Table of Contents

1. Blue’s Shadow [ expected 2025 ] 

2. Listen Before I Go [ expected 2026 ] 

3. Upcoming Content

4. Current Read

5. Poem of the Week

Blue’s Shadow

First things first. Hello. This is unnerving. Speaking to a faceless audience of whom I only know one thing: You have read (or are interested in reading) my work. These newsletters will be no different. Pieces of work in which I give you a taste of the more private corners of my life and career.

So let’s begin with perhaps my most highly anticipated project. I first stumbled upon the idea for Blue’s Shadow shortly after publishing my first novel. What a laborious task writing that book was. Weighing in at 180,000 words after its first draft, crafting Blue and Anna’s story was akin to fighting a gladiator with a butter knife. I danced with the overcomplicated plot and the deceptively pretty prose. My characters, though complex, were dreadfully unlikable and refused to follow the orders of their author. Exhausted from the fight, I was left unhappy with the first draft of Blue’s Shadow. A year later, the second draft had thinned out, 145,000 words, still rife with beauty but simpler and less aggressive. Still, I found myself dissatisfied. Something was missing or rather, something essential lay buried beneath the excess of characters, timelines, and events.

I am now writing the third version of this story. The capricious, tired author in my head wanted to give up long ago, but the stubborn pitfighter in my heart refuses to relinquish the fight. That gladiator of a novel will bend to my will, I promise you. I may only have a butterknife, but I have a lot more stamina than it thinks. It may take another few months of rewrites and revisions, but Blue’s Shadow will see the light of day. I, more than any of you, am impatient to see it on a shelf. I (optimistically) hope to release it in Spring or Summer 2025.

If you are unfamiliar with the premise of Blue’s Shadow, allow me to present it to you:

Listen Before I Go

Listen Before I Go is still in its first draft, but fortunately, I am flying through it. Listen Before I Go is a lot simpler to write because it is a stream of consciousness, the experience of a boy struggling with the innate loneliness that breeds in artists (perhaps I find it so easy to write because it’s what I’m going through now). Listen Before I Go is a relative of I Fell in Love with Hope. At its core, a reflective, poetic rumination on the human experience. All vibes, less plot. Emotional, raw, and at once hopeful. If you are unfamiliar with the premise, allow me to present it to you as well:

Due to ongoing conversations with my team, I am still unsure whether it is Anna and Blue or Dorian and Claire who will find their way to print first. But I promise you all, my readers, that you will have access to both these stories soon.

Upcoming Content

I will be releasing reels every afternoon Monday through Friday. If I fail to upload, something has come up and I will release another reel the following day.

On YouTube, I intend to publish a new video on Sunday, progressing in the Write A Novel With Me series. Please leave any comments on my Instagram or YouTube channel with requests for specific content.

Current Reads

My typical reading list consists almost entirely of novels, but this week I’ve dabbled back into nonfiction.

A necessary gem for any writer, I’ve sunk into Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Xavier Kappus (the young poet). Rilke is an observer in the old world of ignorance. He is soft and eloquent in his advice, feminine and precise in his wisdom. All great authors touch on loneliness, but Rilke has an opposite take as many classic authors such as Edith Wharton and Henry James. Edith Wharton’s memoir and her most celebrated novel, The Age of Innocence, seek out a cure for “intellectual solitude” whereas Rilke embraces solitude as a pinnacle experience for the artist. It seems the middle ground lies with Bukowski who so often asked, “What do you call it? Freedom or Loneliness?”

As I’m in my twenties now and I’ve just graduated from University (a few days ago quite literally), I find myself wrapped up in these questions that none of my idols carry an answer to. It seems Rilke’s letters have found me at the perfect time. His optimism and validation are two encouraging forces I didn’t know I needed until now.

If I’ve not already convinced you, here are some passages:

“Admit, in all honesty, whether or not you would die if you weren’t allowed to write. This above all: Ask yourself, in the night’s quietest moment, Do I have to write? […] Then build your life around that necessity. Your whole life must, down to its most trivial indifferent moments, must be a sign of this need, a testament to it.” (Rilke, 5)

“Read as little literary criticism as you can. Such essays are either partisan opinions, stony and meaningless and hardened into lifelessness, or else clever word games where this view wins today and the opposite one wins tomorrow. Works of art are sublimely alone, and nothing is less able to touch them than criticism.” (Rilke, 15)

“What we need, after all, is only: solitude, a vast inner solitude. Wandering within oneself, meeting no one for hours on end— that is what we need to attain. Being alone the way we were as children. […] Why would you want to exchange the child’s wise unknowing for aversion and scorn?” (Rilke, 34)

“The Future is stationary, my dear Mr. Kappus; it is we who are moving in infinite space” (Rilke, 53)

Poetry

This is a poem from the poetry book I seek to release once the fate of my novels is set in stone. Sticking with the theme of today’s literary giants, I lend my own hand to it, a poem I wrote at fifteen cognizant of that “childhood aloneness”.
(Excerpt from Hollow & Brave By Lancali)

Alone

A quiet cemetery

A home

A quiet yellow space

Walls peeling

Fingers twirl my hair into a crown

The queen of no one and of nothing

In a throne room empty of bows

No voices

No people

No music

Not a sound

Tick tick tick 

Time goes on they said

Wielding its bow and arrows

But time doesn’t go on, it goes round 

One hour

Then two

But the one and the two are the same

Circular Cyclical Twirling

The same coiled strand

The same peel of yellow wallpaper 

The same silence 

Tick tick tick

Look onto my kingdom

My only birthright

Buried in loneliness

For so long, that I find comfort in the casket