swevenquerancia

[swevenquerancia]

Talking is something that I learned to do later in life. It comes relatively easily to me, especially with strangers, I’m not sure why. I think maybe if there’s something on the line by me saying or not saying something I become really quiet because when it comes between saying something and not saying something I’ll always choose silence over speaking. It’s what’s comfortable for me. When there are stakes I tend to say the wrong things or say the right things in the wrong way. Not confidently enough, not loud enough, not clear enough. 

Not enough.

I was sitting in an interview earlier and I kept fumbling over my words which wasn’t an issue, I don’t think. Not the one that pissed me off, at least. I had this sense where I felt like I wasn’t making enough eye contact and when my eyes were wandering when I was answering a question I felt myself rambling, but when I tried to make more eye contact it felt like being more concise in my answers was also wrong. And I kept thinking…that it was all because of stakes. 

I need the job. I need the person to stick with me. I need the understanding of what’s going on in my head..

They’re so hard to obtain because the hurdle that is me takes more than a hop and skip, it always feels like a climb, right? It makes me wish I could sit down with an interviewer. and just talk for at least an hour or two despite that being such a silly thought. And you’re probably saying; “well, you do have that kind of time with the people around you that you need and the ones that don’t understand you.”

And, to that, I say you’re absolutely right. 

So, it’s a complete wash, I guess. I get to battle against this thing inside of me that makes me feel half-human and cripples my ability to effectively communicate and die a misunderstood idiot. Partially, completely, it all depends on where I go from here and how much time is left on the clock. I have this overwhelming sense that I stopped looking at myself as a tale of someone who wins at the end and started looking at myself as a cautionary tale.

If there’s any lesson to be learned is that there’s a time and place but sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes you’ll wait for an opening to say the right words but it never comes, or the words just don’t line up the way you want them to, and I wish I knew exactly what the hell to do in those moments but maybe instead of just shutting up or being silent say whatever and sort it all out later.

Maybe.

I think, especially with how my life has taken its turns as of late, I’ve started to adopt that mode of thinking. My latest writing project will have no real significance or importance to anyone except me and maybe three or four other people. But it’s the only thing I can find myself thinking about. And I don’t think it’ll ever have the potential to have any real appeal to anyone outside of myself and those people, but here I am writing it like it’s a fever I’m trying to sweat out. Peculiar, maybe. But it feels right, and that’s what matters. If I’m wasting my time writing this than it’s my time that’s wasted but…I enjoyed myself wasting it. Paradoxical, maybe? Or not. 

All in all, I wake up and feel like I’m learning to fight all over again. Learning to take my steps. Learning to square off and keep my hands up. The truth about fighting is once you’ve been knocked down and knocked out you’re never as resilient as you once were before that happened. Maybe that’s my problem, not recognizing that my tab’s been pulled, that the battery isn’t factory quality anymore and that I should learn to be the me I am now instead of dwelling on the me I once was. 

Maybe.

[swevenquerancia]

I found myself with a stiff drink in one hand staring at the fridge where her prayer stood pinned by a magnet. I’m not sure why I was staring at it or even what I was thinking in that moment. It’s in Spanish, not my first language, it takes a bit for my brain to transliterate it but I think I was reading it. Then I found myself...wondering where she was but not in the sense of where she was located, I don’t think.

We’re all these thoughts and feelings and mannerisms cooped up in these husks and then we stop being those things and the brain stops firing off thoughts and our heart stops beating and we cease but nothing really vanishes from this world. 

I used to comfort myself with thinking that she was in my heart, the smell of her brewing coffee or the sound of her laughing out in the living room at the television or the lullaby she used to sing me to sleep with. It’s a sentimental thought, that she’s immortalized in the crippling grief that I’ve lived through. But beyond the sentimental, she’s out there, right? Her thoughts and prayers and the essence that is her? Stretched out and strung out across eternity along with him, both overhead and underfoot, behind and ahead.

When I hear a bird sing or a old man cough, I perceive them with something that exceeds hearing. I feel them, not tactile but still resonant. 

Hello, mom.

Hello, dad.

Hello.

[swevenquerancia]

To those of you who have felt disenfranchised and divorced from this world; hopefully you’re still young and susceptible to an old man’s advice. In my younger years I took this feeling and I ran with it, I allowed myself to be shunted out while being anchored by people and relationships with said people. This is not what you want, because there’ll come a time when you will feel like you don’t have those people anymore and you’ll have no anchor to keep you here.

Cling. Cling as hard as you can to the world. Burrow even if it feels like anti-gravity has taken grip of everything you are. Dive without regret and even when you think you’re being told you do not belong please shield your ears and keep planting yourself.

That’s all.

[swevenquerancia]

Mom,

You’ve been asleep for so long now, when do you plan on waking up? 

I’m kidding. 

Today’s your birthday. One of the three, anyway. 

I sometimes hear you calling for me beyond my door like you used to all the time when it’s quiet. Most of the times I’m somewhere between sleep and lucidity when it happens, probably because you had a talent for calling out to me just as I fell asleep. Recently I’ve started hearing you sing to me that lullaby you always used to sing when I was attached at your hip as a baby, though. 

It makes falling asleep easier, I think.

I wish I could tell you that things have progressively gotten easier for me. I think that’s my biggest regret, living as I am now, as you left me...as someone I don’t think you were exactly proud of. If there’s anything I wanted more for myself than anything else it was to become somebody or be something that you could brag about on the phone to whomever you were talking to while you were still here. 

There’s nothing more that I wanted than to make your life easy as possible while you were here and I didn’t accomplish that. I failed.

I’m sorry.

I cut my hair. You kept bothering me to and it was about time, wasn’t it?

I sometimes hear my messenger go off and my heart sinks thinking it’s you sending me some video you found funny. 

Your cigarettes cost over ten dollars now. Almost eleven. If you didn’t quit then, you’d definitely quit now if you were awake. Or maybe not. Probably not. But I don’t think I’d ever hear the end of how much you have to spend on them.

I miss you. I don’t think I’ll ever come to terms with just how much I miss you. It feels like every day I wake up further and further away from you, like a boat being washed out by the tide. I feel untethered and ungrounded so much and it’s overwhelming me so much these days. I want to continue being the man that you raised...the one that you raised me to be, but I’m afraid I’ll wake up as someone different...not better or worse but...different.

The doctors told me the chance of you waking up are slim, yet I’ve kept the kitchen the same way for the most part, I haven’t touched your food, I find it hard to throw out the things of yours that spoiled. I sometimes leave my room to sleep on your bed as if it’ll stop me from feeling adrift in this world. 

Anyway, before I go on too long...

Happy Birthday.

I don’t know how to go on, anymore.

Happy Birthday.

I hope you’re out there somewhere if you’re unable to dream.

Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday

[swevenquerancia]

I wish I could fix things. You might not think there’s things to fix between us but I do. I think there’s too much.

1996, Sylvester Joseph (via ephemera)

[swevenquerancia]

Did you ever stop to think if we were lovers in the most innocent way?

1996, Sylvester Joseph (via ephemera)

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CON JUSTO by sylvester joseph

DESKTOP vers. / MOBILE vers. / BLOG / DONATE

Growing up on the island and being displaced in America seems to have done more harm than good for Alberto. After a failed marriage, he starts to realize things not only about his community, but himself.

[swevenquerancia]

1996 by sylvester joseph

DESKTOP / MOBILE / BLOG / DONATE A short story about people sharing spaces and growing up in the mid-90′s. 

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5.18.18 I DON’T LIVE HERE

We’ve been long overdue for an update. Still working on the book, it’s coming along nicely, I think. We’re still looking at a June release, I’m set on that and I don’t want to push it back, but I won’t release something half-done or sub-par with our first official release. Life is still hectic, but mid-month things usually mellow out for me, so I’m enjoying this time as much as possible. 

I just worked on a school project for a friend of mine, mostly just some script/treatment doctoring, but it reminded me that what I do is a very real thing. I think the worst thing that can happen to a writer or storyteller in general is that nagging feeling that it isn’t a skill to tell a story or know how to put one together. Sometimes writing comes so easy to me that I take it for granted, I figure what I do is something anyone can do and that’s not exactly the truth. 

I mostly rearranged her treatment, told her where some defining character moments that flesh out traits she already had in mind could fit in. Nothing really major and I didn’t want to really touch on the script too much, it’s hers, after all, but it was good regardless and I’m proud of it for her. Hopefully she’ll shoot it all soon and let me see it, maybe I’ll even share it on this blog, I’m not sure. 

It’s a little strange, I always wanted to work on films at some point, but it seemed so tedious to entrust someone else with my vision as a writer that wasn’t an artist I could speak to directly. It’s honestly something I fear in working in comics, too. I’m deathly afraid of having artists handle what I think is my vision, but once it leaves my head written and it reaches someone else’s pencil...it’s no longer just mine, is it? It’s ours. Co-parenting and whatnot.

All in all, things are good, hoping to land a full-time job (since I work full-time hours basically) and get some perks out of the whole deal. I’ve been reading a lot of comic books in the meantime, mostly older Grant Morrison shit like Doom Patrol and Flex Mentallo and whatever. I keep having dreams of alternate earths collapsing on ours and time ending and the sky falling but none of it ever feels...morbid. I just think it’s a nice concept, two parallel timelines with two adjacent earths being mashed into one.

Like, for those of you who don’t read comics, there was a point where Marvel, in the early 2000′s, started up a line of comics called Ultimate. It’s actually what a lot of those Marvel Cinematic Universe films are based off of now, but follow me down the rabbit hole, please. They started this Ultimate line of comics after forty or so years of continuity on their mainstream line of comics and they retold stories in a more modern way, Spider-Man was a teen again dealing with the shit that everyday teenagers deal with these days and Dr. Strange was a television magician and the Hulk was a monster and Thor was seen as a false idol. 

There was some really heavy realism in the Ultimate line while the mainstream line was more of the classic shit. It wasn’t edgy for the sake of being edgy, but it was a way to present a cleaner product that made more sense (which was hip at the time). A lot of people saw the Ultimate line of comics as something of a...perfect version of the Marvel universe. A great remastering of classic, outdated tropes. From an editorial and business standpoint--it just became a hassle to handle two different continuities. It confused readership and all that so one had to die, and while the Ultimate line was popular at one point, it was destroyed due to numerous reasons.

I think about it, though. Not in the sense of comic books but in the sense of alternate timelines and universes. The Ultimate universe was pretty much scavenged and had a lot of the better ideas transplanted into the universe that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created. And that’s what I think I’m most infatuated about, not so much universes ending and perfect versions and whatnot, but becoming another version of yourself. I think we’ve all seen ourselves somewhere we’re not in this universe, whether it be with a different haircut or a different partner or on a beach--we all dream we’re other people and other places and there are versions of ourselves living those lives. 

I said all of that to say this; you should wake up tomorrow and be the Ultimate version of yourself, whether that be being more of yourself or less or staying the same or if that means borrowing something from a version of yourself on a different earth...be that or at least take the first steps toward becoming that today. Don’t just take vacations on an alternate earth, take life by your own goddamn hands and make that earth as close to this one as possible. 

Be your best idea, live your best idea. 

Yours, S. Joseph

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DUENDE HOUSE HAS A NEW LOGO

We’ll be using this now logo. Don’t worry, the classic DUENDE HOUSE logo will still be around when we finally move into making merchandise.

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4.10.2018

I’ve had a really long week. Haven’t gotten much work done. Past making a Ko-fi for the blog, I haven’t been able to sit down and do much of anything else. Retail work sucks like that, I guess. Luckily, I have the next two days off, so I’ll be able to sit down and write. Probably not too much because I’ll be with my nieces, but I’ll make sure to set time aside to try and get some writing down to paper. 

The next project, Molting, should be out sometime in June, I’m thinking. Depends on when I can finish up this last story and compile everything and make edits. Boring shit to talk about, per usual. 

Anyway, I’m excited to put it out just because it’s something new. Most of the work I’ve put up on this blog are old things that I have lying around that I can sell, but Molting will be the first new thing that I’d be releasing. It’s kind of a big deal and it’s really come together organically from a short story collection to a composite novel of sorts, I guess you can say. It really is, I think, an experience unlike any other...in a literary sense. 

I promise I’m not gassing it up, I really feel that way. 

Once we’re done Molting I’ll probably move directly into working on another novel. I want to work on something that’s strictly fantasy/adventure. I’ve been working on a little side project based on someone else’s comic that one day I hope to put out and it’s really just fantasy/sci-fi and I really do have fun writing shit like that but I can’t say I’ve strictly written that kind of stuff on a professional level (despite the fact that that’s what got me into writing in the first place). 

Not to ramble too much, things are cool...not too bad. Cardi B’s album was pretty decent as was Kali Uchis’. I started watching anime again for the first time in a long while and it made me want to write something anime inspired in the vein of an homage to tropes (it revolved around a dude who likes anime joining an anime club he sees in the paper, there’s a cat girl or some shit idk, I didn’t think that far into it). FLCL2 seems like it’s going to be okay, but it’s already falling short of the first one and Megalo Box is pretty cool thus far.

Anyway, I’ll talk to you guys soon.

Peace, Sylvester

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a monologue on burning

By Sylvester Joseph

At the age of four, Xiomara Hernandez shoved me on the playground when we were in Pre-K. She kicked sand in my eyes and called me a stupidhead. I remember it so vividly, it could have happened yesterday, but it happened about thirty years ago. I’d told her that she was bossy and ugly, but I’m a weak kid at this point. I burn at the thought of a girl overpowering me, I knew my older brothers and father would taunt me because this happened, but what could I do? I was a weak kid.

Keep reading

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"That wasn’t the conversation that was meant to be had, I told myself in the car. I sighed and I felt something that wasn’t quite myself occupy me and tremble. A ghost, and I was wholly possessed, and the sound of my son in the back of the car going on about a school field trip became muted, as did the sounds beyond the windshield and the entire world went deaf. Seeing him there, pondering over something as menial as cake mix, completely alive while I felt a portion of myself perishing…it took a toll on me." - Sylvester Joseph 'Cicada Song pt.2' (duende house 2018)

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gray as the slick of ocean, unmoved, and unsorted. i see horizon for miles, i see the gaping wound of the sky, and the white hole of the sun. i am stirred, in the vast and impenetrable darkness of my own anxious sail. - ‘Gray Order’ by Jasmine Hill

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3.31.2018

Hey, guys. I decided to start something regular. A blog to keep everyone updated on junk and stuff. I might do it weekly, but really I’ll be updating and posting stuff here about our work and junk. What’s the harm in it? 

First and foremost, I want to thank everyone who’s supported us so far. I say it a lot, but really, I cannot stress how much it means to me (and Jasmine) that we have people supporting us in our craft and whatnot. It’s honestly the raddest feeling in the world to have people support you and express their gratitude for what you do. 

On the business side of things; things aren’t bad. It’s a little harder to get orders out as fast as I want to (because of work) and I wish I could stress how time consuming trying to package everything up and make it as neat as possible and make re-edits BEFORE sending them out. It’s a bit of a rough process right now, but we’re getting a bit smoother with getting stuff out.

We also made the decision to stop publishing documents through Google Docs and giving contributors and customers a direct link to the document. It works out best that way for a number of reasons: any and all edits happen in realtime, you see the document as it’s meant to be seen (as we see it when we’re writing it), and with a share link you’ll be able to leave comments and have comment threads. Right now, the share links that have been distributed to the works you bought are public links, but we’re asking you don’t share the paid work with anyone (I mean, you paid for it, so it should only be yours). Going forward, instead of distributing public links we’ll be adding readers directly to the document with their email. 

And for those of you who prefer to have .epub format documents, you can both download the .epub from the document and we’ll have a proper .epub formatted document on hand to be sent out at your request complete with cover art for your ebook libraries. 

Aside from keeping busy with sending out orders and working on the technical side of shit, I’ve been trying to wrap up our (Jasmine & I’s) first joint project; Molting. There’s a story or two that needs to be finished and proofed before we can drop it, but I’m super excited for it. It’ll be the first piece of work that we’re going to sell that isn’t old and it’ll officially be the launch of Duende House as a publishing house. Once we have Molting out, I’m going to try my hardest to get Jasmine to put out her own collection of poems. Too many people love her poetry and, to be honest, I can’t wait until it’s not just me putting out work. Being able to publish and push someone else’s work is something I’m really excited to do.

Anyway, I’ve been listening to a lot of Rex Orange County. I’m honestly trying to stay away from today’s music since I’m working on a piece that takes place in the late 90′s, but alas, I suck and Rex Orange County still fits parts of the moods and inspires me in a way that I find strange. But speaking of music, I really haven’t been able to listen to anything super new in a while. The Weeknd’s new album is pretty dope, but only because it sounds like his old stuff. Rich The Kid’s album wasn’t good, I’m honestly disappointed in it. As I’m writing this I’m wondering if I should maybe review music, too. 

That seems too time consuming, though. So, no. 

I already hate how long this blog is running on...so I think I’ll cut it here. 

Duende Dad, S. Joseph

CREDIT: Rex Orange County’s picture, not mine. Also, Rex is not affiliated with this blog or Duende House...yet. Maybe.