Without a Sound

A short story about learning to listen when the music stops.

In my last post, I mentioned wanting to share some of the work I’ve been buried in since you last heard from me. Some of it’s music. Some of it’s film. But this one’s different.

It’s the first piece of fiction I’ve written that wasn’t meant to be filmed or performed in— and I can’t believe this is true—twenty years. Most of my writing since then has been screenplays, but short stories are where this all began. I wanted to see if I could still find my way back there.

So that’s what this is: a small experiment I conducted this past spring. A way of checking in with the part of myself that fell in love with writing in the first place.

That’s all the preamble I’ll give it. If you’re interested, stick around after the story. I’ve included a few closing thoughts about how it came together, what I learned from the process, and how I feel about the end result.

Without a Sound

by
Christopher Schrader

Camille sat on the cold steel bench, her legs tensed against its chill, hands folded neatly in her lap. She couldn’t hear the train as it thundered into the station, but she felt it through her soles and up her spine. She liked that part.

The train passed without stopping, just a silver blur and a gust of wind that tossed her hair across her cheek.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small velvet pouch. Inside was a silver tuning fork, worn smooth on the prongs from years of use. She tapped it against the bench, then touched it to the base of her throat. Closed her eyes.

The vibration moved through her.

Her brother had called this the world’s heartbeat. He said once you learned to feel it, you’d never be truly alone.

Camille swallowed the lump forming in her throat and looked down at the crumpled flyer in her lap:

VICTOR ROWAN, COMPOSER - PRIVATE LESSONS AVAILABLE

There was a faded picture of a man in a tuxedo, baton poised mid-air. He looked precise and self-assured, with angular features and neatly combed hair.

She folded the paper and stood up. Another train was coming. She didn’t need to hear it, she could feel the air change as it arrived.

—

Victor Rowan answered the door like he was already tired of whoever was on the other side. He was still recognizable as the man from the photo, but the years had worn him down. With his rounded shoulders and bleary eyes, he had the look of someone who had outlived the best parts of himself. A house after the fire had been put out.

He squinted at the woman on his stoop.

She was young. Small. Coat zipped to the neck, collar neatly turned. Boots worn but polished. A canvas satchel hung from one shoulder, clean-lined and compact. She stood straight despite the chill, expression calm and unreadable.

She held out the flyer.

Victor took it with the same caution you’d offer a suspicious package. He fished a pair of reading glasses from his pocket, gave her a cursory once-over, and then brought the flyer up to his face.

“I haven’t taught in years,” he said, “Where did you get this?”

Camille held up a finger—hold on a second—then swung her backpack around and started digging through it.

Victor shifted his weight, peered past her down the block like he half-expected a hidden camera crew or a street magician setting up for a trick. But it was just the usual neighborhood noise—a man walking a dog, someone yelling into a phone across the street. Still, he looked mildly embarrassed to be part of whatever this was.

Camille pulled out a small notebook, flipped to a blank page, and scribbled something quickly. She held it up for him to read:

Daniel Yates

The name dropped into the space between them like a stone in a pond. He stared at it for a moment longer than he needed to, then nodded once.

“A shame, that,” he said, softer now. “Most people just learn the notes. He heard what was underneath them.”

He looked at her again, more closely this time. The eyes. Focused. Sharp. Tracking his mouth.

He spoke slower, more deliberately. “You’re reading my lips.”

She nodded. Something shifted in his expression.

“You’re deaf.”

Another nod. No flinching. No apology.

Victor stood there a moment longer, like he wasn’t quite sure what to do with the information.

Then he sighed and stepped back from the door.

“Well,” he said, “Come in before I change my mind.”

—

His home smelled faintly of pipe tobacco and the dry musk of old paper. Not unpleasant. Just... still. The kind of stillness that settles in when someone stops letting time rearrange things.

Camille’s eyes moved across the room: a dust-covered upright piano, a cluttered shelf of theory texts and biographies, sheet music yellowing in piles. On the mantel, a framed photo of a woman mid-laugh, a violin tucked beneath her chin. Below it, a bow encased like a relic.

Victor caught her looking. “Claire,” he said. “She played like God owed her favors.”

Camille signed Wife?, then caught herself and repeated it aloud.

“Wife.”

Victor blinked, momentarily disarmed. Her voice, imperfect but steady, was like a familiar melody played on an unfamiliar instrument.

He nodded once, then motioned for her to sit.

She did, carefully setting her bag on the floor like it held glass. He lowered himself into the armchair opposite her, a groan escaping from both man and furniture.

She wrote in her notebook:

I want to write a song. Not one you hear. One you feel.

Victor’s eyes lifted from the page to her face.

She tapped her sternum.

“Here.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How?”

Camille opened the flap of her bag and removed a small speaker and a flat, puck-like device.

Victor leaned in slightly.

“A transducer?”

She nodded once, then crossed to a floor lamp in the corner and tapped it, listening with her fingertips.

Satisfied, she returned to the table, picked up the transducer, and pressed it to the base of the lamp. She flicked a switch on the speaker.

A low hum traveled up through the frame.

Victor slowly rose from his chair, watching as she rested her fingers against the metal.

“Here,” she said, tapping her chest again.

She turned slightly, a quiet invitation for him to approach.

He hesitated, then moved beside her. Two fingers outstretched, he touched the base.

A breath slipped out of him before he could catch it. He’d expected vibration, maybe even force. What caught him off guard was how clear it was. Clean. Like it had carried meaning.

“Vibration as language,” he said.

Camille nodded.

“To feel music.”

Another nod.

“Without sound.”

She held his gaze. Didn’t blink.

“That’s not music,” he said after a beat. “It’s sculpture with a pulse.”

She wrote again:

Don’t need you to believe. Just help me shape it.

Victor exhaled through his nose, long and slow, his mind working through her request. His eyes narrowed.

“No formal training, I take it?”

She shook her head.

“So you wish to bake a soufflé before you’ve mastered boiling an egg?”

Camille pulled the flyer from her coat pocket, unfolded it, and held it up. Pointed at his name. Then at herself.

Not a word, but the message was unmistakable: Teach me.

Victor snorted lightly, more breath than sound, and rubbed at his jaw like it itched. He wandered toward the fireplace, eyeing the violin bow. His hands curled into loose fists, then opened again. Like something in him was trying to get out.

“I’m sorry,” he said. The words landed flat. “I don’t do sentimental projects. Music’s already losing the war to art-school nonsense and algorithmic slop. I won’t help it devolve into…”

He waved vaguely toward the speaker and transducer.

“…whatever this is.”

Camille blinked once. Watched him carefully. Then wrote:

Not sentiment. Survival.

Victor didn’t read it.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he said, walking toward the door. He glanced back at her, something close to regret briefly visible in his expression. But instead of voicing it, he straightened.

“Well. I don’t want to keep you.”

He opened the door.

She stood frozen for a beat, like the room had tilted beneath her. Then she turned and quietly began packing her things.

Once everything was in place, she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small business card. Flipped it over. Wrote on the back in quick, steady strokes.

She crossed the room and held it out to him.

He looked at the front: PRISM RECORDING STUDIO
On the back: If you change your mind.

She gave him a final nod. Tentative. Hopeful.

Then stepped out into the cold.

Victor closed the door behind her. His hand lingered on the knob.

He stood there long after she was gone.

—

Jonas Hobbes padded across the concrete floor in mismatched socks, cradling a chipped mug that read “Treble Maker.”

His hair stuck up in five directions, each one making its own argument with gravity. The studio lights were dim and tinted blue. Blue was his favorite. It tasted like peppermint.

The space itself was a converted warehouse on the edge of the city. Industrial bones, exposed beams, and big empty windows too dirty to see out of. Acoustic panels clung to the walls like puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit. Cables snaked across the floor, weaving between milk crates and vintage gear.

When Camille stepped through the door, he squinted at her like she was a track that had started playing mid-verse.

“You’re early,” he said. “Or I’m late. Or time is an illusion. Could go either way.”

Camille smirked and signed Hello.

He signed it back, then added aloud, “You’ve got his eyes.”

The words hung there, light as a feather but sharp at the edges.

He tapped the floor with his foot, shifting tone. “So. What’re we building?”

—

Camille placed the tuning fork on the mixing desk, then set the transducer beside it. She opened her notebook to a dog-eared page covered in sketches and notes about vibration frequencies, contact points, and the way different materials absorbed sound.

At the top, scrawled in thick, blocky handwriting:

Not noise. Not silence. Music you can touch.

Jonas skimmed it. His eyes lit up.

“Hot damn, Cammy. I think you just jumped to the top of my favorite people list.”

He dragged over a rubber mat and gestured for her to take off her shoes. “Trust me.”

Camille stepped onto it.

He crouched down, slid the transducer beneath the mat, and connected it to a small amp. Then he grabbed a tablet off the desk, tapped the screen a few times, and fed a low-frequency signal into the system.

The floor buzzed gently beneath her feet. It was warm and rhythmic, like a distant drum echoing up through her bones.

“C minor,” Jonas said. “Feels like thick smoke and indigo. Little acidic at the edges.”

Camille tilted her head, studying him.

“Synesthesia,” Jonas explained, tapping his temple. “My brain wires everything together. Notes turn into colors, numbers feel like shapes. I used to think everyone saw sound and tasted music until I was, like, ten.”

He tapped the tuning fork, then held it between them.

“That’s A4. Orange and yellow. Combine it with D and F sharp and you’ve got a summer breeze through wet hair.”

Camille stared at him a moment longer, then spun around, dropped to a knee, and flipped open her notebook like something inside her had just unlocked.

Jonas watched her scribble furiously, a grin spreading across his face.

“Yup,” he said. “You’re my kind of weird.”

—

They spent hours experimenting.

Camille tested everything. She tapped tabletops, ran mallets along pipes, and dragged her fingers over sheet metal and old wooden crates. Some things vibrated too cleanly. Others felt like static. Jonas watched her work like a scientist waiting for a beaker to boil.

While she explored surfaces, he built layers of sound on his laptop. He looped waveforms, slowed them down, and piped them through the transducer until they felt less like atmosphere and more like tempo.

And they logged it all: the color he saw, the shape it took, how it shifted when Camille changed the material or adjusted the pressure. A low pulse at 42 Hz made the copper pipe buzz like it was whispering. A thinner one sang under her palm when she pressed it flat against a hardwood panel.

A bucket of water became a sub-bass drum. Guitar strings hung from the ceiling tensed and flexed like muscle fibers when the right frequency found its way up their length. They discovered that if she held one with two fingers and he pulsed a wave through it, the vibration settled in her jawbone.

When Camille had an idea, she signed it or scribbled quickly. When Jonas caught something new in a frequency, something she couldn’t feel but he could see, he signaled for her to come over.

“That’s charcoal gray with hints of copper. A little unstable. Like missing someone you’re not supposed to miss.”

Or:

“This one’s pale. Almost white. Like forgetting why you walked into a room.”

Every time Jonas spoke, his words sparked new connections. She was thinking faster than her hand could write.

—

Camille stood barefoot on a sheet of plywood, head tilted, eyes focused but distant. The transducer beneath her pulsed out a low-frequency rhythm that rose through her legs and into her chest. She moved her hands slowly through the air, as if trying to trace the shape of the sound with her fingertips.

Jonas crouched beside a speaker, fiddling with the EQ on his tablet. He frowned.

“Too red,” he said. “It’s getting into fire engine territory. Let me dial it back.”

“Red?” a voice called from the doorway.

Jonas turned. Camille followed his gaze.

Victor stood just inside the entrance, his overcoat still buttoned, a skeptical frown etched across his face.

“You didn’t tell me you were working with someone,” he said to Camille.

Camille signed something to Jonas.

“She says you didn’t give her the chance,” Jonas translated. He stood and offered his hand. “Jonas Hobbes.”

Victor didn’t take it. “Victor Rowan. Composer.”

He surveyed the room, brow creasing deeper with each detail: a hanging curtain of aluminum rods, a kiddie pool with a submerged speaker rippling the surface, strips of wood lined with transducers, cables like veins along the floor.

“What is this? A science fair?”

Jonas grinned. “Check this out.”

He flipped a switch.

The room pulsed. Not with sound, but with texture. The aluminum rods shimmered. The water rippled in its basin. The plywood under Camille’s feet trembled like something alive was stirring beneath it. She pressed her hand to one of the vibrating panels, her smile unrestrained, full.

Victor watched her. Not the contraptions. Her.

And for just a moment, the bitterness cracked.

He walked to the wall where pages from Camille’s notebook had been taped up. Sketches, symbols, scribbled frequency ranges, blocks of color coded by feeling. He scanned them silently, occasionally tapping a corner or underlining something with his finger.

“There’s no phrasing,” he said, turning back. “No arc. You’re building movement without resolution.”

Jonas smirked. “You’re the guy who reads the Terms of Service before clicking agree, aren’t you?”

Victor gave him a look. Not defensive, just genuinely aghast that anyone wouldn’t.

“If you want this to mean something, it needs structure. Shape.” His voice eased a little. “What you have here is raw material. Interesting. Emotional. But unrefined.”

Camille signed Show me, and said it aloud.

Victor hesitated.

Then he took off his coat, draped it over a chair, and rolled up his sleeves.

Camille smiled. And for the first time since she’d struck the tuning fork on that train platform, it didn’t feel like she was chasing a ghost.

It felt like she was finally building something real.

—

Camille sat cross-legged on the floor panel, back upright, shoulders still. She looked steady. Calm.

But the vibration that moved through her didn’t ask permission. It slipped past the places she’d trained herself to guard. The tender spots beneath the armor. The jolt wasn’t sharp, but it was sudden. Like the electric shock of a nerve waking up…

Rain on glass. Daniel’s voice humming beside her.

…her fingers twitched. Barely.

Victor stood behind her, clipboard in hand.

“Too uniform,” he said. “It needs contrast. Tension. If you don’t make them want resolution, they won’t feel it when it arrives.”

Jonas adjusted a dial. “First it needed resolution, now it doesn’t deserve it. Look, man, she wants it to bloom, not snap. It’s breath, not thunder.”

Victor sighed. “Fine. Breath, then. But breath builds. It swells before it exhales.”

Camille opened her eyes and reached for her notebook.

What if it’s pressing down, holding the breath in?

Victor didn’t answer. Instead, he turned away, busying himself with a mess of notes he’d already memorized.

—

Later, they sat around a small folding table, eating cold takeout. The studio was mostly dark, lit only by the amber haze of a single bulb overhead.

Victor broke the silence.

“I didn’t stop composing because I ran out of ideas,” he said quietly. “I stopped because I wrote something for Claire, after she was gone. A string piece. Minor key. Fragile as glass.”

He picked at his food without looking up.

“I thought it would help. Get it out of me. But when I played it… she just felt farther away. Like I’d buried her again, only deeper.”

Camille laid her hand gently over Victor’s, just for a moment.

Then she pulled the tuning fork from her bag and set it on the table.

She began to sign.

Victor turned to Jonas for the translation.

“He was driving,” Jonas said, his eyes on Camille. “Daniel.”

She took a breath. Kept going.

“It was raining. His band had just played at this little dive bar. He wanted to stay out, but I had a curfew. We were singing along to the radio. Looking at each other instead of the road. And then… just…”

She jabbed a finger at her ear, clenched her fists, shook them hard, and snapped her hands outward, fingers splayed.

“Loud. Noise.”

A long pause.

“The last one I’d hear.”

Her hands trembled slightly, as though the words were too heavy to carry.

“Music was the language he trusted most. His songs were the only way he knew how to say what he felt. And now… I can’t hear any of them. I can’t hear him.”

She stared at the tuning fork, steadying herself before continuing.

“I thought all of this would be like… opening a window. And maybe he could come through. Just for a second.”

A crack ran through Victor’s composure.

“I used to think music could do that,” he said. “Bring back the dead. Or at least the part of you that died with them.”

Camille met his eyes.

“It can,” She said, shaping the words carefully. “But grief doesn’t leave, we have to learn to live beside it.”

—

The next day, the silence they’d been screaming into finally answered back.

—

The guests removed their shoes at the door.

Each was asked to step inside without speaking. No programs. No introduction. Just a black box theater and a room full of quiet strangers.

The floor vibrated faintly beneath them, like the tingling return of sensation to a limb that had fallen asleep.

Camille stood off to the side, watching them enter. Her hair was pinned back. Her hands were steady. Beside her, the tuning fork rested on a small square of dark cloth.

Jonas moved between stations, adjusting frequencies and testing connections. The lights were low. Dim honey-colored bulbs and faint, shifting hues. Nothing harsh. Nothing loud.

Victor stood in the back, arms crossed. Just keeping an eye on things, he told himself. But he stayed.

When the last guest had entered, a spotlight lit the center of the room. Camille stepped forward. She knelt and set the tuning fork within the beam.

She struck it.

It sang into the quiet. Small, bright, and quickly gone. But the vibration lingered. The floor thrummed. The fork quivered, a ripple locked in place. One guest, an elderly woman near the front, pressed a hand to her chest, as if something had just moved through her.

Then came the first wave. A low, pulsing rhythm through the soles of their feet. Slow and even, like something trying to convince them everything was still normal.

Another followed. Thinner. Sharper. It climbed up their legs, into their ribs, then tickled their teeth. Jaws clenched. One person’s hand curled into a fist without realizing it. Another stepped back, like the sensation might lash out.

The current thickened. More textures crept through the floor and air. Some were warm, like hands on skin. Others needled like static beneath the surface.

Then came the stretch. Frequencies grew long and thin, like something straining to hold on. Movements slowed. Postures shifted. A few glanced over their shoulders, sensing someone who wasn’t there.

After that, the vibrations turned sparse. Uneven. They flickered in and out, like a thought lost mid-sentence. A name you used to know. Someone near the back exhaled sharply, too loud for the quiet. He startled himself.

Then something shifted. The floor settled. The tones softened. A low resonance returned, steady and wide.

The silence held.

No one reached to fill it.

One guest blinked rapidly, surprised by the sting behind their eyes.

—

At the end, Camille stepped into the center and raised her hand.

Everyone stilled.

She struck the tuning fork one last time.

Held it to her chest.

Then slipped it back into the velvet pouch, like she was laying something to rest.

The lights dimmed.

And what had filled the room settled softly, like dust returning to the floor.

—

The street outside the theater had emptied out hours ago, leaving only the hum of sodium lights and the occasional whisper of a passing car. Jonas’s truck was parked at the curb, tailgate down, cables coiled in loops at his feet.

Camille rolled out the last of the gear—a battered road case with tape marks from a dozen past projects. He took it, stashed it carefully among the rest, then turned back to her.

“You know, I still don’t know what color it was.”

She looked at him, curious.

“The performance,” he said. “It kept shifting. Not chaotic, just… unnameable. Like every time I thought I saw it… I mean, really saw it… it moved.”

Camille nodded, slow and sure. Then signed That sounds right.

Jonas nodded toward the truck. “Need a ride?”

She shook her head and replied with a grin, Victor got into an argument with the GPS on the way here. I’d better make sure he doesn’t take a wrong turn and wake up in Atlantic City.

He laughed and crossed the distance, arms open.

Camille stepped into the hug. Jonas held it an extra beat.

It felt like magenta. The color of gratitude.

—

A few days had passed since the performance.

Victor sat at the small dining table with a cup of tea growing cold beside him. A stack of music books lay open, pages marked and corners worn from use. Across from him, Camille leaned over a notepad, her brow furrowed, hand in motion.

He tapped the table twice. Steady. Even.

“Three-four time,” he said, pointing to a notation on the page. He looked at her to make sure she was following. “Not everything has to be in four-four. Waltzes turn on three. Step, step, sweep.”

She mimicked the pattern with her fingers—one-two-three, one-two-three–and smiled.

Victor turned the page, but paused halfway through. He closed the book and leaned back in his chair, watching her.

“You know,” he said, “someone called your performance ‘the quietest earthquake they’d ever survived.’”

She laughed once, like it caught her by surprise, then signed something.

Victor watched her hands carefully, mouthing the words as he tried to follow.

“I like that,” he said, translating.

She nodded.

He stood and moved toward the mantel, his fingers brushing the edge of Claire’s photo. “That piece I wrote for her…” He trailed off, then continued, quieter. “I thought I wrote it to keep her with me. But maybe… maybe I wrote it to let her go.”

Camille stepped beside him.

Victor opened the case and lifted the violin bow. Held it out.

Camille hesitated.

“She’d want you to have it,” he said. “And I think... I think she’d have liked your song. Claire believed in things like that. Art that could reach across the silence.”

Camille took it carefully. It was lighter than it looked. Heavier than it should have been.

They stood there for a while. No words. Just the sun shifting across the wall.

When it was time to leave, Camille reached into her coat and pulled out the tuning fork. She set it down on the piano.

Victor looked at it, then at her.

“You know,” he said, almost smiling, “this doesn’t mean I’m taking students again.”

Camille pulled out her notebook, scribbled something, and handed it to him.

Of course not. You’ve got too much music to write.

Victor chuckled. “We’ll see.”

She stepped back, gave him a small wave, and let herself out.

The door clicked shut behind her.

Victor sat back down in his chair.

The tuning fork caught the fading light.

He reached for his tea.

Then, instead, for a pen.

Camille was a character who’d been following me around for months. Ever since I decided I wanted to start practicing ASL again. I was trying to find a home for her. At first, I thought maybe a short film. That’s when Victor appeared as well. He offered a nice visual and tonal counterweight.

Since I never quite cracked the story as a film, I just took the first two scenes I’d imagined and wrote them as prose. From there, I let the characters tell me what happened next. Two days later, I had a first draft.

Structurally, it was almost identical to what you just read. The only major change came at the eleventh hour, when I added the small exchange between Jonas and Camille after the show.

While I was writing that initial draft, I kept thinking, Where in the world is this coming from? But as I spent the next couple of weeks making revisions, it stopped feeling like such a mystery.

If you’ve read the last couple of posts, it won’t surprise you to learn that I wrote this during a stretch when the nerve damage was so bad I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to play music again. And then, because that wasn’t enough, there came a point when I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to listen to it.

I was dealing with frequent vestibular migraines, and even when there wasn’t throbbing pain, my eardrums were hypersensitive. The sound of someone dropping silverware could send a sharp, stabbing sensation straight through my skull.

Sometimes I could manage music or TV through speakers at a very low volume, but headphones were completely out of the question. So: no movie theaters, no cranking up my favorite albums, and no video editing either. I couldn’t touch the Lucy Chandler web series. I tried, but it was impossible.

By now, I was used to symptoms cresting, receding, going away, and then being replaced by brand new symptoms. I was working with an embarrassingly long list of doctors and physical therapists who were all assuring me that as non-linear as all of this felt, I was healing.

But when you’re neck deep in it, it doesn’t feel temporary. There was always this fear that maybe the worst of it would pass, but some trace would linger.

As usual, we ran all the tests to triple-check everything. And also as usual, I was told to be patient. From the beginning, my neurologist had explained that a full recovery could take two years. This was about 18 months in.

From there, the hypersensitivity to sound did slowly improve. Migraines became less frequent and eventually went away completely. Gradually, I began turning up the volume on everything to see what I could handle.

I remember the first time I was able to go back into a movie theater and leave feeling completely fine. Kristen and I went to see Jurassic Park: Rebirth. It was LOUD. Even Kristen thought so. But I was 100% okay. I hated the movie, but I loved that afternoon.

A very noisy 4th of July celebration a day or two later confirmed what I already suspected: this chapter of my waking nightmare had mercifully come to an end.

After another ENT appointment later that month, I was told that at this point, over-the-ear headphones would probably be okay again, but maybe stay away from earbuds. They’re not inherently worse or anything, but they do have a more direct line to that vestibular nerve. So, better safe than sorry.

By the end of summer, I was back to video editing, back to watching TV at a normal volume, and back to listening to music.

But Without a Sound was written before things got better. Back when I was furious that two of the things I loved most, movies and music, had suddenly become inaccessible. It felt like my relationship with them would have to change.

So, of course, the story that surfaced was about a woman searching for new ways to communicate and redefining what music means to her. That wasn’t on purpose. It was something that smacked me in the face when I went back and re-read it.

None of what I was going through had anything to do with why I’d started re-learning ASL, by the way. That was just something I’d wanted to do for years. But yeah. Hard to ignore the irony.

What did I learn from writing it? First and foremost: I missed this. I’d forgotten how good it feels to fall in love with your characters. And how much you miss them when it’s over. It sounds sentimental, but I really did. Especially Camille. I even considered opening a new document just to have another conversation with her.

I think she’s who I wish I could be. Someone who meets loss with grace and curiosity. That’s something I was incapable of throughout my ordeal. Victor’s more of a cautionary tale. He’s who I could very easily become if I’m not careful. The version of me that lets bitterness calcify into identity. And Jonas? I think he’s pure wish fulfillment: half artist, half mad scientist. Someone who can take your idea and make it real instead of having to figure everything out on your own.

As for the end result… well, it’s like most things I make. I enjoyed the process more than the product. I’m not embarrassed by it, but if I’m being honest, I did second-guess whether or not I should share it. Certain lines or bits of dialogue are probably a touch too maudlin. What can I say? That’s the headspace I was in. I might roll my eyes at that stuff now, but I know it felt honest at the time.

If nothing else, it was nice to be reminded that I can still do this. I can still sit down, chase a story, and discover something true at the end of it. And maybe, with regular practice, I’ll end up with one I’m not quite so reluctant to put out in the world.

So that’s that.

What comes next is the project that became my biggest undertaking and unquestionably took the most out of me. I’d like to wait until it’s officially released so you can experience it first, if you’d like, before I start unpacking it here.

With any luck, we can dive into it in a few weeks.

Take care, friends. Talk to you soon.

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If there’s a topic you’d like me to cover or a question you’d like to ask, send a message to chrisfightsdemons@substack.com. If it’s something I think other readers will be interested in, I’ll add it to the list and respond in a future post.

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