The Ash Files - Digital + Audio Archive

Both volumes of The Ash Files: the essays written in public and the ones that answered back in private.

Volume I - In Public - looks outward, watching life happen in real time.

Volume II - In Private - turns the camera back, trying to work out what any of it meant.

Together they make the full written record, the performance and the aftermath, the noise and the echo, the version of events that survived being seen.

**Delivered instantly: two EPUB files and the full audio archive.

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IN PUBLIC
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Written in plain sight, these are the pieces that lived on the internet long enough to pick up fingerprints. They were written with an audience, not always on purpose, but always with the awareness of being perceived.

This volume collects the essays that felt the most… relatable, apparently. Some met strangers at the right hour, some were passed around, and others just refused to go away. Together, they capture what it looked like to figure things out in front of people.

They were written in the middle of something — work, endings, the general static of trying to stay coherent while the shape of a life kept changing. They aren’t declarations or advice; they’re notes from inside the noise.

The pieces move through ambition, disillusionment, and the small negotiations we make with meaning. They trace how discipline becomes disguise, how wanting turns into performance, how ordinary days become the record of who you were trying to be.

Volume I is the external part of the archive, the essays that look outward. They observe, they dissect, and they keep their distance… though not nearly as well as they pretend to.

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IN PRIVATE
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These are the ones that weren’t written for anyone in particular. The drafts that outlasted the impulse to share. They were written in quieter rooms, when the performance dropped but the thinking didn’t.

If Volume I was about being seen, this one is about what happens after. The essays here turn inward, not to confess, but to make sense of the private math that public life leaves behind. They catch the small humiliations that come with self-awareness: caring too much, pretending not to, caring again.

They move through solitude, exhaustion, and the slow negotiation between ambition and acceptance. Together they make a record of the private experiments that followed all the public explanations.

Volume II is the inward part of the archive. These essays hang around after the point’s been made, out of habit, mostly.

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THE AUDIO ARCHIVE
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All twenty-seven essays, read by the person who wrote them (me).

Apparently people find my voice calm and comforting. No promises.

These recordings are less performance than evidence, how the sentences sound before they get cleaned up on the page. Some come out steady, some don’t. Together they make the spoken version of a written life: measured, distracted, occasionally sincere.

Audio files will be delivered digitally, but I highly recommend you burn them to a CD, or put them on your retired iPod, or record to a cassette (or multiple) if you’re cool enough to still own a walkman…

**On shelves (digital and otherwise) for a while, not forever.