When Thomas Peak isn’t active in the online community for experimental literature, he writes novel-like texts about the eternal land of rays known as »Beachlandia.« When he writes, he takes on the persona of Tom Ghostly. Tom Ghostly is a character who thus exists in one way or another—both in his own world and on the fictional level of his »Beachlandia« texts.

Furthermore, Tom Ghostly also serves as a kind of avatar onto whom the author can project himself as a writer to leave behind himself and his frailty (unless it is Tom Ghostly who is projecting himself onto the writer). And last but not least, Tom Ghostly helps him find his footing within »Beachlandia«, the eternal land of rays, and to stagger around in wonder, whether in »ghostly galoshes« or »normal boots.«

Thomas Peak is not an author—and yet he is a writer, sort of. A writer who, on days when he isn’t writing, is no ghostly figure like Tom Ghostly, though he is occasionally called ghostly. He doesn’t like to participate in everyday social life, is pale nearly all year round because he avoids the sun, and spoke little to nothing during his school days, which is why teachers and classmates sometimes called him a »ghost«. He knows that the life of a writer born of dust is very short, and therefore simply wants to write, before his soul evaporates, or until time stands still. He wants to wield his fountain pens and computer keyboards, as if he was to catch the signatures of ghosts, whether they could be considered ghastly or kind. Yes, he’d love to do all of that, pereferably in completely ghostly skin rather than in a completely normal one.

By the way: Thomas Peak is of tertiary importance, at best, when he isn’t writing. But when he does write, his wildly fluctuating nature presumably revolves around the poles listed below. Some may feel able to assemble a sort of persona from all these facets:

✺ Uncreative writing & theory of plagiarism
✺ (Dark) academia novels
✺ Marginal-, foot- & endnotology
✺ »The Waste Land«-scholarship
✺ Poetics of failure
✺ Hauntology
✺ Ergodic & multicursal literature
✺ Etym theory
✺ Trans-generic and eclectic forms of literature
✺ Anxiety of influence
✺ Textual fluidity
✺ Post-Postmodernism
✺ Anhedonic protagonists in literature
✺ Auto-exegetic forms of literature
✺ Monomania in writing
✺ Translatology experimental quasi-translation
✺ Anti-commercial & market-averse literature beyond material publishing constraints
✺ Post-hermeneutic practices
✺ Obsessive relations to writing instruments
✺ Human-nonhuman assemblages in Arthurian literature (thing power & material agency)
✺ Morphology of Kafkaisms
✺ Lacanian Jouissance
✺ Pan-fictionalism
✺ Theories of authorian posture
✺ »Found manuscript«-topoi in literature
✺ Indie-philology
✺ Blanchotian spaces of literature
✺ Drolatic-narratological approaches
✺ Genetic Criticism, especially in terms of non-linearity & modularity
✺ Epistemology of not-knowing
✺ Transgressive Literature
✺ Anti-academian Artistic Research
✺ The uncanny nature of the ontologically foreign writing hands
✺ Topological Writing
✺ Typophasmatic text-phenomena
✺ Material Turn & techno-determinism in literary criticism
✺ Weird occurences of timelessness in scenes of writing