a reason to keep going.
The edits for Wolves have been going slowly, and I realized yesterday part of it is I'm stuck in a spot where I'm bored with my own work. This is a terrible place to be and something that frequently happens when you have to edit things multiple times. It's not that I'm bored with the story, it's that I'm so deep into the story that finding ways to fix it proves challenging at times and I'm still working on getting my attention span back.
But we're getting there and while it may sound odd for me to say right on the heels of that, I still love this story. I love how challenging it's been to get right. I love how important it is to me. I love the anticipation I have for writing the sequel. Life is a series of paradoxes, sometimes you just have to learn to sit with them.
A reminder that the best way to support my work is to recommend my books to other people. Word of mouth is pretty clutch, especially in this shrinking world where bookstores don't often stock mid-listers and there's a dustbin space where we're not really selling but our books don't go out of print like they used to.
I hope you're all doing well and taking care of yourselves and your communities as best as you are able.
Don't forget I'm going to be at Read Freely Fest in Columbia, South Carolina the 27th through the 29th of March. Come see me if you're in the area!
Love,
K
Important hockey note: The Colorado Avalanche are 43-10-9 as of the writing of this newsletter. AND WE GOT NAZEM KADRI BACK!!!!!
Currently Reading:
Mediocre, by Ijeoma Oluo
This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, edited by Kwame Alexander
The Ganymedan, by R.T. Ester
Currently Listening:
Almost - Lewis Capaldi
Where you can find me these days:
Bluesky: @kbwagers.com
Instagram: @midwaybrawler
Discord: @greenskywarning
Patreon: kbwagers