Home, Again

It's 3pm on a Saturday and I'm hunched over my desk writing this post while fighting off the effects of last nights bottle of wine and the lingering jetlag from my ten thousand mile flight across the Pacific. After seven months in the South Pacific I'm finally back, California dreaming.

I spent most of 2020 outside the United States, away from the viral insanity, political incontinence, and orgy of stupidity that took place last year. It was much more pleasant to be disgusted and disappointed from afar, especially from the beautiful South Pacific where Gin & Tonics were cheap and plentiful.

But, now I'm home. Glad to be back with my family, but not looking forward to having to work twice as hard at ignoring the world around me. I have to finish the novel I started, write a few more short stories, post a lot more on here, and all while trying to run a family in the midst of a barely competent, bland, corporate dystopia.

My journal is filled with ideas for posts. Topics I want to write about, things I want to discuss, authors and novels I want to talk about, and now that I'm home from my trip I will have the time to actually write some of them.

One of the things I've been thinking a lot about is literary voice and style. I've been having an ongoing conversation with Alexander Hellene and Jon Mollison about writing, specifically modern contemporary writers like my favorite Bret Easton Ellis. Hellene recently read BEE's American Psycho and wrote a great review of it then followed it up with Fight Club, another novel that I think defines the writing style of Generation X.

If you are looking for authorial style unmatched in the past thirty or so years you can't go wrong with American Psycho and Fight Club, two novels that really capture the essence of their time. From there you can continue with Ellis, his later novels gain depth and complexity, but I didn't enjoy anything from Chuck post Fight Club.

Anyways, both of the above merit in depth posts, but I don't feel like it right now, and honestly there's enough written about them that anything I have to say will be as revolutionary as our current administration.

There's one question that came to me while reading Hellene's review of Fight Club. Where is our Palahniuk? Our Bret Easton Ellis? What I mean by this is where is the Millennial version of these writers. American Psycho and Fight Club resonated with the 80s and 90s Gen X. Is there a Millennial writer out there penning my generations Less Than Zero?