Just a warning, this is going to be something a little different. A year ago to the day, I started this blog and published my first post on it. It was an essay, not a short story. Sort of. It was a person critique of my own decision-making, written like a mix of an essay and a memoir story. So, I figured, in the spirit of the first anniversary of the site, I would do another such essay. A retrospective, of a sort. Last time, it was on my decision-making regarding the center of my prior life: College. This last year has been trying, but overall, positive, and the center of that positivity has been my blog, my writing.
I rushed to that first post. I was planning on Friday being when the first thing was posted, but I wanted something up before Thursday. See, on Thursday, I was going to an event thing, and I wanted to have something to show people. I had several stories ready to go, but I was committed to stories being posted on Fridays. So, instead, I gave myself some leeway and put out a short essay on my life. It was somewhere between a story and a musing, and it was, to this day, the only one I have posted like that. It was organized, and clear, and above all, well written. It was also was my longest post for a while. I told people about it, and I think one or two actually paid enough attention to look it up the next day and see my first story.
After that week, I really did not pitch myself for a while. I was scared, and nervous, and a whole lot of things. I thought people would not want to read my thoughts. And that all shows in the writing. My first story was written before I started publishing. Scars. It was a darker look, but it treated the darkness as matter-of-fact. Almost like it was meaningless to the characters, just a part of their world. I tried to write something that meant something to me. As I went on those first couple months, the feelings behind the work changed. Pugio and its follow-ups was a story that I had wanted to put on paper for literally years. A concept that I came up with my freshman year of college, but I never really set into stone. But other than the hard historical context I put into it, it was essentially entertaining fluff. Things that go Bump was not the start of anything, it was entirely meaningless. I came up with a fun idea and wanted to see how that looked in a story. It was not until June that I realized I could tell my story in that world, but that is for later. Before that point, the three urban fantasy stories were just three tellings of essentially the same story, but with different players. I even bailed on my theming for the GI series after two weeks. I was planning on just writing stories from the perspective of the monsters, talking about how their life screwed them up, but after Partnerships, I gave up, went more hard science fiction Space Opera than dark personal story in a future world. The only real place I was myself in those first months was in the filler stories. One Perfect Moment, Wars Start with a Bang, and Under Water.
I will not get into what I see as themes here, because that is not the important part. What you, oh readers, read into the stories is what matters. Death of the Author and all that. I am also not going to get into my personal feelings and emotions, because those are best seen through the stories themselves. Writing stories is the expression of yourself through other people’s voices. If you do not believe that stories hold authors own feelings within, you have likely never tried to write a story. This retrospective is focused on the writing itself.
After the first few months, where I was mostly trying to keep things accessible, I sort of gave up. Best thing I ever did, for my numbers at least. See, after three months, my most popular and viewed story was One Perfect Moment. Not one of my epic tales or something bigger than myself. It was a story about a single person trying to find a moment of peace in a chaotic world. And so, I embraced that with Preparing the Project, a SF story that, for the most part, could take place in the real world, just about a working-class single father trying to get by. Rather than continue writing more Umbrianus stories, I wrote what was, essentially, his final tale. His last great hurrah. So that I could move on to more meaningful stories, more personal stories. In Parisian Night Unlife, I found one of my urban fantasy muses in Marcellus. And in the best move ever, I came up with the idea for Serendipity from a fever dream after binging far too much Pretty Little Liars, You, and Riverdale.
July was probably the best month for me, in terms of structure and consistency. See, the only thing that was consistent beforehand was I put out a SF story at the beginning of the month. Everything else was kind of fluid. Until July. July started with a bang. I decided to write a story I had wanted to try as early as April, but never had the confidence in my writing. It was the first story that I had ever written with one person, alone, not interacting with anyone else. That ended up being a sort of theme in the month. Mobster and the Spy was an explanation of a world through the dialogue only. It did not work so well. Discovering the Knight was an Urban Fantasy story entirely from the perspective of someone clueless, trying to figure out what was going on. Sheriff Anton was me literally just writing the previous month’s story from a different perspective, which set the stage for the whole of Serendipity.
If July was me settling into my groove, August was me trying to break it. In August, I delved into myself much more than I had previous months. I embraced what I was feeling. I was happy, and I wrote Just a Start, a proper love story. The next week, I wrote Instability, a story about fear and embracing who you are. Embracing my fantastical muse, Marcellus and the Grande Game was the first real delving into the mind of my favorite vampire. I started reading up on prohibition, for reasons, and that led directly to Fleur, a story about being separate from the establishment but still powerful. Finally, there was Josephus who, other than having some fun characters, was an attempt to write a meaningful, complete, and plot-forward Serendipity story entirely about a single conversation. It is probably one of my favorites for what it was able to do with so little.
September and October were me returning to my comfort zone. I was starting to have less writing time focused on my short stories, so I wrote small personal stories that I was familiar with. Production Management and Promotion were all about people dealing with bureaucracy in an overly complex future. Barroom dance was an idea I had written about a few times already, in different ways and settings, taking an aspect I love from film and putting it in the real world. I finished off the first Serendipity arc with a bit of a thud, but in an examination of paranoia. And I wrote a Halloween story about slashers because I am more than a little obsessed with the genre. The big development, though, was writing what I knew for my Urban Fantasy world. I do not know much in depth, but I know a lot about college, especially small college communities. And so, I began my Nostra Villa Magistrorum tale. Magic college students dealing with magic college stuff. That quickly became one of my favorite stories to write.
November was weird. Not because of the stories, they all fit into the same categories as September and October, but instead because all of the stories were written in October. As my December musing discussed, I was working on a National Novel Writing Month project over the course of November, so I did not write anything new on the short stories front.
Which brings us to Drinking. I mean, December. In one way, it was a continuation of September and October’s themes of consistency. On the other hand, it was a lot more like July. Making a new mold. Getting into a new groove, after a month of not writing short stories. Like July, I brought Galaxy Incorporated back to its roots, with a monster story about being uniquely broken. I started a new world in The Mind Overcomes by dropping the reader in and giving them an explanation exclusively through internal dialogue. I wrote the same story from a different perspective in Another Side of the First Semester. And I tried something newer with Serendipity, writing a new story surrounding the previous one solely about the circumstances of it, instead of just telling segments of the same story. I also put out my first Musing since that first week, this one was on Nano, for no reason other than a desire to complain at the world about it.
After December, January was pretty much set in stone. I wanted consistency going into the new year, and so consistency I gave. A Galaxy story about someone falling back into problematic old habits. A villainous tale about jealousy and scheming in my newest world. The next in the Magisterium’s stories, starting a new semester as I was turning the page of the new year. And the Serendipity story I had been setting up for with the last two months. However, only those four weeks were set in stone, and so I had a week of experimentation fun which resulted in one of my strangest stories. Misdirecting the Truth. Taking a trope from all of the terrible stories of my youth, a continual mental dialogue with one’s self while the story happens around the main character and combining that with a more realistic world. Not a fictional world where things stop for mental conversations, as I did in most of my old stories, but where characters miss things when they are busy talking to themselves. I went out on a limb, and it generally worked alright, overall. I think.
February was me trying to simultaneously continue the consistency, but also experiment a bit, and have some fun with it. I started out with another Galaxy story about falling back into problematic habits, but this one was more about building up the world itself, rather than just being an introspective and somewhat generic character piece. I wrote a straight up noir-vigilante story, but one about how the relatively normal people would deal with rationalizing things that they cannot understand. Then came my Magisterium piece, which was pretty much just like the others, only it ended on a sad note, which I tend to avoid in my stories. Even the ones like Unprofitable, which ended with the central character literally dying, made it more of a tragic triumph than just a downer. I had gone cold, I had done angry stories, I had even written stories with dark humor about sadness throughout, but I had never just wallowed in sadness before. It was an experience. Which led to what I consider my strangest of the Serendipity stories. I honestly didn’t know where it was going when I started it, and just let the character I was creating form up the oddity of the interactions. Keeping it consistent but experimenting within that consistency.
What does that all mean? In a proper essay, this would be the part where I come to some grand conclusion, some deeper understanding. But this is not a normal essay. It is a description of a journey. And this particular journey is still ongoing. I am not a great writer, by any stretch. I am alright, but I am still finding my perspective, my voice, my niche. The best thing that I have ever done for my writing, for my own development, has been this blog. Not just the consistent writing, because I had been doing that since the middle of college, but actually finishing and publishing things on a consistent basis. It changes how I think about my stories. I have always and will always write for an audience of three: me, myself, and I. However, putting my stuff out there has made me actually think about what each story is saying. If they are worth saying to the world at all. The decisions I have made behind the scenes have been as important to my development as the improvements I have made in my writing. So, to come to my grand conclusion, I will go back to the beginning of this blog and expand on it. I made this blog to write, to force myself to write, so I could actually call myself a writer. That was the whole reason. And I would encourage everyone to do something like this, if they want to work in any creative field. But what I have come to realize is that improving as a writer is no where near the only thing that this blog has done for me. I have improved as an editor, both in catching my mistakes and in deciding which stories are right to publish at what times. I have improved my time management skills, to the point that I can tell exactly how long different stories will take me to write based on the themes and world and my own feelings at the time, give or take ten minutes. And yes, I have become a better writer. So go, put your own creativity out into the world consistently, and see how it improves you.
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