How Did We Get Here?

It's early 2024. Very early.

In the past four years I've written or co-written two books, and spent time writing, tweeting, posting and talking about them. Books are great. They're an interesting kind of collapsed knowledge star that forces all the matter of your thinking for a period of time into one tight, heavy ball. Then, if all goes well, that ball rolls off in different directions, picking up a lot of lint, a fair number of crumbs, and maybe a bit of glitter if you're lucky. Super.

Over roughly that same period of time, because of the weird properties of some distracted brains, including this one, to avoid focusing on the books, and to entertain ourselves through long passages of empty time, travel time, insomnia time and lockdown time, a good eight to ten fictional story concepts decided to pop into my head. One—the first—started life as a 10,000 word, manuscript, which then became eight drafts of an episode script and a 30-page story bible and a pitch deck. The next became a pitch deck, then a 25-odd-page pilot script to enter into some competitions and shop to potentially interested producers or helpful people. It's now creeping into a draft second episode. Both have been co-written, doctored into coherence, and otherwise made alive by Susan.

Now, that means another six or seven stories are running around out there in various stages of dress. One is a first chapter that needs rewriting. One got a teaser 'zine. All got one-page treatments in a nice collection that taunts me as it sits there in the cloud. I'm holding two more at the door that aren't allowed to enter unless two exit. Meanwhile, they keep gathering characters and plot elements and demand to be let in, especially about 4am and on Sundays and in airplanes.

So, what's clearly called for is another place to stick ideas. The fiction will have to stay pinned up in its own mind palace that's more of an unlicensed rave outside of town limits. But to get those going, fingers must be tapping on other keyboards. The other thoughts, ideas, half-baked theories, criticisms, observations and complaints need to be placed somewhere. And that some isn't X or Threads or Bluesky or Masto or Medium, and it sure enough isn't LinkedIn, where I'm simply not pleased, excited, proud or delighted enough to dump interesting thoughts that often. At least not ones interesting to me.

So that's how we got here. I need a piano to play, a cake to bake, some circuits to wire. I need to stop talking to the TV, following my partner around the apartment talking even more, or impolitely interrupting her reading. I should stop subtweeting to people who can't hear it, and venting in DMs. I definitely need to stop tapping long thoughts into WhatsApp and waking friends in other timezones. Writing again is the best way to start writing again.

As a side note, Ghost felt like a good place to set up. I know a lot of people are digging around for allotments right now to move newsletters, social presences, etc. Since I first tried it back at its initial release years ago, Ghost has stabilized a lot, and now provides a tidy place to land "content". Just to give the place that lived in feel, I've ported over some of the longer things I published on Medium over the last few years.

What I/we do for Changeist will still have a couple of homes, both in the quarterly newsletter we send out, and in that same content which lives under what we call "Journal" on our site. This place will be for independent pieces about a lot of topics, a fair amount of which may have a connection to the future as a thing, but isn't limited to things that carry our business flag.

Oh dear, that sounded like one of those posts, didn't it?