Sharing My Short Stories
Making more time to write and share the work that matters most to me
Feel like sending a little extra love my way? ↓
It’s tough to have to treat the work that matters most to you as “just a hobby.”
Every day, I think about the first draft of my novel, which has sat largely untouched for the past month: with each passing day, I find myself hoping that the next morning will be the one when I finally start working on revising the 60,000-word manuscript into an expanded 80,000+-word second draft.
But working on a project of that scale requires a great degree of time and focus, both of which have been in scarce supply lately.
I’ve been moving through a period of major transition in my life since last Fall, when I made the decision to move to Savannah, GA with my partner, after having lived in the Boston area for nearly a decade.
Savannah is a wonderful place, and, for reasons that deserve their own future post to explain adequately, a much better place for me in terms of creative and professional opportunities than Boston ever was, as much as I loved living there for plenty of other reasons.
Never have I settled so quickly into a new city, which is partly a testament to my own growth as a person but also, I’m convinced, a product of the unique social and professional culture of Savannah.
I’ve had the exhilarating privilege of being introduced to so many wonderful entrepreneurs and community leaders in this city who’ve become not just mentors and role models, but dear friends as well. I’ve been drawn into worlds I never imagined myself being a part of, in a mostly positive way.
Those opportunities and connections have been integral to my feeling of connection to this new city, and they continue to open doors that position me well for growing my own business.
But the more time and energy I sink into those things, the less I have for writing.
How do I keep all these balls up in the air? How do I balance the time and energy I spend on athletic hobbies, social engagements, and the ever-shifting tectonic plates of my creative and professional life?
How do I split my time between working on my own creative practices, including my public-facing Substack writing and my fiction writing (which is largely being kept in a private incubator for now), building my own business, and earning income by working for other people’s businesses and/or creative projects?
Having too many things worth pursuing is a good problem to have. I recognize that. But it is a problem nonetheless, one that I’ve been eager to work toward solving.
How do I start bringing some of this into focus, so that the dozen or so paths I find myself half-committing to can be collapsed into a manageable set of two or three that I can pursue in full force, with all the resources I have lying at my disposal?
And, in the absence of any ultimate answer, I find myself falling back on the tried-and-true provisional answer of:
Get back to the creative work that matters most to me.
Make more time for writing fiction.
Unquestioned assumptions: a thematic lens
It’s wild to think I’ve been writing on Substack for nearly two years now, totaling over 100 published posts.
That road, too, has forked in many different directions, such that it’s difficult to pin down what exactly the identity of this publication is. What began as a publication dedicated to essays on theology has taken many experimental twists and turns that ultimately led me toward understanding that the writing that matters most to me is fiction writing, something that’s still very much a work in progress.
As I’ve learned to write fiction over the past year, I’ve learned a lot about myself as a writer, with one of the more valuable lessons being that there is a stable bedrock on which most of my writing has rested for the past two years.
My writing, from my earliest theological essays, to my latest works of fiction, seems to circle around a single thematic lens:
The exploration of unquestioned assumptions.
I think I owe a lot of this to my academic background in the study of religion and theology, which is fundamentally a subject of mystery, ambiguity, and the genesis and exploration of questions that remain unanswered, often intentionally so.
It started off with me exploring unquestioned assumptions like:
We’re all talking about basically the same thing when we use words like “God” and “religion” (we’re not)
If the organized religious systems we were raised in don’t sit right with us, we can safely conclude there’s nothing of value for us in religion in general (we can’t)
To be “good” members of a particular religious or spiritual tradition, we must accept all of its canonical doctrines and practices (why?)
As I’ve moved more into fiction writing, the questions have changed, but the lens hasn’t. In my fiction, I’m still trying to open the pages of books that have been prematurely slammed shut. And I’m keen on doing so because my theology background has exposed me to many unfamiliar perspectives on deceptively simple questions.
We assume that making things easier and safer is good, but thousands of years ago, Daoist sages asked us to consider the merits of the exact opposite perspective. So, I wrote a novel about what that alternate perspective would look like in our world today: what would it look like for a town to intentionally introduce obstacles in that made things harder and more dangerous for its citizens?
We assume that, when we die, we either all go to the same place, or our destination is determined based on some divine judgment of how we lived our lives. But certain ancient texts and schools of thought in Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance, have argued that we have much more agency in this process. So, what if you died tomorrow and had to choose what happened next? How prepared would you be to make such a decision? I wrote a short story exploring that exact, very real possibility.
We assume that veganism is the ultimate commitment to do no harm to animals…until you realize that the modern-day adherents of Jainism, arguably the world’s oldest religious tradition, continue to wear veils, carry brooms, and shuffle their feet to prevent themselves from accidentally killing any tiny organisms by breathing them in or crushing them. That’s not to say that vegans aren’t doing “enough,” but it is worth pointing out that everyone draws a line in the sand on which lives are worth protecting and which are not: human vs animal (and, unfortunately, “us” humans vs “them” humans), mammal vs fish/insect, macroscopic vs microscopic. And what’s more important than where you draw the line, I think, is how conscious you are of which lines you’re drawing, on what basis you’ve drawn those lines, and whether or not you think those lines might be worth re-drawing over time. Those are among the considerations I plan to explore in a future story.
Stories for Substack
So much for the past and future. What about the present?
For the past several months, I’ve been intentionally withholding my fiction writing from Substack because self-publishing something, even just on a blog, often precludes you from getting material published in magazines or in print.
However, it’s not fair to you and not fun for me if I continue to keep the work I care most about behind closed doors.
So, I’d like to keep editing my novel, I’d like to keep working on my business, and I’d like to keep submitting short stories to magazines and contests. Those projects are all going to be slow builds.
In the meantime, I find it unsatisfying if I’m only working on slow-building projects. That’s why, going forward, my goal is to write more short stories, so that I can write some specifically for contests and magazine submissions, and others for my own audience on Substack.
That’s the goal. Wish me luck.
And thank you for sticking with me through all the growing pains of my writing over the past year.
Thank you for reading! You are the chillest!
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