Quotidian Drag, self -published in 2022 and published in 2023, is a novel about the ineffable, the fools who seek it, and the tyrants that try to speak it. It’s a long psychedelic weekend sublime, salty, and morose and a sentimental look back at the Carolina coast in 2019.
There is a profound lesson in the reality of death and our accursed capacity to forget. Leaving the past behind isn't simply a strategy for coping with life. It is the inevitable course of nature. Save for the great library in the heart of every cell and the words of bards and poets mingled and confused in the glare of history, very little remains to testify of all that was. This forgetting is a kind of forgiveness, perhaps the most perfect of all. Matter lives and dies countless times but restlessly reincarnates through the food chain without complaint, a picture of unconditional love.
We are taught to make as much of ourselves as we can. In truth, we find joy in gradually, painfully, getting over ourselves. Our greatest joys are not in a frozen moment but in transformation. We are all in the process of escaping ourselves, bargaining with ourselves, looking outside ourselves, growing despite ourselves, dying to others, dying to ourselves, and dying. The day will inevitably come when the face that meets you in the mirror is not your own, not who you thought you would see. Quite often the mirror goes sooner than this season’s face. We dissolve into the sand whether we are shed of the illusion of birth or not. What we cannot do is stay the same. To try is the heart of despair.
Setting New Worlds Free
there is more literature & other work from William Cameron Edge coming soon
The new work, once bearing the working title ‘Flotsam Pastoral,’ is nearing completion. Its new title is, I hope, a bit more concise and more relevant to the plot. A man saved from a grievous and wasting infected wound by a Faustian bargain with a gremlin, a post-human future crowded with intelligent species, and an exodus of humans, squid, and interdimensional pilgrims turned scoundrel all unhinge a small town and pick up talking grubs and scrap metal saints on their epoch making quest to see the light of day. Would you sail away with the sliding city of the Psychopomp?