I find myself interesting, not in a narcissistic way, but in examination.

I wrote an academic blog post (and then a couple others, 1, 2) to clarify a nonfiction book that commenced as an academic essay. The blog post spawned a novella (pending, in revision), which in turn spawned both a short story (pending novella) and another academic essay (pending novella). With the short story, I plan to release meta commentary and background around the novella.

This seems like an unusual ecosystem, but it’s how my brain operates – on inputs and synthesis. Having completed The Architecture of Encounter, itself a follow-up to A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis and the second of a planned series of three, but hard-pressed to call it a trilogy.

This post might make more sense when the unfinished projects are complete, but until then, consider it a status update.

A bit more…

The reason for the short story is that the novella ends intentionally ambiguous, and the short story is a disconnected possible resolution. But I want the novella to remain open to interpretation, as is my modus operandi in many cases. I had considered including it as an epilogue – and I may do this in a future edition – but for now, I don’t want to prematurely close the discussion.

If I can get someone to publish the short story in a collection, that would be great, but I’ll otherwise publish it with the notes I mentioned above.

To quote The Critical Drinker, ‘Anyway, that’s all I’ve got today. Go away, now‘.