An Update, Optimism, and the Road Ahead
Meandering self-critique/discovery disguised as a blog post
Going forward, Substack will be the new home for the things I write. There are a few reasons for this; primarily, I gain little benefit currently from hosting everything myself. Server costs are one thing, but I’d rather redirect the time and energy I would have spent on development upkeep actually writing. Besides, I had basically created a worse (albeit much more customizable) WordPress. I may one day retreat to my custom solution, but for now Substack seems a more than adequate replacement.
I’m writing this partially because I realized I have not posted anything in nearly a year. That is not to say that I have been entirely idle. Since mid-2021 I have been working on a large, long-term project. Progress has been slow, and what started as a patchwork of interesting ideas has exploded into an ambitious behemoth. I have grown quite attached to this thing, but I am afraid I will have to shelve it in favor of smaller projects to help me wrap my head around the scale of effort that will be required to complete it. I am being incredibly vague about this project because I’m aware that once it is shelved, it may never again see the light of day. But I hope otherwise.
A project I started much more recently, and one I can be less vague about: I’m writing a short story for Passage Prize 2. I’m not sure how well the idea behind my story fits the competition’s theme, but I will submit nevertheless. If I don’t make it into the published volume, I will post the story here, of course.
I’m quite excited about this story. It will be my first work of prose since Emotionsmith, and although it bears a lot of similarities to that story, you could say it has something very different at its core. My perspective on a lot of things has changed in the last three years, and more importantly, I feel like I can write with purpose now. When you really dig into Emotionsmith, beneath all its overloaded symbolism, it’s just a story about a young man trying to get over a failed relationship. Am I being grossly reductionist about my own work? Maybe. But for being 6300 words, in retrospect, I don’t think Emotionsmith has a lot to say. “There is no magic solution to your problems” and “You have to do the hard thing before your life can improve.” These are true, but they’re kind of obvious and unhelpful. What interests me these days is what comes after. Being told that improving your life is hard is one thing, but what does that look like? How do you start? How does it change you? Showing the end result—or at least the process in action—provides a far more compelling and optimistic message.
I don’t want to understate the importance of optimism. Being cynical is too easy in current year. Cynicism is for degenerates and doomscrollers. I should know, I’ve struggled with cynicism (both specific and general) for years. It has a way of eating at your moral foundation, turning purpose into uncertainty and direction into aimlessness. These are the conditions under which I labored while creating Emotionsmith. I can point to specific works of fiction and events in my life that I drew inspiration from, but the truth is, I don’t know why I wrote Emotionsmith the way that I did. I don’t know what, if any, transcendent value I was trying to reach in writing it. It is story for the sake of story, which does not necessarily make it bad, but it does make it hollow.
If you tried to explain all of this to 2019 me, I don’t think I would have understood. Now I do. Apparently 2017 me understood it as well. Upon re-reading Kingdom of Dust, I was surprised at how based the message is relative to how little I understood about storytelling at the time and how little effort I put into writing it. There were a few poems and stories from my old site that didn’t make the cut when I transitioned to Substack, but Kingdom of Dust has aged remarkably well. Maybe it was luck—or divine inspiration.
I digress. Does all of this mean my next story is going to be a masterwork of fiction that both presents a beautiful message of hope and doesn’t lose sight of the sobering reality of our world? I don’t know, but I’m certainly going to try. I’m tired of not trying. I’m tired of wasting my time on hollow things.
I’m going to do the hard thing. I’m going to create something beautiful, cynicism be damned. And if I fail? I’ll get back up and do it again. How’s that for optimism?
