Olio: What Next?

Artwork: Anato Finnstark https://www.artstation.com/artwork/VgkY45

I’m really enjoying this. I hope you’re buckled in.

As I ponder more and more my decision to centralize all my other online work around regular (if not daily) publication of writing here at substack, I only get more excited about the possibilities. If you’re knew to my work trying to build the biggest digital presence I can in order to shout “Jesus Christ is risen!” into it, then you may not know about the games of branding and building I’ve done since the early days of Facebook and Youtube. From Worldview Everlasting to Sharper Iron to Raw and onward, behind the scenes my personal ambition has not been to be a media personality but a writer. As a result, I have years worth of content that has lurked in the shadows, hoping for a day when I could get my act together, clean up the notes, and get something bookworthy.

I’m not abandoning bookworthy, but I am abandoning the hope of having everything I write make it that far before I share it with you. Instead of filtering then publishing, I am going to start publishing then filtering.

What that means is that there is going to be a lot of divergent content in this place. Yesterday, I shared with you the first chapter of one of my fiction novels, Earth. Some of you know that it’s the one closest to being finished. But some you also know I’ve got one called Dust sitting on deck as well. Others of you are hoping that I’ll focus on I Will Teach You to Be Smart, which is my work on the marvelous Luhmann method of “smart noting” and productivity management. Others of you are already reading Mad Christian Mondays and are enjoying my multipart series Where We Stand, a solidification of my thoughts on the current state of Christianity (and, particularly, Lutheran Christianity) in the midst of mass-formation psychosis collapsing western civilization. There is much more. I’ve got notes on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and I’ve got theories on Proverbs 1:2-7 as a substantial philosophy of being. I’ve got memoirs of growing up with CPTSD and I’ve got tidbits on the book of Revelation.

So, because you’re planning to stick around, please know that you’re never quite going to know what’s sitting in your inbox from me. I may give you the most polished piece in my arsenal, or I may just go off on my thoughts from my latest dive into Dan Carlin’s Hardcore history. I expect that whatever this might make of this corner of the internet, it will not be boring.

Today is Sunday, and Sundays are pretty rough roads for me. Because I live by day as a parish pastor in an insignificant corner of the real world, from 730am till some time after 1pm I am a man under authority. When things go well, by 2pm I’m able to sit down with a cigar and get to my daily Bible reading according to the Hebron Collegium Lectionary (a version of the Horner method), after which I strive to get to my writing for Mad Mondays. My goal for the evening is time with family, preferably on the Hebron jiu jitsu mats or around the table with a board game. But tonight I need to attend a pre-funeral viewing for a long time member. After that I think I will spend some time with my wife sipping a margarita.

What does this mean? It means that today you get some olio. And there you have it.

But I wanted to also take this moment to say a bit more about Earth. I don’t want to yammer on about the story or the theme or the writing experience (though I do have notes on writing that I’ll probably share with you at some point too.) I just want to encourage those of you who enjoyed chapter one to be patient with me as I release it in serial form. Truly, there is enough finished that I could share with you new chapters every day for quite some time. But my goal with this experiment is to give myself a reason to keep writing while also alleviating myself of the pressure to finish it in such and such an amount of time. The worst thing I could do is turn this space into “one more to do.”

I hope you don’t mind. More than that, I hope you will enjoy it. This space is part of my concentrated effort to stop the white noise, to stop making content “because I have to,” and to start enjoying my chosen craft for all that it’s worth. Sometimes, you just need to think out loud, and if others happen to benefit from that pondering, all the better.

So, Earth is an the way, and probably Dust too, and maybe even Athanasius Audacity and the Weight of Lunacy (though its only got one chapter and I’m still not sure what the title even means yet.) In the meanwhile, cheers to you and yours, and may my noting out loud the things which I’ve noticed enough to put pen to page be a light in your darkness as we walk together through this upside-down vale of tears. Thank you for joining me on the journey. It is not good for man to be alone.

(P.S. Do expect some typos. I will strive to give careful attention to all the rules of publication. But when it comes to olio, sometime you have to put up with a few broken eggs.)

(P.P.S. Rock on, and Alleluia!)