NF -- A Brief Overview

Been a while since we talked about music here. Something about having a day job and a husband cuts back a LOT on the music-listening time. It also doesn't help that said husband and I have VERY different musical tastes. While we've both introduced each other to a handful of new favourites, our music libraries as a whole remain 'his music' and 'my music.'

The one exception is the rapper NF.

NF has been on my radar for a long time, ever since How Could You Leave Us dropped. I saw it on social media, then the same year my college brought him in for a conference. As he was the only act at the conference who was NOT singing hipster worship, I attended purely on principle. I figured if there were more butts in seats at the not-hipster concerts, maybe they'd quit bringing in hipster acts.

The auditorium he performed to had a capacity of about a thousand people. It was not even half full.

I remember sitting in the pew, analysing every bar he gave us. With my mind steeped as it was in oceans of grief and the 'nothing is EVER good enough' rhetoric that my instructors poured into me like hot lead every single day, I simply thought his rhythm was a bit off... but I also remember thinking that I loved the lyrical concepts.

'I'll check back in five years. He's got potential to go somewhere, but he's not there yet,' I told myself.

Our paths crossed every so often. I remember seeing the Clouds video when it first came out (was thoroughly confused by it but noted the cleaner, sharper rhythms), and I was really impressed by his technical and storytelling skills on Story.

This past Friday we attended one of his stops on the Hope tour -- this time in an NHL arena that was definitely over half capacity with people very hyped to be there.

It was nothing at all like the show that gangly kid five years ago gave us.

Oh sure, the show was sophisticated and even I, a fairly seasoned (and jaded) performing artist with decades of experience, was truly wowed by some of the special effects, entrances, quick changes, and props. I actually feel as if I need to say 'spoiler alert' whenever I talk about this concert online because there was just so much sleight of hand and lovely surprises.

But over the past five years NF leaned into that lyrical strength he always had and leveled his rhythm game up alongside it. This show hits hard, both lyrically and musically, and that is exactly what I love in music -- all music. Hope (the song) alone is worth the price of admission to that show, and it was even before I saw all the live special effects. We bought Hope (the album) when it first dropped back in April, and that is the album that has truly made me a fan. I had bought Clouds shortly after it released, but that was more as a gift for my husband than for me. Hope, however, may just be NF's Darn Floor. In fact, I would go as far to say that NF is to rap was Terry Scott Taylor is to... almost every other genre of music. The lyrical incisiveness and the clear love for and dedication to their craft is very similar (though NF doesn't quote quite as much William Blake).

If, like me, you are thirsty for good music, NF needs to be in your collection.

Novel Achievement Unlocked!

 I have completed my first-ever novel rewrite.

I literally never thought this would happen. This is a bigger rush than I’ve EVER had finishing NaNoWriMo. I have completed a second draft of a book. It’s just over 85,000 words. Is it perfect? No. But it stands up better than its predecessor and gives me something coherent to send to beta readers.

After nine years of my brain melting every time I thought about rewriting, I did it. I seriously just did it. I wrote a coherent novel before I turned thirty. After nine years of putting ‘revise Kyrie’ on my annual goal list, I did it.

I only wish M was here to share my excitement.

Rewrite Update

I'm currently rewriting the MC's death scene.

It's a weird experience. I first wrote this novel, this scene, in November 2014. Even then, I was no stranger to writing death scenes, but that's not what's weird.

What's weird is all the losses, the deaths that happened to me in real life -- all happened after I wrote that rough draft. This character dies of asthma. I wrote this scene in November and lost my best friend to lung failure three months later. My cousin died of asthma five months after I first wrote this scene. I didn't even know she had asthma until the night she died.

It's also weird that this doesn't really trigger me or raise my anxiety levels (I don't have an anxiety disorder -- one of the few mental illnesses I've managed to dodge so far. My fear levels are normal, but my sadness and self-hatred levels are off the charts). Maybe I've accepted defeat and am just assuming bad things will always happen no matter what and there are absolutely zero ways to get out of it. Maybe I've been successful as separating fact from fiction. Maybe not really remembering writing the initial scenes in the first place is helping me be more objective -- there's not much emotional connection as far as 'I wrote this scene on this day while sitting in this place at this time of day' so I haven't had the 'I wrote this and then it happened' thought. Maybe the writing and the real life happened far enough apart that I was able to keep them separate.

Maybe I just knew that this is what had to happen for this book to work, and I have to do what I have to do. This book has no point if she survives. She's already had a near-death experience and the character's lives just continued on for the most part (as it does at college -- if you're not actively dead, you aren't sick enough. At least not at my college). For the MMC to learn what he needs to learn, he has to lose her. And it has to be severe and sudden, with absolutely no recourse. She's not the type of person to willy-nilly end a friendship, especially not one as precious as what they have.

Honestly, her leaving this particular friend character was the initial seed of the idea. At first the scene in my head was her driving away, never to return, but somewhere between initial idea and NaNoWriMo that year it morphed into what it is now, and I think that's a much stronger climax with more interesting repercussions. If she doesn't die, he never gets mad enough to stand up to the villain character -- at the cost of everything he's worked for. If she doesn't die, he never learns to live, really live, and to value people and experiences over money and 'proving people wrong.'

I guess this novel is kind of a synthesis of what was going in my own life at the time -- I was still very much dealing with implications of my own near-death experience several years before and I was in the beginning stages of learning those very same lessons. The main character was who I was striving to become, and the MMC was me in that moment, trying to figure out how to get from here to there.

In some ways I think I've regressed in my goals there. And that's what making this rewrite in general so hard -- because I shut down hard when my cousin died. Suddenly life was not beautiful and life was not worth living. I never fully had the chance to learn those lessons. They have never taken root in my own life. And because this character doesn't die until very near the end of book, that means I spend 97% of the book building her up into this Mary Poppins sort of magical figure (while somehow not being a Mary Sue) with which I am very unfamiliar, and only the final 3% of the book is MMC consciously learning the lessons (which I actually am familiar with). Since the novel is 'written' by him after her death, there are elements of him picking up threads that he missed while he was living them... but that's a tough line to toe, though, because I very much want a 'no spoilers' approach. He, our narrator, doesn't mention that she dies until she does, right in front of him, barely a year after he meets her.

I do intend to send this draft out to a couple of beta readers, though I can think of a couple of things I might need to rewrite after this. This time I did a straight-through, top to bottom rewrite with absolutely no jumping around (partly so I wouldn't forget to write 'smaller' scenes, partly so I wouldn't have to completely reassemble the book potentially multiple times only to find parts still missing -- in short, to stave off mind-melting, brain-burning overwhelm). I started in April 2022 and I am on pace to finish this month. I'm currently at 77,000 words. I've never written anything this long before (you'd better believe I'm backing this thing up on an external drive every other day).

I'm just so proud that I've gotten this far. Even if nobody pays money for this book, I'm proud that I have given it a fair shot at life.

Follow Where?

I'm starting to get restless.

I'm almost three years deep into a 'normal' job. And while I'm good at it and enjoy the actual work... I'm tired. It's that bone-deep exhaustion that I've learned should not be ignored. I only work one day this week because it's tech week for the show I'm in (we open Friday!), and I'm so excited to just... not wake up at 6am. I would turn in my notice this week if I could -- despite the fact that they just announced all employees would be making one extra dollar per hour during the summer.

Maybe it's because I'm in a show -- a rare occasion here in the desert. I know I'm not star material and maybe I never will be, but I am now more happy being a one-line character than I would have been five years ago. I keep thinking of Jesus' words, "Follow Me."

I want to. But where is He, that I might follow? And what must I leave behind -- my job that's paying our bills or the dream I've been clinging to for nearly three decades? Of course my bias/special interests say to leave my job and follow the dream, but is it too soon? I want to follow God's timing, but I don't know what that is. How can I follow a guide that I can't see or hear? He says things like 'love your enemies,' and 'bear witness to the kingdom of God' and 'repent,' but that doesn't tell me whether or not I should be leaving my job or if I should be pursuing this dream of mine.

I want to be self-employed somehow. I miss being able to set my own hours. Even at college, I had control over when I did things as long as I attended classes. Classes were only an hour and fifteen mintues. They were just a part of my day, not the whole entire day like a day job is.

My husband is self-employed now (though it's commission, and he's not 'big' enough yet to maintain a reliably sustaining paycheque), and I'm really kind of jealous. Kyrie is so close to done, so hopefully publishing (read: maybe a small income) is in the not-too-distant future, plus I have two dance film ideas that can hopefully happen by the end of this year, but I can't assume both of those will sustain us. There's no money in dance films unless those films bring in choreographer contracts.

The other day, I remembered for the first time in a long time how my dad, a self-employed contractor, has never lacked for work. Whenever he started getting to the end of his bookings, the phone would start ringing again and he'd suddenly be back to booking six to eight months in advance again. He did no advertising, but he never ran out of work. God always brought more contracts. And I wonder if that's what I -- what we -- need to do. I never realised till now how frightening it must have been at times to know how completely our family's lives were in God's hands, how the only reason my dad ever had work was because God brought it to him. It's completely possible -- I lived it. Everything I ever had as a child -- food, lodging, clothing, lessons -- were as a direct result of God's provision. But my dad is also a much more righteous person than I am. God has blessed him, a righteous man. But I -- I am not the good Christian I used to be. My mid-to-late twenties were a very dark time and I made some very poor choices in those years when I thought God had abandoned me and nothing mattered anymore.

I am less than a decade away from the age my dad was when he started his business. It's not too late. Maybe it's the perfect time. I am in a more calm place now than I was in 2019 when my mindset was 'theatre professional or bust'... and I almost quite literally busted. I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps for every audition, every gig, every piece of choreography, every show, and I almost literally died. The only thing that stopped the madness was the pandemic and even then it was years before I properly acknowledged that I was burnt out and that I needed to breathe in for a while without pressuring myself to create -- at least not at the level I had been.

Or maybe it's too soon. Knowing I have a neurological condition that sets me up to do things before thinking them through is making me paranoid that I'm missing something vitally important and I'd be rushing into things if I quit my day job now. There's also the fact that every time I even think about coming close to broaching this topic with my husband (because isn't a good wife supposed to discuss these kinds of things with her significant other?), he suddenly relapses back into the angry person who rages at me for hours over literally nothing and of course I have to put my life on pause and sideline all my exhaustion and all my needs until I can talk him into being a reasonable human being again.

Again... how on earth am I supposed to know? How am I supposed to follow a leader I can't see? How can I follow the timing of a clock that doesn't exist?

The Time Gap

We've all talked, heard, or at least felt this dissonance regarding time in the past few years. It's as if we all fell asleep when everything shut down in 2020 and now we're all waking up again to realise that three years have passed without us even feeling them. I've heard people of all age groups, religions, genders, and colours say this -- that time simply... disappeared.

But I've felt this before.

In 2014-15, in the span of six months, my best friend, a family friend, and a cousin all died. My uncle was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given three months to live. There were two ugly, out-of-the-blue divorces in my extended family (both marriages were well over a decade old). My college roommate and good friend abandoned me when I needed her most. I was almost literally drowning in homework at college, all with little sleep and no nutrition because performing arts profs don't care that the cafeteria (the only food option in a small college town) is only open for four hours a day. Half of my mother's side of the family stopped talking to each other about some financial dispute that I'm STILL not clear on the details of nearly a decade later.

I returned to college after Christmas 2014 secure in the love of my family and the loyalty of my friends. When I graduated four months later, not a single shred of it remained. It had all been bombed out from around me as I floated in some parallel universe in a different province, unable to protest anything that was happening.

Time stopped for me. 2015 through 2019 was a blur of... nothing. Time did not exist. In late 2019, my concept of time was still shaky.

Then the pandemic hit.

As it stands now, I have no explanation, few anchors, little memory of anything that happened after January 2015. I still, now, today, fully expect to wake up and have it be 17 January 2015. The clock stopped, the tape paused... and yet things kept happening, as if in a dream. It's 2023 somehow. I'm not old enough to be asking, 'where did the time go?' and yet somehow I'm asking it. How am I married? Who really is this guy in the bed with me? Where did all those friends from college go? What shows was I in? How long has Brittney been gone? What novels did I write? And M and Grandpa are gone too? Why am I living this is dusty, scorching, one-note town? How did I get here? It's almost like amnesia, or like my brain was switched into somebody else's body and now I'm living the life of a person I don't even know. And this is exactly how I've felt since 2015.

I've never had the words to explain it till now, and even now, I feel they're not adequate. But now that everyone else in the world has that shared experience of losing two years to lockdown... at least they can understand too, even if none of us are ever able to put it into words.

Missing Person

Written 4 June 2022, 1.24pm.

Trigger warning: su*c*de

I've been thinking a lot lately about who I used to be. That passionate, fiery, justice-loving, people-loving, fiercely kind, deeply-trusting person.

I keep thinking about when I was eighteen. The friends I had, the joy and the time and the clarity and the passion I had. I'm still in contact with some of the important people in my life from that time; the rest have all died. I was genuinely content to sit in my pink bedroom and choreograph Petra and White Heart songs. That was the time in my life when I felt the most complete and the most spiritually satisfied. I had a thirst for God that I didn't appreciate at the time, and in retrospect it showed. I fell into a couple of traditionalist traps, but by and large I was a fighter for true justice and love even then. A lot of my views at least mildly clashed with the religious establishment, but I was skilled enough in writing to persuade several key figures to at least properly consider what I was saying.

I keep thinking what could have been. What if I had ended up with that guy from youth group? What if my cousin had never died? What if I had never gone to college -- or at least that college?

That's a big one. The day I arrived, my faith started dying. It was slow at first, but accelerated tenfold when Brittney died and none of my college friends cared. And instead of getting out after my second year when I had the chance, I fought to return -- to return to the place that pushed me to such dire depths, spiritually. I was severely depressed, deeply wounded, and grieving, and I ran out of province back to a place that was also abusing me, but in new and different ways.

By the time I left college, I was no longer the happy, joyful, passionate person I had been when I had started. The stress of the insane performing arts course load and the abuse from the director who tricked me into believing he had my best interests at heart had taken a heavy physical toll. I was probably a couple of months away from death, based on my physical health alone (I'm not even thinking about the severe depression I was in when I graduated). Instead of being a launchpad for what could have been a beautiful, God-honouring life, college was the death knell for me. I have so many still-bleeding emotional wounds that can be traced directly to that school, that director. Almost every single one of my dreams have died because of him and his words to me. He would say 'performers have to have thick skin,' but the fact is he is abusive and uses that phrase to justify his atrocities. I had thicker skin before I went to college than I do now. I had courage. I had spunk. I had joy. I had passion. I had LIFE, and now every single speck of all of that is gone.

I miss who I used to be.

In my pain and abandonment from God's people, I pushed away God Himself. And now I'm trapped in a tiny desert town with an absurdly high cost of living, absolutely no emotional support, and 'well-meaning' in-laws who are trying their best to take the place of that abusive man. It used to be nothing for me to jump in the van and drive several hours to do a show, or hang out with friends, or try something new. And now I never leave the house -- partly gas prices, and partly fear. I can feel my soul shriveling up and dying a little with every second I live, every breath I take.

I attempted suicide on 8 March 2017, and now, over five years later, I wish more than ever that I had done it then. I wish my life would have ended that day. But I trusted that things would get better, and five years later, they've gotten worse. My soul is dead, and that's a fate worse that still lungs. Every morning I wake up is the same and that's the one thing I never wanted to happen. I wanted to live with passion and joy and verve and courage and life, and I am doing none of that.

I want to busk. I want to make dance films. I want to make shows. I want to learn new styles of dance. I want to write publicly again. I want to be able to have an opinion and not be literally abused for it. I want to be free again. I'm not free. I am in a prison of 'if you do this, I will withhold the love I promised you and stab swords of stinging words into your heart.' I am in a prison of working eight hours a day at something that's fast-paced, but not intellectually stimulating. I am in a prison of hearing over and over the words 'you're not even trying and you have no business doing this.' I am in a prison of being years behind my peers in terms of experience because I stubbornly stuck to a college that had absolutely no intention of actually training me within the field that I went there for, and I had not even begun to heal those wounds before rushing off into marriage and bringing all of that anger and pain into a relationship that did not deserve such a burden and now is so broken by my issues it may never recover.

I miss who I used to be. I would kill to get her back.

Respect

It's well-known here that I do not get along with my in-laws. Specifically, one particular in-law.

That infuriates my husband to no end. He's long since accepted their abusive ways (after all, for twenty years he had no choice) and thinks they're completely normal, but I, with 1. my strong sense of right and wrong/justice, and 2. my growth-and-learning mindset that my own parents very intentionally fostered in me, do not and will not. I decided after college that I will no longer tolerate abuse, and that very definitely extends to family. Including married-in family.

The problem is, my husband was raised to 'respect his elders.' Not because they have earned respect, but because they 'said so.' Because they're older than him. (This, I've heard, is pretty typical of abusers.) And he demands that I do the same, because they destroyed his mind and spirit so thoroughly that he cannot think of doing anything different.

I, however, have been raised to challenge the status quo. Mind you, I did this naturally anyway, but my parents were smart enough to redirect it rather than punish it. They taught me that respect must be earned, not given, no matter how old they are and how much authority they have. My own parents earned my respect by hearing me out whenever I challenged them on something. They didn't always agree with me in the end (sometimes they did, but definitely not always), but they listened to me and addressed the underlying concerns behind my challenge. (This was the problem with the profs at college... they prescribed quick fixes that treated the symptom, not the cause; they didn't listen and address. As such, I got labeled a 'problem student' and was relentlessly bullied and verbally abused BY MY INSTRUCTORS for the better part of five years because they thought they were better than everyone and couldn't shut up and listen for just five minutes.) My parents encouraged me to think. A lot. 'Critical thinking skills' is still one of my mother's favourite phrases, and it shows in the way she educated us. My husband classifies himself as a rebel, but he's regularly scandalised by the things I say over the course of a normal day because he was severely (I would argue brutally) punished for saying far milder things.

My in-laws have questioned EVERY SINGLE ONE of my husband and I's choices since we met. He and I planned our wedding together and then had the entire thing absolutely destroyed by my in-laws because they actively hated everything I wanted for my own wedding. I actively block out the memory of our wedding day, because it wasn't my wedding and it never will be. It was absolutely not the wedding I wanted. It didn't represent me at all, only them. And I will never get that opportunity again. We will never get to have the wedding we wanted. That's supposed to be a HUGE core memory for almost every married couple and I literally can't even think about my wedding without wanting to scream, or injure myself, or both. I'm crying as I type this.

I used to love posting my art publicly. I loved writing on social media. I loved posting my dance videos. I loved sharing about my life honestly, the good and the bad. I loved interacting with the (many) people who loved my work. All it took was one little 'good Christian' family to destroy all of it. As soon as my husband and I got engaged, every single thing I posted became grounds for World War III. It is absolutely not possible to overstate the intensity of the multi-day screaming matches, the awful words they would say, and the gaslighting whenever I'd call them out on their toxicity. Gas was $1.39 a litre here today. Their gaslighting is so thick they could charge eight bucks a litre. You could power a loaded semi truck for months with that stuff, and it's just as toxic for the environment.

What I don't understand is why I'm supposed to respect my in-laws when they don't do the same to me. 'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you' goes BOTH ways, not just one, and I refuse to be bullied into being a pawn in their stupid little game of control.

I will respect them when -- and ONLY when -- 1. they start hearing me out FULLY instead of bullying me after one (1) word (taken completely out of context), 2. they start realising that they've never lived my life and cannot possibly understand it, let alone re-write it, and 3. they realise I'm my own person and survived the first twenty-five years of my life QUITE nicely without their interference/micro-managing, thank you very much.

And even then... only after they've made a long, consistent habit of doing those three things.

One Year - Novel Rewrite Update

One year ago today, I officially started rewriting Kyrie.

I'm well into the 'midpoint' section now. This is the part where the villain begins to show his true colours. This villain is based on some of the villains of my own story, and that, coupled with (yet another) domestic spat and my worsening asthma, is causing a lot of havoc in my body.

I tend to approach my writing as an actress. I place myself in the scene and act out all the characters in the scene. I think this is why people often say that reading my writing reminds them of watching films -- I write what I see in 'real time.' This means that I share in every character's emotions and reactions, and having mined some of the darkest times in my life for this midpoint, those can be very intense, very visceral reactions.

I had planned to write two scenes today. I've written one and my heart rate is already 92 (my resting rate is around 70 and I've been sitting all morning) and I needed my rescue inhaler. I don't know if I'm physically capable of writing the other scene, as it will hit even more of those 'triggers' for me.

On one hand, I'm hoping that the audience will feel the same anger I'm feeling at this character. But on the other hand, it's forcing me to unpack some stuff that I haven't yet regarding some of the people in my own life who treated me this way. I don't really know how to deal with these things in a way that won't ruin my life now. A lot of those villains are no longer a part of my life... but they're now in my head. And I don't know how to get them out of my head.

I am very proud of the progress I'm making in the novel, though. This midpoint scared me a lot and now I would say I'm over the hump and running downhill from here. I've already faced and worked through a lot of blockages and fears in (re)creating this work and I'm so proud of being able to look back on such a substantial document. I would say I'm just past the halfway point of the story, and most of the plot points that scared/overwhelmed me the most have already been written. I have forty-some scenes left in this novel. If I wrote one per day, I could finish before July. If (more realistically) I wrote one scene every day off of work, I will be done before September. Of this year.

I never, EVER even dreamed I would actually experience being so close to finishing a full rewrite/revision of any of my novels, even my best ones.

Two big things that have helped me get this far are: 1. framing it as a 'rewrite' rather than a 'revision,' and 2. making a timeline.

As long as I thought about it as 'revision,' I thought I had to completely restructure the book. 'Revision' implies 'moving stuff around,' but I couldn't find stuff to move around. I liked the structure and timing of the book exactly the way it was and couldn't find another way I thought was better. It was like trying to make a puzzle when the pieces were two different sizes. But as I soon as I started calling it a 'rewrite,' I didn't have to re-order anything. I could keep the general idea exactly the same and simply make it stronger.

This was where the timeline came in. I already had a pretty strong idea of the timeline in my head, but I pulled up a calendar from the year in which the story was set, and wrote out a day-to-day timeline of every single thing that happens to the two main characters of the book. Some of the things don't make it in the book at all but are referenced as things that happened off-screen, or are simply there for my own orientation (grad weekend, for instance -- I don't mention grad at all in the story, but it lets me know that I can't have the characters going to classes or doing homework anymore). Some events did get rearranged here, but not nearly on the level I thought they would have to be.
I colour-coded certain recurring themes and printed off this timeline (all six pages of it) and have had it at my desk ever since. It's been my lifeline and has done wonders for my poor overtaxed brain. The acid-melting-my-brain-whenever-I-try-to-revise feeling completely disappeared once I did this.

I'm so close and so proud and so happy and so relieved and I'm feeling so accomplished. Here's to the second half of the story.

April Saturday

Saturday morning.

My asthma is acting up the worst I think it ever has. I've doubled my meds for the last two days (as my doctor advised), but I still feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest and I'm breathing through a straw. It has not escaped my attention that the anniversary of my cousin's death from this same disease is this coming Friday.

At one time (late college), I would have welcomed this -- oncoming death? No more dealing with the world and all its neurotypical BS? Sign me up.

But now, I sit on my couch with a half-finished painting beside me, half a rewritten novel in front of me, and a crochet project that's almost done nearby, and now I think, I can't go now... I'll never see how these turn out.

The painting in particular stands out to me. I really don't like how it looks so far. I would consider it the first failure of my fledgling watercolour hobby. But I want to finish it, to see if maybe the finished project doesn't look so bad after all. My husband likes it so far and knew what it was without me having to explain it, so it's at least recognisable. If I die now, I will never know if it'll turn out all right in the end.

The novel... there was a time when I would have been okay leaving it unfinished. I made several attempts on my life between drafting it and now. But now I'm around the halfway point of a proper rewrite, and I'm invested. I want to know that I can finish it, even if the 'final' rewrite still needs some touching up. I want to send this out to beta readers. I want to send this to an editor. I want to publish it. I want other people to get invested in this story too.

The crochet project is a small one. I've made two others like it this week. But I used less stitches and a thinner yarn for this one, and I want to see how the final product changes with those variables altered.

I'm still stuck in the desert with no real hope of getting out on the horizon, and it's still beyond my ability to explain just how suffocating it is to wake up to this drab, soul-draining view every morning of my life. But if I can still be creative here, then I can be creative anywhere. Right now my main goal is to fill this dead brown place with colour -- and given how vast and stubbornly brown this desert is, that means I have a LOT of work to do.

So I have to finish this painting, this novel, this crochet project. And that means I have to take care of my health -- something I've never properly done before.

Stop Press: Album Release!

Music fans, rejoice!

If, like me, you missed the Kickstarter project (in 2019!) and were too poor to afford the astronomical shipping ($75???) for the CD pre-order, Terry Scott Taylor’s This Beautiful Mystery is now FINALLY available to order from his Bandcamp page!

I have deliberately avoided listening to this album. I have not bought or streamed the digital versions of any of the songs (though they have been available for a while). I want my first listen to be alone in the dark with a hard copy, with nothing to disturb or interrupt the art. I have no idea what it will be like, but I saw the email and dropped everything to order it because I am that confident it will be worth it. I have never done that ever with any purchase in my entire life. But I will not let this one get away from me again.

Terry Scott Taylor is arguably one of the greatest songwriters to walk the earth. Full stop. He has had nearly 50 years of professional songwriting experience, and it shows. His craftsmanship is unsurpassed. If you have never heard the work of Terry Scott Taylor, do yourself a favour and get this album. Your life will be the richer for it.

It is FINALLY NOW AVAILABLE ON CD on Bandcamp here. But hurry -- it's a limited run. Once these are gone, there will be no more.

Enjoy.