a sorta kinda manifesto

"These days, I meet far too many young writers who try to start off with a novel right off, or a trilogy, or even a nine-book series. That’s like starting in at rock climbing by tackling Mt. Everest."

Finally.

After three weeks of relearning CSS, building the site, relearning to hate CSS; it’s finally here. The Wobsite is live. Is it likely that few will see this? Yes. And that’s okay, because YOU’RE reading this. And I want to tell you a story.

I’ve been writing stories off-and-on for the better part of my entire life. I’d write for a few months, drop it, move on to a different hobby, drop that, and go back to writing. I decided around early 2020 that enough was enough, and that it was time to properly stick with it.

The timing of that decision is not lost on me.

I’ve grown to love writing over these years more than any other hobby I’ve ever done, but at the same time some bad habits started forming. Namely, out of all the many big novel projects that I was so sure would manifest into an amazing novel, I didn’t finish a single bloody one.

I did short stories and the like and they usually turned out well, but those longer stories with such extensive worlds always fell apart for one reason or another.

The story not turning out exactly the way I wanted it to in the first draft and giving up. Spending so much time on grotesquely detailed outlines (Down to each action of every scene) that I’d get burnt out. I always found a reason to quit and move on to the next shiny story idea. Instead of hopping from hobby to hobby, I was now hopping from novel to novel. It was poisoning the thing I loved doing. And I was starting to push short stories to the side.

After all, I was working on Serious Novels here. Why would I want to waste my time with shorter stuff (shorter stuff i could use to better learn the entire process of writing/editing)? Not when longer stories were much better vehicles for characters and plot that would never get finished. And that’s how things were for a while.

If I gave up on The Patricians’ Circle, I would move on to Knights in Space. If I gave up on that, I’d work on Annals of The Physical World. If that proved too difficult, I would work on Earth, LLC. If that ALSO failed, hey, I have a new idea for The Patricians’ Circle, I’ll just go start it over from scratch. The old material sucked anyway.

It took until November 2024 for this problem to get too big to ignore. Doing anything for five years can feel like a marathon. Doing something for five years and not seeing results was a death march. And the last three projects were the death marchiest of all:

• Knights in Space (Months spent making a complex outline only to burn out writing. I got so frustrated with the lack of progress and the fact that this is (roughly) my fourth attempt that I stopped. It taught me that I use complex outlining to put off actually writing the thing.)

• Guardians (An “epic” for the sake of making an “epic.” Absolutely demoralising to work on.)

• Patricians’ Circle (I have attempted this fucking story more times that I can count. Had the original idea in high school almost ten years ago and couldn’t let it go.)

They all failed. I felt like a failure. And my brain finally folded its arms and refused to keep working. No more ideas, no more motivation to work. Nothing. After all, why bother if the next one was going to fall apart anyway?

For much of November/December I barely worked on writing. I glacially wrote a few short stories, but coming up with and working on stories now was like drawing blood from a stone. I was worried that my favourite hobby was over and I’d have to go take up knitting or something instead. Until I wrote The Keep.

Being the first short story I’d finished in yonks, I sent it to my nerd friends (love y’all). Not only did they all tell me how much they liked it (delicious external validation), a few asked if I had a website link to chuck em. Now there’s a good idea.

I’d already attempted a website before, but I threw it up in a day and went right back to whatever long project I was working, (And I went by Æthelwulf which…was a choice). It didn’t take long to forget it existed. But instead of throwing up some default site I didn’t care about, why not a custom site? One that I can work hard on, be proud of, and that I can use to show my writing to the world? At least it’s something I can do that isn’t writing.

Then I took it further: Why not also release these failed projects under a permissive Creative Commons licence? That way I can be done with them and relinquish all ownership.

And it worked.

The ideas are back. The drive to write is back. Writing feels incredible again. I thought I’d lost it all (and I probably just needed the break) but I feel more driven than ever. It’ll be short stories for a while as I learn my process of drafting/editing/completeing properly this time, but I’m happy knowing that when I complete them they’ll always have a home.

Special shout out to my nerd friends (still love y’all) and girlfriend. Thanks for pushing me to be my best even when I’m at my worst.