New Year Housekeeping

Alright, some of you may have seen the posts I made on twitter or bluesky, and I'm not usually one for new year resolutions or that sort of thing, but with the holidays over, and my tumultuous summer and fall finally behind me, I'd like to recommit to writing stuff this year. If there's one thing I've known over the years I've been doing this (since, like, 2006? how did almost twenty years happen like that?) it's that the thing that helps me the most is consistency and a bit of a schedule--that, and it's a whole lot harder to get back into the habit of things once you've been off it for a while--and I feel like I've been off it for quite a while.

Somehow I used to post 3000-5000 words a week, and I don't really know how I did that for two or three years straight, but I did. Things as they stand, I doubt I'll get back to that level again, but hey, let's go ahead and start a bit smaller scale. One thing I announced is that I'm going to be doing microstories on bluesky and twitter this year. My goal is to do at least 300 of them--but getting ideas moving is really the thing that makes the rest of the process happen. I felt my most creative in the last year in October, when I was doing those microstories, and ended up with a few short stories coming out of them, along with a video idea or two I never got around to making.

So, one thing I miss doing is the suggestion box on here, and I'd like to get back into the habit of doing that again every month. Suggestions might become fodder for microstories, or might become larger stories themselves. I also have a pretty sizable backlog of stuff that I...just haven't posted anywhere from last year. Trust me when I say that I don't really stop writing, even when I stop posting stuff.

Posting stuff has been part of the issue, and this I'll direct a bit more broadly. The real lurch in my output occurred a few years back, when Patreon told me I'd violated TOS, and I ended up purging a lot of stuff from this account out of caution, stuff that's not "lost" perse, but which is now only existing in my very messy google drive. When Twitter went sideways this year, the same sort of thing happened as everything there went wonky. There just aren't very many places where I feel like my writing can be posted without fear of censorship, especially as the US government keeps threatening to pass even more draconian internet laws that will make it even harder to put what I do out there. It's disheartening, and I know that's the point. 

Sponsus seems to have gone kaput. I can't delete my account myself, and no one has responded to my emails as of yet. I know some folks who are on other crowdfunding sites that I might look into this year, but since this is still up and running for the moment, I'll keep going here, even as I look into some other possibilities in the next few months. Bluesky seems descent for the most part, though once it opens up to the wider public, it's probably going to be a disaster--we'll see. In any case, for those who don't have access to codes, here:

bsky-social-zogiv-7vynt
bsky-social-7sbry-7dvqw
bsky-social-stnl7-xcc6j
bsky-social-24rrn-r4udv
bsky-social-76xec-huzdz

Figure those will be better served getting posted here than anywhere else. 

Beyond the suggestion box, I'm not quite sure what the output will look like here in the new year. I think I'm going to try to get one longer piece posted a week--either a chapter from something longer, or a chunk from an interactive I haven't posted, or a longer story based on a suggestion. For now, I think we'll start there, and let's just say...Tuesdays? Sure, new stories on Tuesdays from now on. 

Beyond that, work sucks a lot out of me. I'm usually putting in well over 40 hours a week, which does not leave a lot of room for more than eating and sleeping. The more people who support me though, eventually, the less I'll have to do that, and maybe I can do all of this stuff more instead. Thanks, as always, for those of you who have kept supporting me through all of this, it means a ton.