My… I’ve been asleep for quite some time, haven’t I?

When I laid down to rest the world was together, at least somewhat. I suppose a year or two of gathered time has never been good for any soul. No wonder everything looks like it is falling apart around us. Alas, I’ve returned from the dream I’d been living in for so long. It was a beautiful lifetime I spent there. I am sad, somewhat, to be back to the land of the living but I so missed this. Being able to come here and write freely, or, as freely as I felt I could write at the time.

Much has changed for me too, while I’ve been away. This old corpse got married this year, who would have seen that coming?

It’s been a long year for all of us, and so I wanted to wrap up a final package to give during what is supposed to be the best time of the year. As it looks like the world is crumbling to pieces around us, I’ve been laying back. I’ve had a lot to say this year but for my own reasons I’ve kept a lot of what I’ve had to say to myself. I want to make Modern Alchemy and Salt + Iron as a whole a place of peace and of light and to be completely transparent I haven’t had a lot of either of those things this year.

2020 did a number on my mental health, and making consistent content was impossible. I’d planned out a great year before COVID and the isolation from lockdown hit, after the doors closed though I ended up spending as much time as I possibly could on keeping myself sane and healthy. I’ve been lucky this year, however, that I’ve been able to explore new worlds in my own mind. Sleep is good for that kind of thing. I’ve been trying to take care of myself. The famous 36 hour writing sessions I once touted have since become things of the past, of course that was in part because I was trying to keep myself busy in other ways.

I have much to talk to you about this year, and I’ve planned a lot to release in December, but I wanted to write this now, to let you know that I am very much still alive, thankfully. 2020 was filled with the exact kind of thing I built my life and this blog around, extreme struggle and difficulty used to mold us into better, kinder, gentler people… but that isn’t what 2020 did to so many of us. I deleted my social media profiles earlier this year, around the election, so I guess not THAT much earlier. I’m still on from time to time but that carnal and destructive desire to check Instagram all day long was eroding at my ability to think for myself. Not to mention the effect Facebook has had on all of us. I thought it better that I abandon all of it instead.

Beyond that, I’ve made it a point to focus on the one thing I love above everything else: Writing. As such, I’ve got new writing coming soon, but before I really dig deep into that I have a few loose ends to tie up. I know you’ve heard this from me a thousand times before, but hey, I like tying knots what can I say?

The long and short of it is this… 2020 was hard. One of the hardest years of my life, it was stressful, it was sorrowful, it made me mad and it made me cry. It made me question the life I’ve led up to this point and it made me wonder about the purpose of this long drawn out bubble bath I’ve been living in for so long. As a community online we’ve spoken quite a bit about privilege and truth and hypocrisy lately, and I am not excluded from those conversations hell, I’m the subject of some but that is what life is about. Without the bad, you cannot have the good.

What is the point of having a cure if everyone is already better?

This year was a lot of bad things, even for me, but I refuse to let 2020 win. I got married this year. I got to see people I haven’t seen in years in brief moments during the pandemic. I got to write an entire novel unbothered by the difficulties and strife of the day to day and I have had a dumbfounding amount of time to think, discuss, and marvel at all of the things that God has given me and to be honest with you, nothing can beat that.

This year was hard, but it wasn’t meant to be Awful.

I’ll see you soon, and I hope you’re prepared to get…

mean for the holidays.

-AT

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If you enjoyed today’s writing please share it on whatever social media outlet you enjoy the most. While you’re at it, don’t forget to check out The Grimoire of Finality where you can read all of my incoming fiction writing. (It still has that new blog smell.)

I hope something I’ve said made a difference in your life, and please always remember…

Life is not meant to be awful.

Catch me on social media if you’d like to get more info/updates on what is soon to come!

Instagram || Twitter || Facebook

@alvatobiasbooks

Salt & Iron Productions

(On Facebook)

-AT