First, I deactivated my Twitter account.

I had zero negative emotion about it.

The other two are holding steady, but we’ll see.

I’ve had very few words to give away lately. There’s something happening to me. Or maybe I’m transforming from the inside.

I spent eight years and most of my forties writing two memoirs. I started the first parts of “Blood,” that anyone has read when I was 40. “I Dream He Talks to Me,” began in the fall of 2016, when I was 44. “Blood,” was released in October 2019 and “I Dream He Talks to Me,” came out almost four weeks ago. I am now 49.

The two books combined consist of about 130,000 words. That doesn’t seem like a lot when you consider the amount of days I spent ruminating over them, wrestling with them, coercing them into shape, and making them suitable reading while ensuring they were still my truth, but to get to that 130,000 words I probably wrote at least twice as many. That’s fine. That’s how the work gets done.

And I know that writing those two books was where I’ve done my best artistic work to date.

Maybe it’s because the second one has finally been released and I feel I’ve said my peace, or that I took power over the stories that pulse through my life and gave them definitive words so they and the throb of their weight could be released from an internal world only I can feel.

But I don’t think it has anything to do with writing the books at all.

I think it’s mostly due to writing about it, and writing about the rest of life on social media. I think it has to do with the feeling of obligation and culture of scarcity that social media thrives upon — as I’ve said before, artists seem to have only one avenue to connection with our audiences these days and that avenue is through screens, on which we’re supposed to make catchy visuals and quickly readable sentences appear. And we’re supposed to do it with style, grace, professionalism, knowledge of algorithms, tags, handles, perfectly honed pitch, and seemingly little effort and time invested. We’re all afraid that if we don’t participate and participate often, and participating often and well is a part-time job at least, we’ll be forgotten. We’ll lose our place. We’ll lose our chance. We won’t get to make our work anymore because if no one buys it, we’ll have to do something else to feed our families. And no one can buy it if they don’t know about it. So, that leaves one option: post, post, post or be left behind and starve.

I’ve participated in it until I’m all but burned out.

I haven’t known what to say about it until the last few days, and I’ve been turning it all over in my mind — what is it? what is it? this doesn’t mean I’m stepping away. it can’t. it’s not time to. yet — I told you I’d be here and I haven’t been. I quit writing my blog. I haven’t done an installment of On The Record in weeks. No Q & As. I know. Maybe you haven’t noticed, or maybe you have, either is fine, I promise. I think I’m only copping to it because I have this thing about doing what I say I’m going to do.

And now I’m saying I’m taking a bit of a break.

I did deactivate my Twitter account. It felt good, because here’s the thing: I don’t think too many people wake up in the morning, stretch, grab their phones, and start tapping away while watching their character limit decrease because they want to spread love and joy. If those people do exist in large quantities, I’ve been following the wrong people. Most tweeters just seem to want to get their opinion down somewhere — it’s mostly a snark and anger filled echo chamber. I think ten years (my account has been around that long) is about enough of that. I understand its usefulness for journalists, etc. but I’m not a journalist.

If I am going to continue to plow this field of mine, I have to let it go fallow right now. I have an EP coming in early 2022 that I can’t wait for you to hear. News on that soon. Other things are always happening and, of course, I’ll let you know. But I don’t want it to be because I have to, I want it to be because I want to. To get there, I need to fill up my tank.

I just wanted to tell you why I’m quiet these days.

Sending love everywhere,

AM