"Lord Willing and the Creek Don't Rise" WIP Update
Rekindling my Creativity by Going Full Redneck
A Quick Reintroduction to Me and This Newsletter
The last few months have been, frankly, absurd.
At my day job, I don’t recall ever going through a period as consistently intense as the last four or five weeks have been.
On top of that, I stepped away from my newsletter while figuring out the situation with my podcast. To make a long story short, contracts are funny things, and you shouldn’t sign one related to your business unless you have a concrete plan for how it impacts the long-term. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way, and I needed time to make sure I could relinquish my rights to the Inkwell Insights podcast without also having to give up my newsletter. (Something something brand ownership rights, something something losing 70% of any future subscription revenue, something something just not worth it.)
I’ve felt burnt out. Frustrated. Disappointed in myself.
With my podcast and the way I envisioned this newsletter evolving over time, I was really focused on building an audience and a platform that I could leverage for future writing and publishing endeavors. I’m an entrepreneur at heart and a certified business bitch by day, so I was looking at my newsletter and podcast exclusively through a strategic lens.
Only my heart wasn’t in it. Sitting down to draft a podcast script or a newsletter with the intent of growing an audience left me feeling jaded and annoyed, not inspired. If anything, it made me want to write less because it meant I had to spend even more of my free time in front of a computer screen.
One night, while unable to sleep, I rolled over, grabbed my phone, and opened the Notes app. In my restless, unfiltered state, here’s what flowed out:
Going into 2026, I want to disappear into writing more. No podcasting, no vlogging, no paid advertising, no trying to build a brand. I want to delete my Twitter account and the five or so Instagram and Facebook pages I’ve accrued other than my personal one. I want to close my LLC and cancel all the monthly subscriptions that I just don’t need. I’ll allow myself to keep a newsletter for personal reflections I wish to share, and a simple personal website that holds onto my name as a domain but which requires no regular maintenance or tracking analytics. I’m starting from scratch. Over the course of the coming year, I will publish at least one piece of short fiction and one essay. I will write consistently. Attend one writing conference. That is it. That is the extent of expectations I wish to shoulder. I aim to finish a draft of my manuscript. More and more, I want to figure out how to disconnect after work. Turn my brain off. Not OFF off. But work off. Maybe I remove slack and my work email from my phone. I deserve to give myself a year to create rather than capitalize. I’m not ready to leave my job and join a communal artists cult, but I need to strike a better balance so that I don’t reach that point.
The following day, in a slightly rested state with a semi-clearer head, I sat down and journaled about it again. The more I reflected on why I wanted to start over from scratch, the more I realized just how threadbare I was becoming. Or, maybe moth-eaten would be a more accurate description. Not only was I trying to cram more and more and more into my schedule, but I was also confining my writing to a very narrow box of what I thought it needed to be. Rather than using my writing to liberate my mind or process my feelings, I’ve been restricting myself to thinking and writing only about what can build a brand.
And that’s a shit way to approach writing, if we’re being honest. It just felt right to me for a while because it’s the narrative I have been surrounded by for so long.
So, if you will, allow me to reintroduce myself and this newsletter.
My name is Blake Reichenbach. I live in Kentucky. I write essays and speculative fiction. I have a big ol’ dog named Walker– he’s deaf and very affectionate. I’m a gym rat, bookworm, and introvert. I love being alone, in the mountains, and alone in the mountains.
As for this newsletter, fuck brandability. It’s just a writer writing about writing, and the interesting things he dives into along the way. That’s it.
Now that that’s settled, I want to tell you a bit about what I’ve started writing recently…
Current WIP: “Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise”
As I’ve intimated in the subtitle of this piece, I’ve found a renewed vigor to my creativity by going full redneck.
For much of my childhood, I distanced myself from the redneck moniker and the stereotypes of Appalachia. I didn’t want to be seen as a dumb hillbilly. All I ever really had going for me was my intelligence, so it always felt like a kick in the teeth when I’d see Appalachian/ poor Southern characters in movies or on TV, and they were the comic relief village idiot character.
I feared the constraints of those stereotypes and set my sights on the big city (which, at the time, was Louisville, Kentucky —a city that isn’t a small town, but also isn’t quite a big city) and trained myself to speak without an accent.
But, because life is funny, I’ve landed back in Eastern Kentucky and have lived here for about six years now.
Not only have I come to terms with my locale enough to be comfortable, but I’ve also learned to embrace and celebrate Appalachia. The perception of Appalachia that I had as a kid was one filtered by shame and my own fears and insecurities. The longer I live in the region and the more I study it, the more I love it.
And in my current manuscript, I’ve given myself license to explore Appalachia– to embrace how I grew up, paint the intricacies of small towns, and, most importantly, incorporate Appalachia’s rich history of diversity, political resistance, and ecology.
In fact, my turn of phrase– “going full redneck”– was intentional. The term redneck has its roots in the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, which took place in West Virginia. It was the largest labor uprising in the United States and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. Coal companies targeting the United Mine Workers union paid off Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency and the Logan County Sheriff’s office, particularly Sheriff Don Chafin, to bust the union by any means necessary.
Miners were thrown from their houses. Harassed on the streets. Faced threats to themselves and their families.
And the miners didn’t back down. They banded together, supported each other, and continued to resist the coal companies’ exploitation. A symbol of solidarity, they wore red bandanas around their necks to identify each other.
As tensions escalated, Sheriff Don Chafin infamously gave orders to his men to “open fire on any of those redneck bastards you see.”
The Battle of Blair Mountain was bloody, and the National Guard was deployed to bring it to an end.
There’s so much more to say about Blair Mountain, but I’m saving that for another day and communicating the abridged version for now.
The point I’m getting at is that I love living in Eastern Kentucky. Yes, Appalachia has its problems, but no, those problems aren’t because its people are inferior. Appalachia’s poverty is a policy decision. For too long, it has been under the thumb of coal companies that aren’t even headquartered in our state. Appalachia represents a form of American colonialism within our own country: those rich with power but poor in resources exploit those poor in power but rich in resources.
Appalachia is stripped of its coal and has its land destroyed so that people who aren’t even from here or living here continue to get richer, while jobs, opportunities, and stability never materialize in its hills.
Starting to understand this history of internal-colonialism and Appalachia’s beautiful history of resistance and labor organization has removed that lens of shame I looked through as a child, and replaced it with one of defiant hope.
In my current WIP, “Lord Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise,” set in modern-day Eastern Kentucky, I’m exploring themes of defiant hope and homecoming. To give you the CliffsNotes on what it’s all about, I’ll look to the Twitter theme of describing one’s manuscript poorly for comedic effect:
It’s an Appalachian love triangle where a squirrely gay rat boy longs for the straight golden retriever himbo who longs for the nerdy black girl who longs to punch god. Oh, and there are coal demons.
To be a little less tongue-in-cheek, it’s a sort of Appalachian retelling of the Orpheus myth, following three friends who have reunited after several years apart. As they investigate a string of recent disappearances, they uncover a secret history of murder and human sacrifice that has haunted their town for generations. By the time they realize what they’re dealing with, it’s too late. They already know too much, and there’s no turning back. If they’re to survive and bring the truth to light, they’ll have to first descend into the darkness of the coal mines, where more awaits them than ore and dust…
It’s spooky. It draws on magical realism and elements of horror. It’s rooted in classical Greek mythology and Appalachian history. It’s a little gay. (Okay, it’s actually very gay.)
And I’m having so much fun writing it.