I’m never going to fix all these broken systems causing everyone pain and suffering. All I can do is encourage others to create their own system, which is what I did. Somehow, against astronomical odds, I succeeded. That’s only because I recognized the best opportunity of my life just in time. Now I’m still trying to eliminate the last stragglers of my mistakes’ consequences, and in doing so, I leave my future wide open. 

I keep thinking about EB White talking about how writing shouldn’t be seen as a profession, but rather as a reaction to something “more productive.” As much as I love and respect the man, I disagree. Yes, writing on its own does nothing. People have to actually read what you have to say and actually apply something from it to be worth your while. But you have no control over that outcome. 

So instead, beyond being a writer, you must master being a communicator, something I’m relatively terrible at, and yet, I got through to Emily and a handful of others. I suck at properly conveying my message and yet, sometimes I luck out and say just the right thing at the right time…

But I’m not greedy. I just need some sort of cushion. Money is and never will be the end all be all. It just saddens me that writing has become so devalued. Except when it’s a video essay; then everyone clamors over it. I’ve never attempted a proper video essay because frankly, I don’t want to put the work in for something that may never get any views. I worry about backlash. But you know what. There’s a solution to that. Just don’t give a shit. But that’s so much easier said than done. 

Of course, as someone who has taken far more than her fair share of shit, I’ve come to realize that most of it is misdirected anger and frustration. Even I myself have taken until just this year to realize my own anger and frustration was misdirected. Hate the game, not the players, finally makes sense to me. And most people are playing the wrong game altogether. Just as I was until I finally put together cloud pieces and realized I was onto something big… Rather than cheat the system, I want to circumvent it all together.

My goal is to prove that writing is a noble profession and not just a curious side project that can masquerade as a career. Many kooks have tried to create new “systems,” but they all end up being a sort of cult. I’m not into cults. I just want to free people from their mental prisons and break out and surpass the ones who cheated the system in place of their own. That is, let’s combine our individual strengths and create a force that steamrolls the fat cats and evil underminers and brings holiday cheer every day of the year. Now, onto actually doing that…

…

Frankly, I have very few pieces that I’m truly proud of, although there are some essays I wrote for my short essay collection Cloud Pieces that stand out in my mind. [It’s no longer available as I pulled it from published status and a lot of the best pieces will reemerge in The Unmasking of a Phoenix]. I’m honestly just surprised I’ve written as much as I have; my output isn’t legendary or anything, but a lot of my essays contain bits and pieces of things I wrote in my high school years, and my fiction goes back to daydreams from my childhood.

As for the “author life” I knew it would be a constant headache with forced rewrites, publishing deadlines, speaking engagements, and yet barely being able to subsist when all my expenses are met. I actually hate writing for a living, as I’ve discovered. I used to think EB White was wrong when he said writing wasn’t an occupation. It certainly CAN be, but it’s probably better that it isn’t; that’s why he became a farmer after all, and it’s ironic that his farm only barely paid for itself, and the writing is what actually paid the bills. But he loved the labor of the farm and the writing became an inconvenient necessity, even though he was incredibly brilliant at it. In fact, I get to live the dream he never got to live. 

Our farm is nothing but greenery here, but Emily and I have such immense financial security at such a relatively young age that both of our writing can be done free of any connection to money or commercial scrutiny. It can just exist, with or without an audience. And people do read our work; it’s just a very small few.

Nothing makes sense about how I got here, from a purely probabilistic standpoint. The “luck” I’ve had meeting Emily and making some absurdly good stock picks isn’t statistically likely at all. I’ve made a lot of huge mistakes, trusting people that clearly never had my best interests in mind, signing away years to paying off college debt for a degree I never got. It’s not that I didn’t want to pursue a degree; I just realized it wasn’t worth it in the end. I actually have some sort of “survivor’s guilt” for being the most successful person EVER in my extended family and of all the people I went to school with. I am truly one of the one percent today, and this is mind-boggling to me, because my path here wasn’t like any other.

As for the part my 20-year-old self wouldn’t believe? I actually would’ve believed that I hit it big with a stock like Nvidia (the big one as it turned out). I would’ve believed that I had some success in real estate (but not to the degree it turned out.) I never would’ve believed I would’ve met someone online like Emily who would just let me do my thing and not expect anything of me but to just let her do her own thing. I never would’ve believed that a great chunk of our current wealth was her selling her childhood home in New York City (and to think we could’ve gotten more for it, but that’s a long story). We made more money from that one sale than I would have made in an entire real estate career. 

The part I wouldn’t have believed is that it all came suddenly. I always assumed it would take some balance of buying and selling collectibles, stock picking, and smart real estate maneuvering and maybe by forty I’d have enough to live on while I just focused on writing my essays and silly stories. But because all the wealth creation happened within the past couple of years, it still doesn’t feel real.

…

I decided yesterday to stop watching nostalgia-fueled content for a while and stick to the more thoughtful content of my favorite BookTubers. [Lady of the Library and Strange Lucidity in particular.]

I don’t post on social media anymore because I’m just feeding the monster I hate so much. [As much as I’m compelled to return, my attempts at finding any traction on Instagram again was ill-fated.] These platforms are essentially making you work for them for free. Even Substack and Medium, once great repositories of interesting contemporary thought are just increasingly walled gardens. [Although, I decided Substack was the least of all the evils and I do get reads on there at least where as my main websites are basically my wife and whoever just happens to stumble upon it.]

I get that people need to make a living, but Substack in particular has its Notes social media side which you are forced to contend with as a creator whether you like it or not. [For all of its faults, though, Notes is the best of the remaining social-media-adjacent platforms.] I’d rather just have my couple websites, The Phoenix Desertsong as my archive of formerly published works and more “literary” archived gems and Obscure Curiosities as my ongoing messy digital garden.

Audience curation is something that I would rather happen organically, and my ‘messiness’ may end up giving me a competitive advantage over the next few years. I’m in this for the long game, which is why I’m trying to clean up at least some portion of my archive to draw people in. But I no longer check for keywords, even though I easily could. I want to be more of a long-form writer of letters to no one in particular. 

My thinking is that the briefs are fun to create and post just so I don’t fall silent online for too long and fade into entropy. As it is, no one but Emily and a few of her friends even read my work at all. I’m starting at ground zero, so I may as well make the best of this opportunity while it’s practically silent.

[by mid march 2026 I was forcing myself to “enjoy” the silence. The first half of the year was truly lonely and almost extinguished my will to live. Fortunately, the Lord somehow got me through and I’m much stronger for it!]

…

I don’t think that “real life” was ever meant to have any sort of coherency or narrative quality to it. Physical reality is far too complex and chaotic to provide a framework for any sort of explainable narrative. We must instead take the things we think are important and connect them however we may see fit, chronologically or not. 

Right now I want to discover who I am becoming, this much freer and mature Amelia that is approaching 40, her best years seemingly behind her but I refuse to believe that’s the case. Even with my physical ailments like chronic fatigue and mild neuropathy, I still have my words about me. But the autistic burnout and emotional overload of the past year leaves me passing through many days in a dense fog. Fortunately, I still break through occasionally… These moments of strange lucidity are a blessing from the Divine as I try to live my days with a focus on gaining any sort of forward momentum that I can, even if inevitably it looks like I’m just standing still.

Keywords must fall by the wayside, overemphasis on literary references and cliches should be avoided. I do find myself liking Joan Didion’s approach, especially with all the social commentary woven through her little adventures she describes. Mine is a much more ethereal and abstract approach though, and perhaps that’s a function of my autism. I created the CRAP framework so I wouldn’t just ramble endlessly like I’m wont to do. I want to create a durable legacy of thoughtful writing, not content for its own sake, but something worth reading. 

A good bit from Gemini here: “We impose structure on chaos so we can sleep at night, but the chaos is the truth. The narrative is just the coping mechanism.”

…

A couple years ago, I observed a late March snowfall that came quite unexpectedly. It would lead to a short couple paragraphs that I titled cloud pieces after a phrase I used in that short observational note. Eventually that concept led me to pull bits I’d written over the past couple years, which became part of a four season collection I also titled cloud pieces.

But unfortunately, I ended up gumming up the works with the “assistance” of an LLM which shall not be named. I ruined what could have been my magnum opus, short and sweet as it could’ve been, with cliche and fluff just to give it what I confused with weight.

Today it was not the first snowfall of the year, but certainly so far the heaviest. It’s just another winter Tuesday in Vermont, some might say, but this winter storm, while not particularly violent or blustery, laid a persistent sort of white wash over the landscape. It still made the roads dangerous. Whiteout conditions were still an issue, although to a milder degree. What this mild wintry weather event represents to me is the year coming to a close in a way no calendar could foretell. 

For me, 2025 is pretty much over, even as 28 days remain on the calendar. My 2025 self, battered, bruised, and befuddled, is already gearing up for a brand new run in 2026. And while the winter isn’t even officially here for another few weeks, it’s already well underway for me, an upcoming hibernation of the old and tired who will hopefully reawaken in the spring with revived perspective and motivation for finding the beauty in the absurd and the spark in the rusted machinations of old inventions long forgotten. 

…as to how highly I regard the works that I read as being part of a literary and intellectual continuum of which I’m trying to be a part. … Perhaps I’m also trying a bit too hard to over-engineer my writing into a particular inventive paradigm… When Gemini suggests a softer ending in her gentle ABCD critiques, I think of a vixen curling up beneath the roots of a dying elm, hoping that she will wake up to a much prettier world than the one she is hiding from. That feels like me right now. 

The sensation of stopping, for me, is a dizzying one. I’ve been spinning my wheels so long that it’s no wonder I’m restless. I need to be like this snow fox vixen I’m imagining. But I can’t withdraw my promise that I will start again. I can’t just hope for a better spring to come like the fox. Hope is fleeting and ethereal and abstract, and I need to ground myself in the very real fact that the world isn’t ending, but the way society functions as we know it very well could be changing in some ugly and unfortunate ways. 

…

Some powerful thoughts worth saving from the chaff from the rest of my ruminations with a chat bot…

I remember someone telling me that I need to let my writing be more feral. I’m pretty sure it was a chat bot, funny enough. But I will say this: my writing over the past couple years somehow became more mechanical. I feel less like someone stroking their pen on paper with a patient purpose and more of an auto mechanic replacing brake pads and cleaning out the exhaust. This is perhaps one of the clumsiest analogies I could put into words, but it’s making sense to my fearless writer brain right now. If I’ve learned anything recently, it’s that I need to glorify human messiness and inefficiency more than ever. After all the robots are taking over and soon enough are going to be selling each other products but using our credit cards and there won’t be anything we can do about it.

So yeah, I read about all this doom and gloom. The AI apocalypse is coming! Yeah, so it seems to be. I can’t deny the signs of the times. But what can I do to stop it? I simply must maintain the will to walk away from what is considered convenient for the sake of my mental health and individuality. The quirky and misunderstood must be maintained and cherished. But when I try to stop and think, refrain from consuming content regardless of how strictly I curate it, I feel dizzy and unable to remain entirely motionless without some stored tension that makes me twitch and shudder. 

Even when I feel my motor cutting out from overheating – emotionally, cognitively, or otherwise – there is no state of rest, only a much more muted form of forward momentum in which I find my agency almost nonexistent as I plumb my suggested videos feed on YouTube. Yes I successfully beat my social media addiction, and my late night YouTube binging seems to be my last guilty pleasure. But even that needs to be curbed. Otherwise I will only create a vicious circle of ruined sleep cycles leading to even foggier headspaces. My will to walk away from what is clogging up my intake valves must persist.