Today, as I wandered down the stony benches and mini meadows at over 9,000 feet hunting mushrooms and eating the occasional alpine currant, thoughts on how to describe this place and elevation idled in my mind. It occurred that I have some seven other outlines, from as long ago as ten days, haunting the Awes West travel writing project.

This will not do. Travel writing will be avoided like the plague and the characters and scenes retained for fiction in the mind’s eye. An intermediary step between journaling and novelizing seemed a good idea some weeks ago. But the soul balks, the inner ears ring ever more loudly and there is an urgency inside to write history and finish the many novels wandering in the out-of-focus mind’s eye.

My experiences on the train will be used in the science-fiction pulp adventure Timejacker.

The impressions of the places, friends, strangers and faces must be folded into an appendix for the novel that must be written here, on location. I have only 64 days left in Utah.

I wish to complete:

-Cox & Swain

-Plantation America

…

I will scrap:

-Awes West

…

I intend to compose and complete the novels:

-Timejacker

-Wife—

-Of Ichor and War

Wife— is a novel of Elder Earth, a sequel to Sorcerer!, and Ranger?.

Those travel scenes I had sketched in hopes of doing character studies and setting translocations, will be retained below, in the now demoted Awes West concept, that will occupy the appendices of the various novels. These are:

House Apostate

Kingsport, Bay of the Mother of God, Easter New England, 2022, August, Friday First

…

Inn Speak

Lankton, Easter New England, 2022, August, Sunday First

…

Manor Slake

Fruitville, Easter New England, 2022, August, Sunday First

…

Asylum

Milton, Wester Door, 2022, August, Thursday Second

…

Meathouse Bread

Ferryton, Wester Door, 2022, August, Thursday Second

…

Klan Queen

A Visit with a Chalk Creek Matron in Exile

Awes West, Vale Bernie, Oak Bench Farm, 2022, August, Sunday Fourth

…

Jack Stallion

Visitation from a Peoa Mink-Skinner

Awes West, Vale Bernie, Oak Bench Farm, 2022, August, Monday Fourth

…

The overwhelming sense that the Awes West writing scene was a mistake dawned upon me yesterday, as I searched Bob’s library for a book I could read. He recommended Jim Bridger’s latest biography. But the print is too small and I cannot read it. That would have been a good adjunct to Wife— as the biography is set in the same physical location.

I then noticed The World of Odysseus, a slip-cover Literary Guild edition that I mailed to Bob when I became homeless and was disposing of my library. This reminded me, that now in Utah for months, all of the travel writing can be used in Wife— and also, that Of Ichor and War, a mythological tale, would be best composed while in relative isolation, not when living in a place like Portland where contemporary travel writing of the Harm City variety will impose itself upon my writing mind.

With some superstition, I have considered the death of a computer and a phone, isolating me, along with the increased ringing sound in my head, to be a message from Beyond that I need to do some work set in the Beyond.

Additionally, this morning, as I routinely addressed Francis Bacon’s Of Plantations in a bid to wrap up the annual Plantation America book, I was stricken by the value of his work in regards to both that history project and the Elder Earth series of fantasy novels. His work on The New Atlantis and his suspected Rosicrucian and Shakespearean connections beg for a delving into his metaphysics in the interest of history and fiction.

Thank you for your patient tolerance.

I hope the works under consideration serve the reader’s purpose.