My Novelistic Methodologies

 

Note: the following text originally appeared on my (now defunct) Substack on August 15, 2026 

The following text is not intended to be viewed as a blueprint for other writers to follow¹. Rather, it is an attempt to both clarify/organize my thoughts and to elucidate the methodologies I typically employ when writing a novel. However, if other people manage to get something out of this (and also if it helps them forge their own methodologies in turn), I won’t be complaining.

Many writers, I’ve observed, often follow strict schedules when it comes to writing novels: writing so many pages (or achieving a certain word count) a day, only writing at specific times of the day, and so on and so forth. I’ve never really been one of those writers, mainly because, as a retail worker, my hours/days off change on a week-to-week basis, so I have to continuously adjust my writing time accordingly. Also, every novel is its own unique challenge, and no two projects are ever the same, so I find that a “one size fit’s all” approach rigidly adhered to usually ends in disaster. Therefore, I also need to be adaptive, flexible, and even at times improvisatory in my approach to each novel. Having said that, over the years I have designed various methods to writing (along with the creation of assorted tools) to at least make the process go by in a smoother, and dare I say, more exceedingly efficient manner.

First off, before starting a novel I do think it’s important (for me at least) to have some idea for a title firmly in place. This is taking a page from Alfred Hitchcock’s book: he would often try to pin down a name for his current movie project early on, because he believed that (to quote Donald Spoto’s book The Dark Side of Genius) “. . . the lack of a definite title gave the production an atmosphere of the haphazard and a lack of focus.” In the case of two of my more recent novels, Harlem Smoke and The Joy of the Worm, I found the proper title well before even setting down a word of text. Granted, it’s not always that easy, and sometimes it can take a while for one to intuitively grasp the title most appropriate for the novel in composition. Still, I do believe it’s a point worth considering when one is just getting started on a project.

Secondly, I do feel that it’s not a bad idea to keep some sort of official journal or notebook handy. This is something I started doing with Harlem Smoke in 2015, and I did it again with my French-Decadent short novel in 2019 and, more recently, with The Joy of the Worm. This notebook will contain important dates (what day I came up with the idea, what day I came up with the title, what day I named such-and-such character), along with a list of milestones (more on that later), notes on the soundtrack (assuming the book will have one), list of things/details to include at some point, character sketches, rough drafts of scenes, and things of that nature. These notebooks of mine aren’t particularly super-organized in the layout of their contents, but the important thing is that the information is there. On the PC itself, I’ll also create a special folder dedicated to the novel in progress, where I’ll keep relevant JPGs, further research material, a subfolder for prior drafts, etc.

(These are the official notebooks I used for Harlem Smoke and The Joy of the Worm)

Next, I’ll often make a list of scenes that I think will be in the book (these might not be ALL the scenes, but at least the important ones), often out-of-order. I’ll then make a second list where I take those scenes and arrange them into a rough chronological order. I’ll then split the list up into individual chapters. Looking over this list of chapters and the scenes that comprise them, I go through each chapter and try to guestimate how many pages in a Word document that chapter will be. By doing this, I can then get a rough estimate as to how long I think the final book will be (in terms of page count). While this may seem to be an odd practice to some, keep in mind that when I wrote books in high school and college it was by hand, on folded up pieces of paper, so I thus needed to plan carefully so that I knew exactly how many pieces of paper I needed to use. Also, I like having a rough idea of how many pages a book is so that I can then set milestones. For example, if I think a book will be 300 pages, that means every 30 pages I’ll be another 10% done that book in question (other milestones I like to track besides each 10% mark is when I reach page 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, and so on, along with hitting the 50,000 word count and 100,000 word count). I have become very proficient at this: I expected the first draft of Harlem Smoke to be 300 pages and it ended up being 292, while I expected the first draft of The Joy of the Worm to again be 300 pages, and it ended up being 302. Generally speaking, with novels I usually aim for around 270-300 pages, sometimes going to 400 but not usually. Again, it all depends on the individual project and that project’s requirements.

(This was the milestone page that I kept for Harlem Smoke)

(Of course, sometimes the special particular needs of a project dictate a slightly different working method. Going into The Joy of the Worm, I knew the book would be divided into twelve main chapters, each being assigned one of the months on the calendar, so in the case of that book I listed the chapters first, then decided what scenes would be in each one. But usually, I start with a list of the scenes).

When it comes to the actual writing of the book, I try as hard as I can to write the scenes/chapters in chronological order, from the first page to the last (one book where I didn’t do this was Confusion, where I wrote the first half in chronological order, but kind of skipped around the second half, an experience I later swore I would avoid in the future). Granted, sometimes I might leave a scene kind of sketchy (with the intention that later on I’ll go back and fill it in in greater detail: a good example of this is in The Joy of the Worm, where in the first chapter there’s a scene set at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts: I started writing the book in September of 2025, but didn’t actually visit the museum until July 2026, so for a long time that scene was very vague and almost a placeholder). The important thing is getting the main flow of the book down, so that by the time the first draft is done, the book is essentially complete (though still raw and imperfect and in need of refinement). This was something I picked up on when reading an interview with David Crane in an older issue of Retro Gamer magazine, where (in regards to his game Ghostbusters for the Commodore 64), he described his method of designing a game, by which he would first create the game’s total flow, from the title screen to the congratulations screen at the end, and focus mainly on getting the primary gameplay loop down first, before later on going to pretty it up with the cool little extra details. The point is, the first draft might not be the most elegant pf documents, riddled with typos and unnecessary words and fat to be trimmed, and with skeletal portions that need meat added to them, but what’s important is that, for the most part, it can still be read as a finished and complete story.

Once the first draft is done I’ll make a copy of it on my computer. The original document gets set aside, and the copy I’ll rename to something like “Second Draft – in progress.” With the second draft, I’ll go back and add in a lot of the small details that I neglected to include the first time through, expand sketchy scenes that need expanding, things like that. Just as the character of Morpheus uses various totems of power in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book to make his tasks easier, I myself have developed a number of useful tools that help me with the editing process of my books, and which I usually deploy once I reach the second draft stage. One of the first of these is what I call my Word Repetitions List. This is basically a list of words/phrases/dialogue adverbs that I tend to unconsciously use a lot without really thinking about it while working on the first draft. Originally this was just a handwritten list on a piece of paper, and it was getting pretty funky and hard to read from repeated usage, so a couple of years ago I had the brainstorm of typing it up as a document on my computer. Now, I can just print a new copy up whenever I need it, and as I go through the manuscript and eliminate excessive repetitions I just cross them out with a red pen on the printed document (one function of Word that makes this process even faster is the “Search Document” feature on the navigation sidebar).

The first two pages of my Repetitions List, starting with general words and phrases, then adverbs

Another of my favorite tools is my Weird Word List, a document I’ve been adding to on my computer for well over a decade now. Essentially, whenever I’m reading a book and come across a weird/unknown/archaic word, I’ll make a note of it, and every four months I’ll go through this small list of weird words and add them to my master list of weird words. This Weird Word List of mine is currently a 45 page document with over 1800 entries, and with my second drafts I’ll go through the list to see if there are any words on it I can insert into the manuscript, along with also using it to make sure that I don’t repeat any of those weird words more than once. I basically liken this process to a chef adding spices to a meal, and a judgment call is needed as to how many such words is too many. For example, I didn’t need to use all that many such words in The Joy of the Worm: unlike my horror, fantasy, or decadent writings, where I like to use such words to generate a particular effect or to create an otherworldly atmosphere, The Joy of the Worm is set in the more mundane and realistic contemporary world, hence a lot of weird words would seem jarring and out-of-place. So with this most recent book, I kind of held back a little. Anyway, once that step is done, I’ll then do a basic spellcheck on the manuscript.

Two pages from my 45 page Weird Word List document

Finally, I’ll print out the second draft, and carefully read it (usually a chapter a day), using a red pen for corrections or to make notes for myself. Once that’s done, I’ll create a third copy of the manuscript, the third draft as it were, and this will be the corrected edition (where I’ll also add in beginning papers and end papers such as an epigraph page, acknowledgments, the “about the author” page, and so on), along with finalizing the soundtrack (assuming that the book has one). This third draft is usually the one I send to publishers, though sometimes I might also do a fourth draft if I think the project calls for it. But usually I don’t go over three drafts.

A brief note on the soundtrack: it’s probably a good idea not to plan out the book’s soundtrack in detail ahead of time, because then if the project crashes and burns, it can be dejecting if one had assembled a really cool soundtrack for it (this is a lesson I’ve painfully learned many times over the years, so I speak from experience here). So I think it’s a better idea to just start with a few major songs that you know will feature in certain scenes, or which gives you an idea of the book’s “vibe.” Much like Tarantino does with his films, where he tries to find the title song early on because that song then informs the film’s character, I try to do the same with my own books. In Harlem Smoke, the two key songs were “The House That Dripped Blood” by Insane Poetry and “Gimme Hell” by The Jesus and Mary Chain (the latter of which became the book’s “title song”). With The Joy of the Worm, it was “Time To Pretend” by MGMT (which ended up being the book’s “title song”), though “Birds of a Feather” by Billie Eilish was an important one as well. Once one has made great progress on a book and completion seems assured, then feel free to start adding songs in more detail. Naturally, this only applies if music is called for in a book; with my French-Decadent short novel, this wasn’t necessary, as that book was set in the 1890s.

I hope this gives a brief idea about some of the processes I generally employ when working on a novel. Short story collections are a bit of a different beast so some of these methodologies described above don’t apply in those cases, though the editing process I use is still basically the same for those.

1 Back in 2020, on Facebook + Twitter, I posted a number of helpful tips and advice for aspiring writers, which I later collected on my old Onxy Glossary blog. You can read those here (but keep in mind with some of them I was either being perverse or not entirely serious): https://onyxglossary.blogspot.com/2020/09/james-champagnes-writing-tips-collected.html

Contra No One: various thoughts in regards to the subject of Indifference and its negative effect on a writer's mental spaces

 

Note: The following was originally posted on my (now defunct) Substack on June 19, 2026

“Try hard for a dozen years or more, break your heart half-a-dozen times, go down into desolation and come back up again, and then begin it all anew. A nice life, isn’t it?”

—Arthur Machen, from a letter written to Colin Summerford, 1925

A recent trend I’ve been noticing on the various social media platforms I frequent is that a very large number of writers (some friends, some casual acquaintances, most total strangers) seem to be drowning in an ocean of hopelessness and futility. Many seem to be haunted by variations on the same thought: paralyzed by the world’s seeming indifference, feelings of being a nobody, concerns over “careers” that are stalled or running on fumes, and so on. I’d like to cover all of those concerns, but I should also add that perhaps the most common complaint I see from other writers is how they’re vexed by the question “What’s the point of slaving away at this? No one will care.”

First off, before I even begin to get into all that, as I’ve touched on elsewhere *, the creative process is often a journey worth going on even if nothing comes out of it in terms of fame or riches, because of the powerful and spiritual effects it can have on the soul of the artist who embarks on such an odyssey, an almost alchemical transformation that at times can allow you to see a once mundane world in new and exciting ways. And there’s something, to me at least, that’s very exciting about taking these creations that previously only existed within the confines of my skull and unleashing them out into the wider world, where they’re no longer completely under my control. Suddenly, characters that had initially only lived a limited life inside my imagination are now entering the minds of others and taking on new forms, new dimensions, and new lives. I suppose this is perhaps the greatest gift I can give to my “children.” Also, if the Hermetic esotericists of the 16^th century were right and Man is a Microcosm (or, to quote John Dee, the “Lesse World”) to the Macrocosm that is God, which is to say an image of the Divine writ small, then in the act of creation we emulate the very Heavenly Forces that gave us life. It becomes, in effect, not just an artistic task but an exalted and holy one (though in all probability the materialist would sneer at such an affectation).

Also as a preamble, I should stress that I do not speak glibly here. Like many writers, I’m all too painfully aware of how discouraging and frustrating it can be to slave away on a project, only to finally have it released and watch it seemingly disappear into a void (having said that, my own personal concern is less “who will care about this?” and more “who will even publish this?”). My novel Harlem Smoke, which I perhaps put more of myself into than any of my other books to date, has, over the last seven and a half years, only earned one professional review and a total of ten text reviews on Goodreads. The two short story collections I wrote prior to that have, amongst themselves, no more than six text reviews on Goodreads. At the same time, I don’t truly believe that books disappear into a void. Because they are out there, in the great wild of the world, patiently waiting to be discovered, gems hidden among the dross of society. It’s impossible to say how or why some books get recognized and others do not, and “literary immortality” is a crapshoot. H.P. Lovecraft died believing his work was destined for total obscurity, yet he has achieved a kind of international posthumous fame that, had he been able to witness it, would have left him flabbergasted. By comparison, many of his then more popular contemporaries have mostly vanished into the dustbins of history. Should we not rejoice, then, when the proverbial stone that the builders rejected finds its place as a foundational force within the walls warding the New Jerusalem? 

But to return to the matter at hand . . . Indifference, I’ve found, is often the sword on which many a writer has willingly fallen on. But I feel this is a case of people vastly overrating the Enemy. Put simply, Indifference is not a worthy adversary. Who cares if no one will care? No one is literally nothing, nobody . . . it’s a nonexistent entity, a throne without a tyrant, a paper tiger of an antagonist. And I find it highly doubtful that no one will care. Odds are good that there will be at least a few loved ones (be they of a familial character, such as parents, siblings, or children), along with friends, acquaintances, colleagues and coworkers in the life of the writer that will care about the fruits generated by their creative efforts, and so long as even one person cares, it puts a lie to the claim that no one cares (because “no one” literally means “not a single person”). And by the way, this really only comes into play and becomes a problem when one puts a premium on the flesh (as human beings, in their materialist follies, often tend to do). For who’s to say there isn’t an invisible audience that appreciates the end result of one’s literary endeavors? I think of Thoth, the Nine Muses, Ganesha, Saint Francis de Sales (patron saint of writers), etc. “Who cares? The gods do, darling!”

As for the idea of being an unimportant nobody, this is also a wasteful thing to dwell on. How can you even quantify such a thing? Again, and to reiterate the point above, almost everyone has at least one family member, friend, or colleague who cares deeply about them and/or their work, and I think if you can’t find satisfaction in that, you’ll perhaps never find it at all, because it’s not as if there’s some arbitrary magic number of “fans” where, once you hit that target, you magically transform from a “nobody” to a “somebody.” As for these “fans,” it’s not as if you’ll ever meet, or even interact with, most of the strangers who may buy your book, and this is maybe even for the best. * * I suspect that if the Stephen Kings of the world actually saw some of the people buying their books, they’d vomit in disgust. One careful, caring, and deeply invested reader trumps a million randos (I’m suddenly reminded of a quote from Stalin: “A million is just a statistic”). And if your work can touch even one person on some level and make a difference in their lives, even a fleetingly temporary one, then that’s still one more person whose life you wouldn’t have touched had you never chosen to publish (or put pen to paper) in the first place (and, at the risk of sounding New Age-y, maybe your influencing one person in a positive way causes them to influence someone else in a positive way as well, a ripple effect in which the resulting good vibes have an equally positive effect on a cosmic level). Is there any difference between a doctor who has saved one life and a doctor who has saved a thousand? From the patient whose life was saved, the one is all that matters.

As for “careers,” this is, for the most part, often a pretentious affectation (when I use it in regard to myself be assured my tongue is always firmly planted in cheek), because in all actuality I know of almost no writer who lives solely off the income generated by their books (hence my putting the word in air quotes), and even for the writers who have been published by the major presses, writing is often more a side hustle than an actual viable career. Many writers have fallow periods (again, I speak from experience: there was a long timespan between the publication of Harlem Smoke in January of 2019 and the publication of my French-Decadent short novel in late 2025 where all I could get published were two slim chapbooks and one or two short stories). It’s what you do during those fallow periods that makes all the difference. And sometimes it’s important to have one’s mettle tested (the old bromide about adversity building character), and perhaps these fallow periods are Nature’s way of separating the wheat from the chaff (see, again, the Machen quote posted at the beginning of this treatise). A true writer, one who answers the demanding call of our vocation, presses on, whereas the dilettante wallows in a pit of negativity and misery (a purgatorial state often of their own devising). I remember when Alt-Lit was a thing for five minutes in 2011, and how many of its young writers were being lauded by the trendsetters and gatekeepers as the face of the future of literature. But the sad fact is, many of them were merely content in having the label “writer” harnessed to their name, and living the supposedly glamorous lifestyle that accompanied it (social networking, attending readings, getting their names cited on “hip” blogs, etc.) But the actual hard work of writing books was seen as an impediment, or a necessary evil at best, and oftentimes their books were beside the point, a mere prop or accessory (it’s also possible that the resulting dissolute lifestyle of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll sapped their creative vitality). And I also think of all the horror writers of the “twenty-tens” who capitalized on the (very brief) resurgence of cultural interest in Weird Fiction (mainly in the wake of the first season of True Detective), and how many of these writers were feted by conventions, won literary awards, and so on. But like the Alt-Lit writers before them, so many of them have faded away, vanishing like vampires in the first light of dawn, no longer publishing or, in some cases, even writing. And yet I, who have never achieved even the slightest modicum of fame, endure. What it boils down to, I think, is that for the majority of these dilettante lifestyle writers, once the trendsetters have moved on and become distracted by some new temporary and transient bauble, and the spotlight no longer shines on them (and in many cases, this spotlight was a very shallow source of illumination indeed, the false ensnaring dim light of the Bardo Thodol), they collapse like a puppet whose strings have been cut. But it’s what one does in those periods when the spotlight is off one that reveals the writer’s true character.

As a self-styled Medievalist, I very much subscribe to the idea of Lady Fortune spinning her great Wheel. Many writers are ebullient when they’re at the top of the Wheel and experiencing their salad days (to quote Shakespeare’s Cleopatra), but when the Wheel inevitably spins and they fall from their heights, they allow themselves to be permanently crushed. The true writer, however, takes their lumps (as painful and frustrating as they might be), and clings on for the ride, for like Machen they are hopeful fellows and stoic gamblers (who have adopted the words of A Song of Ice and Fire’s House Martell as their own: “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken”), and they have faith that, sooner or later, the Wheel will spin in their favor and they will rise, phoenix-like, and once again be at the top of the world.

I would like to end this treatise with a quote I recently saw someone post on Facebook (in relation to some of the issues touched on above), written by Aleister Crowley in his Autohagiography: “. . . my responsibility to the gods was to write as I was inspired; my responsibility to mankind was to publish what I wrote. But it ended there. As long my books were accessible to the public . . . my hands were clean.” * * * This is, of course, a realistic and admirably pragmatic stance. But having recently read Frances A. Yate’s remarkable book The Art of Memory, I came across another fitting quote, this one written by Giordano Bruno in his 1584 text cena de le ceneri: “Men of rare spirit who have in them something of the heroic and the divine, will climb the hill of difficulty and wring from harsh circumstances the palm of immortality. And though you may never reach the winning post nor gain the prize, cease not to run the race.”

* See, for example, some of my comments on the Neo-Passéism entry related to Artificial Intelligence: https://neopasseism.substack.com/p/ai

* * To use myself as an example, once at work I spotted a customer selecting a book of mine to purchase, and I do not exaggerate when I say that he looked like the kind of man you’d see on the news that gets arrested for keeping corpses in his basement. Unless you’re Bret Easton Ellis, odds are your readers won’t be young, hip and sexy. 

* * * It’s worth remembering that Crowley’s magical motto was Perdurabo, Latin for “I will endure” or “I will endure until the end.” More writers should adopt inspirational magical mottos.

SUCS: Memories of my College Era

 Note: this post originally appeared on my (now defunct) Substack on March 18, 2026 

Playing the game Perfect Tides: Station to Station last month has got me thinking about my own personal college experience. I began my Freshman year at Rhode Island College (or RIC for short) during the Fall term of 1998, and graduated over the summer of 2003, with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree. Why five years instead of the traditional four, you may wonder? Well, to get your diploma, there were a number of requirements you had to meet, like having so many total credits, being at or above a certain GPA point, and various course requirements. One of those course requirements was Lab Science, and I had a devil of a time passing such a course (even during my middle school and high school years, my two worst subjects were always Math and Science). Having said that, it’s not like my fifth year was even a full year. I did take four courses that Fall Term, but in the Spring Term I really only took one class, Advanced Workshop in Creative Writing, which met once a week, on Wednesday (in June-July of 2003, I took a summer session course at a nearby community college, CCRI, where I finally passed a Lab Science course . . . after my credits were transferred, I got my diploma in the mail in July). My major was English, while my minor was in Film.

My College Diploma 

Thinking back on it all, I kind of wish I had taken college a little more seriously. It’s not that I was a bad student, or a stupid one, I was just somewhat unmotivated and indifferent and driftless: the only classes where I generally really tried to excel were the advanced creative writing courses. Plus, I had a lot going on in my life at the time, with a lot of distractions. I was pretty diligent my Freshman year, but by Sophomore year I was, on the side, doing a lot of gaming (mainly Doom, Gangsters: Organized Crime, the first two Rainbow Six games, Thief Gold and Thief II: The Metal Age, and System Shock 2), working on music (this especially became a big concern in the year 2000, when I began composing music on my computer), watching movies, writing novels (including my short noir novel Twist in February 1999, my serial killer thriller novel Red Cherry in the summer/fall of 1999¹, and Illuminated Shadows, the first book of my Trinity fantasy trilogy, in the year 2000), plus holding a part-time job (working as a bagger and cart attendant at a Stop & Shop supermarket) and spending a lot of time online posting on forums and message boards, mainly sites like Through The Looking Glass and Barbelith. Essentially, I was just in my own little world, and kind of scatterbrained. Also, it didn’t help that while some of my professors were great, others were real hard-asses, and then there were some who had long ago checked out and just stopped giving a damn, and in that latter case it’s really hard to get inspired or motivated with people like that. Complicating matters, in the Spring Term of 2002, I also began reading The Invisibles by Grant Morrison, which got me dabbling in the occult for a time, and that was yet another distraction. I even had a bit of a social life: while I wasn’t the type to go to parties (RIC wasn’t a big party school anyway), I did socialize and even had a small circle of friends. So I was just all over the place. In some ways, I was like Max Fischer in Rushmore, just with less charisma.

The funny thing is, recently I downloaded my college transcripts, and I was surprised to see that my grades weren’t quite as terrible as I remembered them being. Of the 39 courses or so I took during my five years at RIC, there were five in the A range (most of which I got during my final year, where I started buckling down), ten in the B range, 12 in the C range, 4 in the D range (which still counted as getting the low pass), and five in the F range (plus two “Satisfactory” and one “Unsatisfactory” grades, the latter being from my first attempt to get my Math requirement). Essentially, I was a B’s and C’s student, which according to the college’s grading system classified me as a “Good/Satisfactory” student. It wasn’t always pretty, but I usually got the required credits. The five courses I flunked were mainly Science-related: Introduction to Astronomy, Introduction to Geology, and Introduction to Biology, while the other two were Film courses (one of which, through a scheduling error on my part, I kind of missed the Final exam . . . as I said, scatterbrained). At the very least, I never flunked any of the 16 English courses I took, and seeing as how that was my major, I’m happy about that (though it’s somewhat embarrassing that of the two Shakespeare courses I took, I ended up with a C and a D- grade; one of those hard-ass professors). What it boils down to was that as a college student I was adequate, and to me that’s not a negative connotation word (hell, according to H.P. Lovecraft’s wife, he was an adequate lover).

I guess if I were doing it all over again, I’d probably, first of all, pick a different minor. My minor in college, as noted above, was Film, because when I first enrolled at RIC, it was during that brief period in my life where, inspired by the indie films of directors like Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers that I had begun to watch during my Senior year of high school, I was entertaining dreams of being a filmmaker myself, hence why I picked Film as my minor. And though I did diligently work on two screenplays (neither of which I completed) during my Freshman year at RIC (Nurse Sharks, a Reservoir Dogs-rip-off about an all-female gang of thieves planning a car heist, and Arthouse, which was to be kind of a Surrealist Eraserhead rip-off), I quickly lost interest in that dream by the end of my first year at RIC, but just never got around to changing my minor (as it is, I only took one Film course my second year, none in my third year, three in my fourth year, and one in my final year). In hindsight, what I really should have selected to be my minor was History, one of the few non-Art/English-related subjects that I really excelled at in high school. I only took two History courses during my five years at RIC, an Intro to Western History course my very first semester at the college, and a Perspectives on East Asia course I took my third year. The Intro to Western History course was one of the few courses I actually got an A grade on, and my professor was very impressed with a paper I wrote on the atrocities associated with Christopher Columbus (so impressed, in fact, that he made a copy of it to show future classes as an example of how to write an essay). He tried to get me interested into taking a more advanced History course, but I wasn’t really into that at the time, and I’ve always regretted that. I sometimes wonder if that’s why I’ve read so many history-related books these last 6-7 years, to make up for lost time. Not that taking Film as a minor was a total loss . . . at the very least, I got to see a lot of really cool movies, like Do The Right Thing, Un Chien Andalou, Meshes of the Afternoon, La Jetée, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Night on Earth, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and many, many Hitchcock movies. Actually, it was pretty much in college that I first fell in love with the work of Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train being the first film of his I ever saw).

I also would have liked to have read more of the books that were assigned to me, but it’s kind of hard: you have all these courses with all this assigned reading and not enough time to read it all, so you have to pick your battles and choose what to read, what to skim, and what to skip. I did read some of the books I was assigned to read, like various Shakespeare plays, Oedipus the King and Candide and Les Fleurs du mal, but there were also a large number of books I blew off: Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Invisible Man, Wise Blood, and numerous others². It’s just (aside from the time issues noted above) I was far more interested in the books I was reading on my own time and of my own choice on the side. It’s also worth noting that, after my second year or so, most of the rest of the English classes I took tended to be more creative writing courses where the emphasis was less on reading and more on writing, so in truth, over my five years at RIC, I didn’t really have a hell of a lot of assigned reading, all things considered (excluding generic textbooks, that is).

The Campus Library 

All told, I do have a lot of happy memories from my college era. I recall spending many an hour in the breaks between classes (some of which could stretch out for up to four hours) hanging out at the campus Library, where I would either work on my own books or peruse books which contained subject matter that interested me (some favorites included Garry Trudeau’s The Doonesbury Chronicles, Tom Dartner’s The Art of Electronic Music, Hitchcock/Truffaut, Curt Gentry and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, Ed Sanders’ The Family, The Voice of the SS: A History of the SS Journal Das Schwarze Korps, Life in a Medieval Castle by Joseph and Frances Gies, books on industrial disasters and toxic waste disposal techniques, a Joel-Peter Witkin art monograph, and numerous books about serial killers and police investigation procedures). The Library itself was a pretty cool building: on the fourth floor, near the Special Collections office, there was a genuine suit of armor. I would even visit the Library during the summer just to do some research in its nice air-conditioned confines.

The suit of armor on the library's fourth floor

Other times during between-class breaks, after I’d have lunch in the Dining Center, I would just go for long walks all around the campus (if the weather permitted): I used to often journey to the very top of the campus, where, behind the old Athletic Center, there was a cul-de-sac, in the center of which was an isolated tree, that I liked to say hello to, as I felt it was lonely (alas, when I last returned to the campus, in the spring of 2013, I was saddened to see that the tree was no longer there). I would also spend large amounts of time hanging out at the campus Computer Lab, either working on papers or just wasting time on the Internet.

The isolated tree at the end point of the campus

I also remember how I would usually park my car behind the dorms every day, then make the long walk to the school proper (not fun in the dead of winter, mind, as the campus was located up in the hills and could get very bitingly cold when it was windy out): I would basically follow a path where the dorms would be on my left and a forest would be on my right (and vice-versa during the return trip). Though I can recall one harrowing incident where, on the first day of a Literature and Film course I took in the Spring 2002 term, we watched the film Don’t Look Now during the first class. This was an evening class, and when I left the building afterwards I saw the campus was enshrouded in fog. As I walked back to my car, I was feeling especially jumpy that evening, and kept expecting to see a little disfigured female dwarf in a red coat come running out from between the parked cars as I walked the long, lonely path back to the parking lot behind the dorms.

The main parking lot behind the dorms, with the arrow pointing to the path that led to the main campus

Other memories: earlier, I mentioned how my last term at RIC, I only had one class, Advanced Workshop in Creative Writing. You couldn’t just pick this class yourself, the professor had to handpick you for it, and of all the courses I ever took at RIC, that one was by far my favorite. I actually mentioned this class in my recent Substack entry on Shakespeare; we would meet once a week in the campus Shakespeare Room, which was one of my favorite rooms in the entire campus, because it was decorated with a lot of nice little Shakespearian touches.

(The Shakespeare Room, with an arrow pointing to where I sat during the Advanced Workshop in Creative Writing course I took during my final term at RIC)

I also should mention the Mistress Mayhem S&M Show. Towards the end of my Freshman year at RIC, during the Spring 1999 term, I developed a crush on a Goth girl who worked at the campus Dining Center: I remember that she would often wear a black Bauhaus band T-shirt, and the band logo fascinated me. During the summer before I started my Sophomore year, I started to get involved in the Goth subculture myself, buying CDs by bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees and Switchblade Symphony, getting Gothic bracelets and necklaces and rings at Newbury Comics and Hot Topic, and even purchasing (from a Salvation Army store in Providence) a black trenchcoat, one sleeve of which I “artfully” sliced up with a razor blade, to give it a asymmetrical ragged look. In the start of my Sophomore year of college, Fall 1999, I also began reading writers like Poppy Z. Brite, H.P. Lovecraft, and started reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novels.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Goth (2002)

Obviously, I was trying to impress the girl in question, who I believe was named Karen (which is why the Goth girl in my Trinity books is also named Karen): one day at the Dining Center she complimented the Switchblade Symphony T-shirt I had on, and told me that she did a show every Friday night at the campus radio station that was focused on Industrial, Darkwave and EBM music, the name of this show being the Mistress Mayhem S&M Show. So during the Fall 1999 and Spring 2000 terms I would drive up to the campus every Friday night where, from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., I would listen to her show on my car radio (usually while reading books like Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite and Silk by Caitlin R. Kiernan). I discovered a lot of great music from her show, and can even remember the first two songs she played that first show I heard, “Do You Fear (For Your Child)” by My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult and “Stigmata” by Ministry (the day after that, I went to Newbury Comics and purchased Ministry’s The Land of Rape and Honey album). By the Fall of 2001, however, in an attempt to present a less ominous image I kind of ditched the black trenchcoat look and also lost all the jewelry, though I mostly continued wearing black T-shirts and jeans.

(Me on vacation in Montreal, in the summer of 2000. Note the skull-themed bracelets. Sadly, I don’t think there are any photos of me in the trenchcoat)

If I ever become famous enough, I think I would like to donate my papers to Rhode Island College, as their final resting place, preferably in the campus Library.

Some more pictures:

The Campus Quad

Abstract art sculpture on the front lawn of the library 

The Student Union building. The elevated walkway on the left of the picture shows the connection between the Student Union and the Dining Center (a handy shortcut on cold winter days)

The car I drove during my entire time at RIC, though it died right before I began my summer session at CCRI in June 2003. One of the bumper stickers reads “I’m so Gothic I’m Dead”

By the end of my time at RIC, my backpack was looking a little ragged

Rows of desks on the first floor of the library 

One of the books I would often flip through on my library breaks

Another picture of me from that era, my 22nd birthday, June 17 2002 (shortly after I had finished my 4th year at RIC). This is the only tie-dye T-shirt I ever owned

1

In the years 2015-2016, I wrote a novel, Harlem Smoke, in which Red Cherry’s main character, Marsha Garland, played a crucial role

2

In all fairness, I did eventually read Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights and Wise Blood on my own time, many years later

Assigned Reading

Note: the following text originally appeared on my (now defunct) Substack on March 3, 2026 

In my last major post, I talked a bit about William Shakespeare, and the works of his I was assigned to read in high school and college. After a bit of thought, I decided it might be interesting to quickly look at some of the other books and stories that I was assigned to read in my middle school and high school era, mainly focusing on English class.

The thing is, in middle school at least, we weren’t really assigned all that many books to read. As best as I can recall, in English classes we would usually have these big text books (usually illustrated with cover art depicting animals or nature scenes) that were actually compendiums of short stories, or edited/condensed versions of longer works, and the teacher would usually read these stories to us in class, and then we’d go off and write reports on them. There were some exceptions, some take-home books we had to read on our own time (like I remember having to read Steinbeck’s The Pearl in the 8^th grade), but for the most part, it was mainly short stories. Sadly, I can’t remember all that many of these stories, though there were a few from the 8^th grade that stuck in my memory, mainly “Different Cultural Levels Eat Here” by Peter De Vries, and “Examination Day” by Henry Slesar (the latter of which was later adapted into a Twilight Zone episode of the same name, in 1958).

Anyway, this “reading short stories from text books” thing extended into high school, for I remember reading Carson McCullers’ “Sucker” in the 9^th grade (over 20 years later, I was pleasantly surprised when, upon reading a collection of all of McCullers’ short fiction, coming across “Sucker” again and thinking, “Hey, I read this in high school!”), and “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury in the 11^th grade. But it was really in the 10^th grade of high school that we truly began to gravitate away from these short story assignments to reading longer books (and plays). I’ve already mentioned how in 10^th grade English I first read Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, but that same year we also read Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway (which I reread last year), and A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens (okay, I’ll admit, I didn’t read that one all the way, mainly just skim-read it). In the 11^th grade, along with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth, we also read Wharton’s Ethan Frome (I seem to remember being one of the few students in the class to actually enjoy that one), some Arthur Miller plays (The Crucible and Death of a Salesman), and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (okay, I admit I skim-read that one as well). And in my last year of high school, along with Shakespeare’s Othello and Hamlet, we also read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (which I really enjoyed), William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, and some Tennessee Williams plays (The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire). Actually, the summer before I started the 12^th grade, our class also had to read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (and I think I was one of the few people in the class to actually do so on good faith). Now that I think about it, in Senior year we also had to choose a poet to examine, and I vaguely remember reading Anne Sexton’s The Death Notebooks, which I enjoyed. I was kind of morbid back then, so I probably picked that one because I liked the title.

Although I can remember many of the above books fairly well (despite the long span of time that has elapsed since I last read them), I’m not quite sure how greatly they influenced me as a writer (aside from Shakespeare, that is), but all the same, I’m glad I was exposed to them. As I mentioned above, I did enjoy Brave New World, and The Crucible was pretty good as well. I really need to reread some of them one day, like the Tennessee Williams plays and also Ethan Frome, for example.

Of course, during the time period discussed above I was doing a lot of my own unassigned reading on the side, but that’s a story for another day . . .

My Love Affair with Shakespeare: a chronological account of my personal history with the Bard

 Note: the following piece originally appeared on my (now defunct) Substack on Feb. 23, 2026

Like many people, it was during my high school years that I first encountered the plays of William Shakespeare, though obviously I had heard of his name before that point. But that’s just what he had been for me . . . a name, albeit a famous one. It was in a 10^th grade English class at Woonsocket High School that I first engaged with his work for real, in 1995-1996. We read two Shakespeare plays that Sophomore year: Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew. I wasn’t super-crazy about the latter, but really enjoyed Romeo and Juliet, which is still one of the GOAT “tragic doomed young lovers” tales. One thing I remember about reading Shakespeare plays in high school was that we typically read them out loud in class, with each student taking on a part. I forget most of the parts I read for, aside from the fact that I read the lines for the role of Casca in Julius Caesar in the 11^th grade.

The 10^th grade, by the by, was also the period of time when I started to become very interested in the Middle Ages and medievalism as a whole, thanks to the History class I had that year. In the 9^th grade for History, we mainly covered the Ancient and Classical world, but by the 10^th grade, we focused on Medieval Europe, and I think reading about that time period in History, while at the same time discovering the writing of Shakespeare, really influenced my fascination with that era of human history, for in many ways, though a product of the Renaissance, Shakespeare could be at times a very medieval writer (those interested in exploring this topic in greater detail should check out Helen Cooper’s intriguing book Shakespeare and the Medieval World for more information on this subject).

Keeping to the school’s seeming dictum that one should read two Shakespeare plays a year, in my 11^th grade English class we read Julius Caesar and Macbeth (which remains one of my favorite Shakespeare plays), and in my Senior year at high school we read Othello and the immortal Hamlet. While on the subject, one of the best things about reading Shakespeare plays in high school was that we students knew, in the back of our minds, that inevitably after the class had finished discussing the play, as a treat the teacher would let us watch a filmic adaptation of the play in question, which could only be a good thing because there have been some very, very fine movies based on Shakespeare’s plays. As a result, in the 10^th grade we got to watch the Franco Zeffirelli adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet (the latter being one of my all-time faves), in the 11^th grade we saw the Joseph L. Mankiewicz version of Julius Caesar and the Roman Polanski version of Macbeth (another great film, though I can’t believe they let us watch it in high school), and in 12^th grade we got to see Oliver Parker’s Othello and yet another Zeffirelli adaptation, the Mel Gibson Hamlet (another great movie).

First page of a notebook I kept for my college's course on Shakespeare's Histories & Comedies 

My exposure to Shakespeare and his work, of course, extended into my college years, which is hardly surprising seeing as my major was English. In my first semester Freshman year, during the Fall of 1998, I read Hamlet a second time for an Intro to Western Literature course, and in Spring of 1999, in yet another Lit course, read Macbeth again (we also got to watch Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood film, which was very cool). In my third year at Rhode Island College, I took two courses entirely devoted to Shakespeare, one covering the Tragedies (which mainly had me rereading works such as Macbeth, Othello, and yet again, Hamlet, though there was at least one new one: King Lear), the other being one devoted to some of his Histories and Comedies. The book we used in both cases was the 1997 Norton Shakespeare edited by Stephen Greenblatt, which used for its cover art the striking Fool’s Cap World Map (c. 1580, artist unknown). At over 3,400 pages, this beast of a book was a pain to lug around, but I loved it all the same: each of the plays within were preceded by fascinating introductions written by various Shakespeare scholars, and I recall many a lunch hour at the campus dining center where, while eating, I would pick a play at random and read the introduction for it, even for plays we hadn’t been assigned to read. Sadly, I no longer have my copy of this book, but one of my younger brothers still does, and sometimes when I’m on the exercise bike in the basement of my parent’s house I’ll flip through that while working out (again, not the easiest thing to do as it weighs like 5 pounds).

Around this same period of time in college I had also been reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic book in graphic novel format, and of course, not only did Shakespeare himself appear in a few issues of that work, but there were also issues memorably inspired by his plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest (two Shakespeare plays, incidentally, that I would finally get around to reading in 2024). I know it’s bad form to even mention Gaiman’s name these days, but there’s no covering up the fact that The Sandman was an enormous influence on me in college, and served as a gateway to discovering other, better comic book writers (like Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, and Warren Ellis).

Shakespeare as he appeared in THE SANDMAN, as illustrated by Charles Vess

Finally, in my very last semester at RIC, in 2003, I took only one course, the most advanced Creative Writing course available at the college. We met weekly in a special conference room called “The William Shakespeare Room.” It was mainly a room for meetings with a big conference table, but the room was decorated with some Shakespearean touches, like a framed portrait of the Bard himself (plus other related historical figures like Queen Elizabeth I), and in one corner of the room there was a model replica of the Globe Theatre. Of all the courses I took at Rhode Island College, this last one was by far my favorite, and that it took place in a room devoted to the life of Shakespeare only sweetens the memories.

(The photograph above is The William Shakespeare Room at Rhode Island College, as it looked in 2013 (picture taken by myself, during a visit to the campus). I sat on the chair at the bottom center of this photograph during the aforementioned Advanced Creative Writing course)

Following my graduation from college, my interest in Shakespeare declined a bit, as I began to investigate other areas of interest (though I did reread Macbeth in 2013). But I began to gravitate towards his orbit again in 2022, when I read the delightfully illustrated A Shakespeare Motley: An Illustrated Compendium (published by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust). And then in 2023, feeling nostalgic, I rewatched some of the Shakespeare adaptations I remembered enjoying so greatly back in high school, mainly the Zeffirelli Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet and the Polanski Macbeth. This in turn led to a fascination with the language of Shakespeare’s era, commonly known as Early Modern English (but also sometimes called King James’ English and Shakespearean English), with all of those “thous” and “thees” and “hithers” and what have you. This all led me to the book Shakespeare’s Words: A Glossary and Language Companion, by David Crystal and Ben Crystal, which I think is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever encountered, I can waste many a happy hour just cheerfully flipping through its pages and taking in its voluminous content.

Finally, in late 2024, I began delving into Shakespeare’s work again, both rereading many of his plays while reading some others for the very first time. I began with a small paperback collection of Shakespeare’s Comedies published by Washington square Press, which boasted A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, all of which were new to me. Then, in 2025, I acquired two lavish hardcover editions of Shakespeare’s works put out by the Franklin Library, the first themed around his Histories (King John, Richard II, King Henry IV Pts. 1 & 2, Henry V, and Richard III, most of which were new to me, aside from the first and second parts of Henry IV, which I had read in college), the second the famous Tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Julius Caesar; all rereads, for me). Through an Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Second Edition, I also read Antony and Cleopatra + The Merchant of Venice for the first time, along with rereading All’s Well That Ends Well. More recently, this year I also read his complete Sonnets for the first time.

All told, of the 38-39 plays Shakespeare either wrote (or co-wrote), I’ve read (and, in some cases, reread) 20 of them. I’m unsure if I’ll ever get around to reading all of them (an impossibility in any event, as some of Shakespeare’s plays, like Love’s Labour Won and Cardenio, are lost to time), but there are at least a few remaining well-known ones I’d like to get to at some point, like Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure. I’ve also recently begun reading books in general about the Elizabethan Era, which has become one of my favorite time periods, a region of time not only fascinating for historical and artistic reasons, but also metaphysical ones.

What do I like about Shakespeare so much? How to best explain the allure of this dramatist, playwright, tragedian and poet, born on the feast day of Saint George? I have trouble expressing it in words. It’s a combination of a lot of things, really: his sometimes quite convoluted storylines (many of which are deeply steeped in medieval symbolism and iconography), his memorable cast of characters (populated with a grand assembly of kings, queens, princes, lords and ladies, nobles and servants, heralds and messengers, attendants, fools and clowns and jesters, gravediggers, musicians, sailors, ghosts and witches and fairies, friars, soldiers, and so many more), his turn of phrase and use of language, the extraordinary stylistic and thematic range of his plays (which ran the entire dramatic gamut from comedy to tragedy), and the manner in which his art has transcended all sorts of barriers (be they cultural/geographical, time, and space), to the general annoyance of the tedious anti-Stratfordians¹. But I suppose in some ways it’s because he kind of reminds me of myself a little, in that he wasn’t really a super-original writer. So many of his plays were built from the foundations of other sources, be it history or the popular tales of his time, that he then elevated and improved upon. Really, the case could be made that he’s essentially the most famous fanfiction writer in the history of English letters, and as someone who can claim that the majority of his own books are essentially spins on “things I like that I feel I could do a better job with,” I can appreciate this aspect of the Bard of Avon’s character. Or maybe, in the end, what it all boils down to is that reading his work brings me back to my high school and college days, when my future seemed more wide-open and full of promise.

1

As Ben Jonson memorably said about Shakespeare, he was “not of an age, but for all time”