As I look through this site all I see are zombies. Words, ideas, projects all shambling around pretending to be stories. To be a good writer—as with anything—first, you have to be bad. Seeing the bad in your own writing, especially the old stuff, shows growth. When I wrote a lot of this stuff I felt that it was good. I must have anyway, right? But the writer that wrote that is gone and I’m here now. If we wake up every day a different person then hopefully I’m at least a better person and a better writer most days.

It does add particular difficulty to my longer writing projects though. When I write something big I rarely write in a sensible way. I write the scenes that have my attention. Scenes that are important but lack the all-important connective tissue. Coming back to the scene a year later when much of the story has been built up around it with world-building creating “the mountains in the distance” not to mention my growth as a writer and it’s like entering the uncanny valley. Perhaps it’s worse. I’m not just in the valley taking a stroll, I have to figure out everything that’s making it uncanny and fix it.

That’s fine though, none of those projects are published anywhere. My website is a different story, no pun intended. It’s published. It’s live, available to all, and I have the power to take it all down. Not going to lie, part of me wants to. A fresh start. It’s still my right. But I don’t think I will. We climb mountains for many reasons, we want to say we did it, we want to challenge ourselves, and we also want to look back to see how far we’ve come.

I still might take it down to make room for other mountains, but not today. Today, this site is just a monument and a reminder of who I was. Maybe it can also be a window for you and me as to who I am. More self-important bullshit. Just what I thought the world always needed.

Quote of the Moment:

 “I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?”
—Robert A. Heinlein, All You Zombies

Current Reads:

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson