What Next

What Next

Thank you to anyone who has read through What is Left After Everything is Gone. I hope you will continue to subscribe to my Substack, so that I can continue sharing my writing with you. I will maintain regular postings, and avoid cluttering your inboxe.

I will do a couple of things in tandem while I gather strength to push on with What is Left When Everything is Gone.

I will serialise a novel that I have written about a time machine, Vehicle. I will post instalments twice a week, and I hope you enjoy it. Someone (me) has described it as:

A psychedelic ramble through ancient Ireland.

The Irish comic tradition’s take on Zen Buddhism and Chinese culture.

Ulysses meets the Surangama Sutra.

The Hill of Tara via the backstreets of Sanlitun Bar Street, Beijing, circa 2007.

A Joycean plunge through Yeatsian geometry, crash-landing in Zen.

I will also post some of my poetry. I know that some people do not like poetry, so I will label those posts clearly. I have written poetry all my life, and this is part of my project of enclosing my life in writing. The first poems that I share will be the ones I wrote just after the events described in What is Left.

My friend Dan is working on images to accompany the most recent series of poems I have written, A Wilderness of Cloud. When they’re ready, I will post these as well.

I will occasionally share my reflections on the bizarre life I lead, living with MS, doing qigong and meditation for most of each day, and writing, always writing. I will reflect on the joys of watching my son grow up, the harmony between Lin and me, the rain and the thousands of birds that throng around our house out here in the Irish countryside, where nobody ever visits.

I will need some time to recover before I continue work on What is Left. With this, I hope to complete the encirclement of my life in writing. I’ve written about my life in China, from 2000-2014, and in great detail about my life in Galway between 2014 and 2022.

What remains to be finally written is the time after my mother’s death, to my departure from Ireland to China in 2000. As I begin to map this piece of writing out, I will share the process here. I have a lot of it already written, but apart from some fun bar scenes, I will rewrite all of it, most likely continuing to use the bead structure and first person present tense.

It is always very difficult for me to finish a piece of writing. It sends me on a dark emotional curve. What is Left shows the birth of a mania I’ve suffered from all my adult life: the need to keep writing. I feel that when I am not writing, I am only empty space. It may sound trite, but it is excruciating, and it has always been a dreadful burden.