End of an Apprenticeship

"ABRAHADABRA.
I entered in with woe; with mirth
I now go forth, and with thanksgiving,
To do my pleasure on the earth
Among the legions of the living."

-Aleister Crowley, "The Mass of the Phoenix" 

In David Keenan’s book England’s Hidden Reverse, there’s a section where David Tibet (of Current 93 fame), in regards to the dissatisfaction he felt towards almost the entire first decade of Current 93’s output, stated that at the time of the release of his Thunder Perfect Mind album (in 1992) that he intended it to possibly be the final Current 93 album: “I had decided I was going to give it up and start another project. I was just unhappy with everything that I had done.” And (in regards to his discovery of the work of Pascal and Kierkegaard), “After reading them things couldn’t be the same again, everything took on a new light, so I’d look at my early material and though I’d be proud of it as experiments in sound and form, I didn’t want to be involved in anything that wasn’t specifically dealing with one’s own soul. The state of the soul became of paramount importance.”

Although Tibet did (mostly) carry on with the Current 93 name, I mention all this as a prelude to what I have to say next, because in recent years I’ve begun to feel much the same way about the books that have been published under my name over the last twenty years or so. It’s not so much I’m unhappy in an artistic sense with my previous published works, as there are things about them I like a great deal, and things in them I can point to as to what I think is at times good writing; indeed, my concerns are more personal and metaphysical in nature. I guess maybe what I'm trying to say is, ever since I first got the ambition to one day be a professional writer (roughly around the end of my middle school era and the start of high school), I can’t say that what I’ve actually had published has matched up with my original ambitions. I feel that I've veered wildly off-course and drifted away from my initial artistic intentions and innermost concerns over the last 25 years, and part of that was due, I suppose, to peer pressure and the overbearing influences of some of the social circles I used to frequent online.

I know it must sound crazy, but there are days where I almost wish I could wipe the slate clean and start my career over from scratch, where I’m not burdened by this previous body of work that I now feel follows me around like a decaying corpse, or a malignant shadow. I hate the idea of people reading my old books and mistaking the warped simulacrum I presented to the world then as a reflection of my actual self. That’s one of the problems, I suppose, with being a published author: the work is often the legacy, and I’m not sure that what I’ve produced thus far is what I want my legacy to be. This does not mean that my old body of work is no longer a part of my legacy entirely . . . it just instead will be a very small part, an extravagant footnote. Because perhaps I can will it to be so. 

With that being said, I have thus made the decision that, much like a snake shedding off an old skin, the time has come to discard “James Champagne” as my author name and adopt a new, slightly modified one: henceforth, I will now be using the name “James G. Champagne” as my professional author name, and everything I write going forward will be published under that name (the G, by the way, stands for Gerald, my middle initial). While I do not formally disown my old work (indeed, I’m grateful to the people who took a chance on publishing them, and to the small amount of people who actually read them), I will no longer be publishing anything under my old moniker, and I have now relegated everything published under that name (roughly from the period of 2006-2025) as non-canon apprentice work, or “juvenilia that just happened to get published.” In computing terms, you could consider the books released under the “James Champagne” name as demo products, or v1.0 objects.

What does this mean in practical terms? Well, for starters, I’ve decided to move on from the Onyx Glossary blog (a blog I began in 2010) and start fresh on a new platform elsewhere. This will thus be the last entry I post in it. I will not, however, delete this blog, but instead let it remain standing as an archive of “historical interest” (tongue being firmly inserted in cheek here). In regards to my old published books and stories, that is a Pandora’s box that has been opened and there’s nothing I can do about that now, other than to just let the books quietly go out-of-print (indeed, my first novel, Confusion, which I self-published through iUniverse in 2006, has been off the market since 2011). Thusly, the first published novel I produce under the name James G. Champagne I will personally consider my first official published novel (the same goes for short stories, poetry, and any other form of fictional expression). In effect, I am making of my career a tabula rasa.

Put another way, in the form of an analogy, my chief desire is for my old body of work to be the roots hidden beneath the surface, out of sight, and my new body of work to be the tree that everyone sees. I’m not sure if an author can decanonize their own work, but I’m not afraid to give it a shot!