For the actual composition, click here.
this composition is unfinished just like the rest, but this time it’s not on purpose. this one will be finished one day. it is an ongoing narrative, a good old-fashioned fictional Blog.
the writing style was selected in order to challenge myself, to push myself to be even clearer and even more lucid than ever before. this is inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, a book that was a headache to read but felt inexplicably rewarding. you don’t have to know Molloy to read composition no. 8, though. just, I suppose this is the closest I can really come to writing from a genuine “folksy” place. this is my folk. this is DJay Folk. immensely personal, local. this is the logical conclusion of the trajectory of the composition no. series.
the actual content was also selected in order to challenge myself. I want to mythologize the Weed Years, much as I would use Jordan Eats and Rapture to mythologize my early teenage years. the challenge here isn’t necessarily in being honest and open about things, nor in dramatizing real events, but rather in putting words to processes that paralyzed me.
there’s a much easier way to look at this, as this complicated set of requirements basically comes right around to describe a far more recognizable process:
this is poetry. old-fashioned, Symbolic-Surrealist, Metaphysical, every damn book I’ve taken interest in as an adult, poetry. I’m digging into my memories of the Weed Years and breaking it down into fundamental symbols and ideas. then I’m processing the interactions and crystallizing a genuine poetic point out of it.
the story itself openly acknowledges how and why this is so difficult.
I started writing this in 2021. I wrote a whole section of the story in 2023, then I only wrote one chapter of section 2 in 2024. at the time of writing (jan 2025) I have opened some notebooks and done some more rigorous preparation for what’s to come.
hell, in all this time, we haven’t even fucking made it to the Dolls yet. they keep getting brought up, it’s obvious they will be a focus of the narrative. we kinda are coming close to them, though. I’m a little intimidated by the prospect, as I want the Dolls to capture a very specific undefined emotion. so I’ve gotta define that emotion first, then use the Dolls to make the reader feel it.
after the Dolls, there are some other upcoming structural elements I’m planning out at the moment. and eventually, the end of the story will involve the plot of my game Empty City, as I’d been meaning to fictionalize that one for a while. (it won’t be a retelling of it, as Empty City is not about Jordan. but Jordan is a character in the game! and I want to explain what the fuck he’s doing there.)
I do not know exactly how long this story will be. I would like it to be the length of a short novel, but I don’t need to force that if the story doesn’t call for it.
right, I guess I’ll say some of the other kinds of things I say for all the other compositions.
so visually this blog feels more like an actual modern website. that’s got to do with my decision to make the original blog using one of Blogger’s newer dynamic styles, as Blogger will obviously try to use newer styles to capture a modern aesthetic.
with this aesthetic, there is no image in the background, only a pleasant non-white color scheme.
I took the basic aesthetic of the original blog and simplified it further, removing the needless javascript and that confusing table of contents. the text is arranged neatly, as the priority here is the narrative experience, like a book. and even in the story so far, the text has drifted into “experimental” modes which offer a far more visual experience. I have been able to preserve those in the Website release.
there is also, rather front and center, a more obvious visual element. composition no. 8 will feature my art. I am actually drawing things for this story. so far we just have the “splash” image, foreshadowing the Dolls.
even just from this image alone, you can draw some conclusions and expectations for what the Dolls may end up being. the design of this Doll is based on the Rag Doll from composition no. 2. I knew I wanted to bring that dress back, I wanted to explore that Rag Doll idea.
I’ll lay a couple more cards on the table here: I want composition no. 8 to be a scary story. I want the experience of reading it to be bizarre, considered, cerebral, and for it to feel like the reader has just kinda stumbled into horrors they haven’t got the language for. maybe I just really want the composition no. blogs to have led to something substantial, something self-evidently worthy of being someone’s favorite Internet Fiction. the same kinda thing I always want with my projects, but that’s how I know this series is one of my projects: I’m getting optimistic about it!
and, like. what this story is so far is very dense prose getting at some very dense concepts through a short list of Symbols I find very aesthetically addictive.
the Dolls are one of those Symbols.
my self-insert is another.
EAT is another, and EAT does have a presence in this narrative, but it’s indirect. EAT is the second-person this time. this story is being told to EAT.
and then there’s the Eternal Mansions. they are related in some way to the Empty City. they may just be a geographical “feature” in the Empty City, I think that’s a reasonable deduction. but if they are, they’re the same Empty City that I made a game about, it’s the Empty City as I myself see it. it’s a land that doesn’t really exist, and is just an allegory. but we must treat it as if it does, and feel around until we can identify some features this non-existent place actually has.
it’s a perfect place.
it’s not meant for humans.
composition no. 8 will continue. you can be sure of that.
this is where it’s currently at.
I will update it on the Website and not the original blog. I mean, probably.