It’s a good question. Sort of existential, unanswerable, all that. I’m immediately rambling. The focus of this should probably be why am I creating a blog in the year of our lord 2026, let alone starting a blog devoted to fiction. I suppose this is a sort of early mid-life crisis. Though depending on how the average lifespan of a heterosexual American man shakes out, who knows if it’s even early.
I guess what I’m trying to do here is sort of kick-start writing again. When I was in college I did creative writing as a major (poetry mostly) but always wanted to really devote myself to writing fiction. After college, I had a few abortive attempts at doing regular serious writing, but between being in my 20’s, being very broke, and having enough good taste to know that what I was writing was really very bad, I sort of fell off. Hard to be disciplined in your art when you’ve got to pay rent.
But, I’m in my 30s now and I’m feeling with a genuine acuity the passage of time. So instead of waiting for the arbitrary turn of the new year, I’m going to declare that this is the start of my new habit.
The goal here: a short story a week, for a year. Certainly, most of them will be bad. But maybe some of them will be good. And they’re gonna go on this blog because where should I put my performative exercise in literary windmill tilting?
I’m choosing to be pretty expansive in terms of genre. I love big, literary fiction but I’ve lately been very into genre fiction, particularly sci-fi works that I missed for one reason or another. So I think the likelihood is that this will lean towards sci-fi (or adjacent) stuff or a bit. The first couple outlines are for that.
Oh, maybe it should go without saying, but no AI will be used in the process of writing these stories. When they’re bad, they’re gonna be bad in the old-fashioned way: I’m no good.
So, let’s get to work.