TigerTorakio

Happy New Year! Yes, 2020, wasn't great. And I'm certainly hoping for a better 2021. But there have been plenty of loser years before. And some good things happened in 2020. In personal literary terms: On the one hand, I had just a single poem published and felt pretty depressed at how devoid of imagination and closed off to anything outside the bland mainstream the poetry publishing world is. On the other hand, I finished a new book manuscript, began a new series of poems, absorbed lots of things (books, music, etc.) to refuel my own imagination, and laid the groundwork for more erasures. Onward to H the Shadow: For Book II, titled The Book of M, I'll be trying new things, visually and linguistically. This is the story of Maug now. But are we in the same time continuum, or a parallel world? Not even I know!

I began this project close to two years ago, in January of 2019, as an experiment. Previously, I'd done erasure only as a kind of party game or warmup activity leading to other writing projects. But, given how fun erasure can be, it's hard for me to keep away from it, and I wanted to try crafting a long poem solely from erased pages. There are two more books that make up The Bondman, the book that H the Shadow is an erasure of. I'd originally intended to erase only the first, but over the course of Book I, I became very fond of H and Maug and their journey of paranormal split personalities, horse transformation, and romance. Book II will begin soon...

I haven't felt like posting anything the past few months. 2020 has been pretty depressing. I do have a piece of good news about my writing: My second book, The Ceremonial Armor of the Impostor, has been nominated for an Elgin Award from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association. The Elgin Awards honor outstanding books of science fiction and fantasy poetry. Here's the full list of nominees: https://www.sfpoetry.com/el/elgcand.html In other news: Some of you may know I listen to a lot of music on Bandcamp and write microreviews. I think the independent artists on Bandcamp are among the most creative and inspiring people in music today, and I also think supporting them is very important. Some Bandcamp community members assembled a massive working list of the black artists, labels, and producers on the site, and I've been working my way through the ones tagged techno, house, electro, dance, disco, chiptune, jazz, and fusion. I'll be adding a bunch of albums and