A New Book to Download

With that short batch of Cliffside Short-stories finished, I am now forced to look at what comes next for my Saturday postings. Of all the writing I’ve done, what fits best in a sidelong once-a-week format? I have more short stories, but not enough to outlast the weeks of books I have to upload. Do I write more short stories? Use Saturday to upload drafts and show my process? Only post personal bloggings about how I feel or what’s going on in the news today?

One of my particular quirks is my inability to finish. I am never satisfied, always searching for better ways of saying what I mean, more artful turns of phrase, ways to translate the chunky stew of sensation and reflex in my brain into cold hard letters.

But it will never be perfect. I will never be able to take what is in my head and place it into yours. There will always be misunderstanding, that’s just the nature of communication.

So I am going to embrace that, and post one of my stories that I don’t think is a good format for HTML.

Some backstory first: John Gardner’s Grendel is at once a retelling of the epic poem of Beowulf and an exploration of multiple philisophical concepts, including Existentialism, Nhilisim, and Absurdism.

After reading the Epic of Gilgimesh, I found myself enamoured with several philisophical questions, not the least of which was why did this purportedly heroic figure of Gilgimesh start life as a tyrant? I had long since felt skeptical of the concepts of “heroism” in both the moral and narrative senses, so I decided to ape John Gardner and re-tell the Epic of Gilgimesh from Enkidu’s persepctive, while exploring the philosophy of morality.

What does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be good? Is Kant’s “will to goodness” any different than Nietzsche’s “will to power?” Can morality even exist between people under a power imbalance? If so, what would that look like?

Alongside these questions, I found myself experimenting with form and function. I use whitespace in ways that make this work nearly impossible to translate into HTML, so I have instead uploaded the book as a PDF file you can download.

This is perhaps my most literary work to date, and while I daresay there is maybe more of me in Edmund than in Roman, this work contains perhaps a less masked version of myself. I openly sobbed while writing multiple chapters, especially the final one.

Speaking of: it is important to note that the epilogue and final chapter have swapped places over six times in my revising. I think you should read both, but in whichever order you’d like.

Download here: The Chains of Gods