this doesn’t have to be a hard thing.

you could put in a thimble full of creativity
into a sea of indifference,
and change your entire universe.

you don’t have to come
crashing in like a thunderstorm,
you don’t have to write
the Great American Poem.

just write a little bit every day,
and stretch your spirit far and wide -
don’t be embarrassed to share,
don’t be scared anymore

this is your permission
to write bad poems
as long as you’re writing poems,
and I promise you won’t regret it.

I’ve started my own poetry writing challenge because I can’t find one I like enough to stick to every day.

I’ll give you three words every day, you post a poem containing all three on your own Substack, then link back to the daily note where you likely found me.

This is day one - go for it!

Your three words:

Thimble, Thunderstorm, Regret

I’m writing a novel this November, and many of my friends on Substack are, too.

NaNoWriMo died a sad death, so now I guess we’re just calling it Novel November and participating on our own, or joining challenges on different websites.

Personally, I am using the free version of Reedsy Studio because I like the way it tracks the words I write each day, and as a lot of other cool features, too. But I am not here to talk about writing apps, I’m here to talk about the things that make writing your novel more difficult, especially when you are trying to cram a (good-ish) story into 50,000 words in 30 days.

I’ve been doing this novel writing challenge for more than 15 years, I’ve won and lost, I’ve hosted write-ins, and I’ve given the advice I could to the people who would want or need to hear it.

But here are some less obvious things you might struggle with while trying to reach 50,000 words:

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1. Resenting the time it takes to write.

Here’s the thing about writing a novel in November - you have to write the whole novel in November. If you want to “win”, anyway. To some this is easy - I can write fast when I am in a real groove, and I can also force out 1,000 words when it’s the last thing I want to be doing.

But others? Others may not be willing to give up the time it takes to write every day. Ideally, you’d be writing 1,667 words a day to reach 50K by November 30th. That’s a lot of no-TV time, that’s a lot of saying no to dinner plans with friends, that’s a lot of time you’re taking out of your life for an arbitrary goal with no real prize, other than having it finished.

If you aren’t prepared and willing to spend more time than usual on your writing, you probably aren’t ready for a challenge like this.

2. Realizing that thinking about your novel is not the same as writing it.

Sorry, friends, but when it’s crunch time, you can’t just think your novel into existence. All the hours you’ve spent hashing out plot points, scenes, and characters don’t matter. You can plan all you want, but you have no idea what’s really going to happen if you get to day 20 and still don’t know what the fuck you are writing because your outline has gone off the rails.

Novel month is not for planning, that’s what October was for.

Don’t over think things and try to make your first draft perfect. Your first draft will never be perfect, that’s why it’s just the first draft.

3. Buyer’s (er, writer’s) Remorse.

Have you ever poured hours, days, even weeks or months into a story you’re writing and then just stop because a “new and better idea” has just come to mind?

I have! I have started novels and abandoned them more times than I can count, and almost every time I stop writing one is because I’m so excited to try writing another.

You can’t do this during Novel November. You have to abandon the shiny object syndrome that might otherwise catch you in it’s grasp and pull you from one project to another. On day one, you have to be locked in and ready to go, and definitely can’t decide to start over on day 20.

I keep mentioning day 20… there’s a reason for that I’ll get to later.

4. The “Am I Worthy?” Question

When you have big ideas, (and I often have very, very big ideas), you can’t beat yourself up if you don’t bring forth a torrent of words or if you’ve somehow gone astray of the day’s target word count.

You need to remember that your worth as a human, and human writer, has absolutely nothing to do with your word count at any given time.

Is writing 50,000 words in 30 days a challenge? Yes, it is, but you’re the one who gets to decide what “winning” means to you.

What I’ve found, is it’s best to compete against yourself, not other writers. Try to beat your best self, and forget about what anyone else might be writing, or how much they have written, because it won’t serve you well.

Another thing? You don’t have to feel “worthy” to write a novel. Writing a novel is as hard and as simple as this: you just have to be consistent and keep putting one word after another.

5. Living With the Awful Fact of a First Draft

I could just say “living with an awful first draft” because that’s what we all have to do when we strive to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

The point here isn’t to make it pretty, and it isn’t to make it perfect (what the hell is perfect, anyway)?

First drafts are for getting the bones of a story onto the page. They don’t have to have great dialogue, you don’t have to have perfectly fleshed out characters, and you don’t have to remember every detail of your book in the first go-round.

I once wrote an entire novel and then in the re-read, I realized I’d left three whole characters on a planet! I just forgot about their side-quest and kept moving, and when I went back, I didn’t even know what I was thinking in the first place.

That’s what first drafts are for. They’re terrible, they’re awful, they’re messy, and if they’re done well, you can read them over and say “What the hell is this shit?” and then get down to the real work of revision which for me is the hardest part.

6. Making it to Day 20

What’s the deal with day 20? Why do I keep mentioning it?

Well, after all these years of trying to write 50,000 word novels, because I didn’t always make it to the end, and sometimes I abandoned it within days, I’ve learned something special about getting to day 20.

If you can make it to day 20 and still want to be writing your novel, you’re golden.

If you can make it to day 20, you will be so close to the finish line, you won’t be able to let yourself give up on your story.

Day 20 is the turning point - it’s when you’ll know whether you’ve got a heaping pile of shit or a folio of gold, and either way, you’ll tell yourself that you might as well finish now.

You’ve gotten so far. How can you not finish now?

To those who are embarking on the ship of Novel November, I salute you!

I may not be your captain, but I can help a little with being a guide.

My grandpa lay on the couch with his shirt off and pants unbuttoned, looking like Sasquatch trying to sleep off a bender.

“He does this every year,” grandma said. “Just ignore him and come back in the dining room, we’re sharing tales.”

My family sits around the table; everyone is laughing but I’d missed the joke.

Nevertheless, my aunt Gina holds the floor as the family jokester, and goes on telling stories.“Do you remember the time he got up and his pants just went right to the floor?”

I remembered being horrified by seeing my grandfather in his tighty whiteys, and running out of the room before he could pull them back up.

“And you, Nicole,” aunt Gina says to me. “Do you remember the time you were running around with the carving knife? You must have been about nine.”

“I remember,” I say, but I hadn’t just been running around with it, I’d been trying to kill my cousin, Bee, but I was never able to catch her.

Bee the blond, Bee the beautiful, Bee who would never be called Beatrice in public and hated her parents for choosing that name.

There she was, across the table from me, all these years later, and now she boasts about her job, and the money she makes, and shows off her huge engagement ring while I seethe with jealousy.

I pick my fork up from the table and tuck it into my skirt.

“You used to be so jealous of me,” Bee laughed. “All the boys liked me more.”

Everyone laughed. It was supposed to be funny, but it wasn’t funny to me. I put the fork down and pick up the spoon instead. I want it to hurt when I use it to pry out her pretty blue eyes.

This was written for the Liminal Space Creative Micro-300 story contest. I didn’t follow the rules for the game, but I still had fun writing it.

I hope you enjoyed reading it!

010 - Dr. Viktor Sokolov, Astrophysicist

It had been rumored for years that there was a “Ghost” living in the salt mines on Mars. A man who looked just like someone they used to know but could barely remember. When I was assigned to this project, it was disclosed that a certain individual had faked his own murder to escape Mars Station 3, and I was given the location of where I could find him for the only interview he’s ever done in his life. I am surprised that he is happy to see me, but it would be an understatement that he was excited to share his story.

Hello, Dr. Sokolov, I have been looking forward to meeting you for quite some time.
I am glad someone finally found me out here. How did you find me?

That’s not important. Just know there are always eyes in the sky, so to speak. Are you ready to get started?
Yes, yes, let’s get started!

Alright. Dr. Sokolov, can you explain your version of the events that happened at the observatory the night you fought with Dr. Witlock?
I am happy to explain. I have been wanting to explain for a long, long time.
Of course, you know I was there just after the discovery, when all of us were in the room, all of us arguing over what to do, and whether to tell anyone.
Well, I was already convinced that Wormwood would be a direct hit to Earth, and we knew it would be in the next four months. That’s not a lot of time when you have 10 billion people on Earth to evacuate, if it was even possible. I wanted my countrymen to have all options possible to evacuate, and that meant getting the truth out so people could start to act.
But not just to my country, that is the thing everyone got wrong. I was not trying to notify the Russian authorities. I was trying to send a message to every professional astronomer I knew, and a few amateurs who were always loud on the internet.
I wasn’t trying to steal secrets and let Russia have a leg up on the evacuation. I wanted everyone in the world to know about Wormwood, so they could make the choice to evacuate as soon as possible.

All this time, people believed Witlock attacked you because you were sharing secrets with your government? Why didn’t you ever try to tell the truth?
Who would have believed me? Who in that room would have taken a moment out of their own yelling at each other to listen to someone like me? No one wanted me in that room in the first place, they were all suspicious of me because of the old wars.

Did people get more suspicious of you when the Russians started evacuating people to Mars Station 1, before the announcement was even made?
Oh, of course, of course they did. But it wasn’t me. No matter what anyone thinks, it wasn’t me who got the information to our government.
There were so many people who hated Russia after the wars, so many countries turned their backs on us forever, and I don’t blame them necessarily, even though I loved my homeland and was proud to be part of Roscosmos.
I just never thought anyone would actually want to kill who they thought was the messenger, but here I am.

How did you get here?
Well, I heard rumours around my residence block of MS3 that someone had a… medication they’d developed to assist in self-death. There were a lot of people who opted out of life once they got to the station and realized they were just the most basic of living quarters, and, really, not much of a life if you didn’t have a purpose there, a job. You were lucky if you had 100 square feet to yourself up there, and I don’t miss it.
Anyway, there were rumors that someone was going to inject it and kill me in my sleep. Obviously, I didn’t want that to happen, so I had to immediately take measures to stop it.

You faked your own death. How was that possible on MS3? They were still ejecting the dead into space back then.
Yes, indeed they were, before all those bodies became space junk that were a nuisance to every flight leaving orbit.

Sokolov rolled his eyes and put a hand on his forehead.

It’s still hard for me to believe how stupid people can be sometimes. Not because I’m very smart, but because so many people have no common sense. And, yet, that’s how I escaped…as a piece of space junk.

But how?
I had a few friends on MS3 who didn’t want to see me dead, so they helped me out. They had to steal me a spacesuit that barely fit. I was so scared the whole thing was going to fail because I was an inch too tall for the suit, but it fit.
They put me into a cargo container and shipped me off to Mars. It was really a lot easier than I ever thought it could be.
When I reached Mars, I was smuggled further away, down here, in the salt mines. This is probably the hardest part. This is the one thing that makes me question whether I still want to be alive.

You would choose self-death over working in a salt mine?

Sokolov shrugged and looked at me with sad, teary eyes.

It’s lonely down here, Mr. Eggars, and to go from being one of the top astrophysicists in the world to being a salt miner is, well, it’s an entirely different kind of life and certainly not one that I would have chosen for myself, but beggars can’t be choosers, isn’t that what they say?
I miss my work. I miss staring into space, looking at stars, finding new planets, doing all the math to see how far they were, and to track all of the moving things in space… I miss it.

Is it possible for you to make it out of here and go to an observatory?
No, I am trapped here. It hasn’t been long enough, I don’t think, for people to have forgotten my face. Especially if I were to enter an observatory.
I’m the Ghost of Mars, right? I’m that familiar face that haunts people in the mines, the one they can’t make sense of… It’s a strange life here, and I don’t really like it or want to be here anymore.

I’m sorry to hear that, sir.
Don’t worry about me, Mr. Eggars. Years ago people wanted to kill me because they thought I was giving the Russians a leg up, when really I was trying to save the world.
Look how great that turned out for me.
Now, the medication they were going to poison me with is sitting right there next to you in that vile on the shelf. I can go anytime I want. And now that I’ve talked to you and had the chance to tell my story, well, it probably won’t be long until I’m gone.

Does anyone else miss old school blogging, like back when we had Livejournals and ugly Blogspots, and if you were cool and advanced you’d use Moveabletype? What about Vox dot com? Does anyone remember when that domain was a site like Tumblr and Blogspot had a baby? It was amazing, it was brief, it’s probably almost forgotten.

Now, we can think to ourselves, no one is going to forget Medium, or Substack, or Squarespace… but maybe we will one day. I’d like to think that good things will just keep going on forever, but we know that isn’t realistic or true.

I’ve been enjoying Substack lately because it has no barriers to entry, and it’s easy to get eyes on your work via the Notes part of the platform. It’s the only real social media I use nowadays, and I honestly love it because it’s so easy to curate the feed of what you read, and people are just nice there. It’s like the Minnesota of the Internet.

I haven’t been using Substack long, not consistently anyway, but I reached my first 100 subscribers in less than a month, and I get meaningful feedback on almost everything I write.

Medium, sadly, has not been doing it for me lately. I used to write there under a pseudonym and did very well for a while. I could make a few hundred dollars a month if I put effort into it and I was gaining on 10,000 followers when I stopped for various personal reasons.

I also have an account under my real name, but that one…

I don’t know what happened to Medium between the time I had a real following and the time I took away from my personal account, but it makes me sad.

On the other hand, the sadness I had over Medium forsaking my posts actually gave me a huge interest in jumping on the bandwagon of something totally new - TK.

What the hell is TK, you wonder?

TK is what writers use as a placeholder when they want to revisit something in their draft. TK is easy to find because there are so few words with that letter combination.

But now TK is something else, and I am a proud ambassador here to tell you why you should give Medium and TK a shot, even if you aren’t married to Medium (yet).

TK.XYZ has something called the Public Journal, and it’s exactly what it sounds like.

It’s a place for people to free write, brain dump, and BLOG like we used to about our lives - the boring, mundane, but often most important parts of our lives.

I haven’t been posting there consistently though I have been using TK for most of my article drafting, even the things I don’t post on Medium, but yesterday I was having a hard time and really needed to rant, and for some reason it just came spilling out in my Public Journal.

I was ranting about how I couldn’t afford anything, how hard a time I’m having job searching, how I will never retire, how I am hopelessly broke and just overall feeling hopeless.

I ranted, I raved, and in the end, I apologized and promised I wouldn’t be this way all the time, and then someone commented:

“Just so you know, some of us think it’s OK if you do this all the time. I think this is supposed to be a safe place.”

And I almost wept, because I know she’s right. I’ve gotten nothing but support and good feedback from the people on TK. It’s fun to talk with and get to know people through their daily missives and comment sections, and there is a “Daily Note” feature that has become indispensable to me.

Every day TK makes you a Daily Note in its own section that automatically comes with a local weather report and a To-do list carried over from the day before. You can expand on the template and edit it to make it your own by adding dividers, moving sections… and I am not even going to get into the AI of TK, because, well, I don’t use it, but I know lots of people do and love it!

(That’s right, TK has their own, built in, COMPLETELY OPTIONAL AI assistant, and I just have never felt the need to use it. I don’t use AI in my writing except to occasionally line edit things, but it has no place in my creative writing.)

Anyway, that Daily Note is my second favorite feature of TK after the Public Journal, and it makes it even better to have an iPhone home screen widget that I can click on whenever I want and get right to that Daily Note with nothing in my way.

And just to drill it in one more time how much this Daily Note has affected my daily workflow - I have almost 2,000 notes in Apple Notes, and I have barely opened that app in months. All of my notes are on TK. All of my drafts are there, because it’s a beautiful place to write and keep things organized by tags (another great feature!), there’s little reason to use other apps because TK has replaced so many.

Am I a champion of TK? Yes.

Am I getting compensated for this? No.

I am just a proud ambassador doing my due diligence, and inviting you to take a visit to TK.XYZ - I don’t think you’ll be sorry, I think you’ll be enthralled.

There were shrieks and wails of fear and delight coming from people on the rides, and the chiding carnies when you passed them on the midway. The high laughs of the wandering clowns, the squeaks and squeals of the ferris wheel, the endless song of the carousel, all of them flooding into her ears and making her pulse quicken.

She came alone and did so on purpose, she didn’t want to invite anyone on her night’s adventure. Despite all the distractions, she went directly to the House of Mirrors, ignoring the heckles and bells of the midway.

“Four tickets,” the carnie said to her after she stomped up the shaking metal staircase.

She handed him the tickets and he let her pass behind the black curtain, and as it fell back into place, the sounds of the carnival melted into the background. She stared at herself. And herself. And herself.

She started walking, and before she knew it she was slamming into a mirror, turning, slamming into another. Around and around she went, seeing hundreds of herself, copy after copy in front and behind her. When she turned, all of her turned, and she felt her skin prickled with goosebumps, fear that -

“Gotcha!”

She screamed and jumped and then turned and fell into his arms.

“I thought I would never find you,” she said.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t,” he said.

They kissed, their love reflected back on them a million times.

“Are you ready to get out of here?” he asked her, and she nodded with a smile.

“We have to get out of here first,” she said.

He grasped her hand and they started walking through the House of Mirrors, he led her and felt his way forward as she watched their reflections go on forever in the glass, like she wanted to go on forever with him.

“Come on,” he laughed, and when he turned back to look at her, it happened.

His shoulder went through the mirror first, then he started falling, pulling her down, too.

The sound of the shattering was spectacular, and he held his arms around her, protecting her as the mirrors fell and broke one by one, until they were laying alone in a dark, empty room that now had a shimmering floor.

“What the fuck did you do?” They heard the growl of the ticket taker, and saw him coming toward them, crunching his way over the glass.

“Let’s go!”

The two lovers jumped to their feet and they ran, dodging past the carny that was too slow to catch them.

Out on the midway, they ran with their hands clasped tight, ignoring the whoosh from the Tilt-a-Whirl, the wails from the Zipper sending its riders flying in their metal cages.

“Do you think they’ll catch us?” she asked.

“What if they did?”

“They won’t,” she decided. “We’ll keep running, together, forever.”

“That’s far enough!” they heard a man shout, and they stopped and turned.

The police.

They were so fucked.

This was written for ’s Horrorless Halloween writing challenge - to write 500 words Halloween adjacent, with the theme of “Fairgrounds” and to… not write a horror story.

I adore these writing prompts and think I may start doing them as much as I can!

009 - Trevor Blanche, News Anchor

Trevor Blanche has been living on MS3 since the exodus from Earth. He is a popular man on the station, being that he is still doing his job as a news anchor for his station and a co-anchor for all three. Even though he is getting older, he is still a very attractive man with smooth skin, sparkling blue eyes, and a smile that lights up a room.

Wow, I never thought anyone would care so much about what I have to say, but that’s fine, I am okay with being on the other side of the table, so to speak.

I don’t think there’s anyone left that knows about Sokolov and how he influenced things.
No? That’s a shame. I know billions died and how lucky I am to be here, and even the ones left alive, we’re getting so old now. But I’d be happy to help your cause in any way. I’m just not used to being the one who’s interviewed.

I’m sure you’ll do fine. Please, tell me, did you first hear about the asteroid on the night of the announcement?
No, that’s the thing that made this all so exciting and dramatic. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have used that word, exciting. I guess it’s just that I didn’t know at the time that the asteroid was really going to hit us. I mean, come on, right? What are the odds? That was a joke, if you couldn’t tell.
Anyway, I’m sure you know there were already rumors moving around Russia about this “anomaly” in space, but at first they weren’t specific about it. It only took a few days for the word “asteroid” to be heard over the wires, and then next thing you know, it’s all over Russia’s media, even though they’re saying they haven’t confirmed anything.

But Sokolov was being mentioned?
Oh, yes. Remember, he was not only an astrophysicist, he was a former Cosmonaut, he was a hero in Russia after he saved the ISS from electrical failure. The man was brilliant, but, you know, he was loyal to his country, that always came first for him.

Do you consider him a traitor?
A traitor to what? To whom? He leaked information out of a room of people who’d collectively decided to keep quiet. He’d signed no NDA, there was no part of his job description that said the things going on in that observatory was private information. I think Sokolov did what he thought was right, even though everyone else disagreed with him.
If anything, the traitors are the ones who kept it under wraps until everyone could see Wormwood in the fucking sky.
Thirteen days. Thirteen days between the discovery and President Cortana’s announcement. Do you know how many more people we could have gotten off Earth if they’d just announced it sooner? Millions. Millions and millions of people.
Sure, if they were wrong and Wormwood didn’t hit, it would have been the most expensive fire drill the world has ever seen, but to waste all that time…
Whoever it was that knew it and wanted it under wraps, those were the traitors.

Do you feel that way because you’re a reporter and you feel it’s your duty to announce these kinds of things, even if they aren’t confirmed?
The only duty I had as an anchor was to do whatever my producer told me to do whether I agreed with it or not. I reported the news on TV. My days of journalism were long over by the time I got in front of a camera, and by day one I knew I belonged on television.
So, no, I felt no duty to say something on TV that would have lost me my job. That’s not to say I wasn’t talking about it. We heard more chatter than anyone from news outlets across the world, but it didn’t matter to me, I wasn’t going to report on something that hadn’t been handed to me and put on the teleprompter. I just did my job.

You said you were hearing a lot of chatter, from who?
Other news organizations, like I said, were the ones who heard things first whether they were true or not. Plenty of countries started reporting on an asteroid before the official announcement, but none of the claims were backed up.
The hobby astronomers were calling in thousands of tips all over the world, they were sharing pictures all over the internet, there was speculation on its trajectory, all of that was already going on in other countries, but not the United States, oh no, we had to get it right.

Trevor rolls his eyes and lets out a heavy sigh before going on.

Yes, I think the traitors are the ones who tried keeping it a secret longer. So many more people could have been saved, but the U.S., you know, we always had to get it right the first time. Cortana would never accept looking bad on the international stage. But what he did to Sokolov? That was fucked up.

What was it like, being in the room when Cortana made the announcement?
Well, it was the first time I’d ever been in the Oval Office. I’d been to the White House before, but only in the press room. I was thrilled when the network chose me to go to the Oval and report after he spoke.
It was chaos, total chaos of anchors and cameramen, and the boom mics, my God, I got hit in the head every five seconds because I’d made it to the front of the line. And there he was, with a ten foot buffer between us, Cortana behind the desk, ready to speak.
The room was electric. We all knew at that point what he was going to announce, but it was obvious that it hadn’t really sunk in as truth to anyone yet, not a single person in the room. But we’re news people. We’ve heard everything. Didn’t mean we believed everything, especially not at first.
But then we got quiet, silent, before the president started talking. And once he was talking, that’s when things started to feel a little different. I looked around and there were some perplexed faces, for sure, but I was…

You were what?
Well, I was scared. I’d been hearing for weeks that this asteroid was coming to hit Earth and wouldn’t let myself believe it until the president said it on live TV, broadcast on every network the world over. Do you know what a feat of organization that was?
But yes, I admit I was scared. All I could think about was how I was going to get myself off the planet in the time we had left.
I was one of the lucky ones, you know? Of course you know. Because you’re still here, too.

Start Here

“Lookie here, fellers, whaddaya know, we got a right looker, here.”

“What’s that you wearin’ kid?”

“It’s just a costume.”

“Costume? Lookin’ like you’re a witch and we oughtta burn ya.”

“No, it’s just for fun, I swear ya, it’s just to get more candy.” she said, but she saw her words stupefy them.

“Whatcha need to dress up like a witch for if you want candy?”

“So we can go house to house and get candy, you know, souling. It’s what we did back in Ireland.”

“This ain’t Ireland,” one of the men said, and spat from the side of his mouth.

“You be a long way from home, missy, all alone lookin’ like a witch,” another man said as he moved closer to her.

“What’s that ya got there in yer hand?”

“It’s a candy bucket, it’s just for me to carry the candy around in, that’s all.”

“Lemme get a look in there,” the spitter said, and reached forward, smacking the bucket out of her hands.

There was the clank of metal as the bucket hit the dirt, and rustling of leaves as her treats fell out onto the ground.

“Whaddya have to go and do that for?” she asked, hands on her hips.

“Oh, you a strong girl, eh? You gonna stand up to us?”

“Grown men shouldn’t pick on little girls.”

“Little girls shouldn’t be out walking the streets at night. Do you belong in the saloon?”

“Don’t be daft. Now, get out of my way,” she said, and bent to pick up her candy.

The men left her alone, laughing as they strutted along.

The girl narrowed her eyes at them and whispered some words none of them would understand, but tomorrow, the men would be wondering why their lips were skinned shut forever.

This was written for with the prompt being the theme of trick-or-treating, with the words western, stupefy, and candy bucket all rolled in for extra points… and do I get extra because it’s exactly 300 words?

I’m not sure. I just know I love writing prompts like this and having to be creative with the brevity.

I look in peoples windows to amuse myself, it's easy from here.

I can see into every lighted window across the boulevard, and live another life.

I could have a husband come home to me, so I could kiss him at the door. I could have a nanny raising my children while I work out until I pass out. I could be a hoarder whose home is filled with garbage.

But could I be myself, put myself into another life, through another window?

Could I dance in the kitchen? Could I have a child?

I don't want to be alone.

I’m on a mission to write 1,000 one hundred word stories.

I live with my daughter and boyfriend, I work in an office with three women every day, one of whom I consider a best friend now, and I have another good friend I text with almost daily who lives across the country. Oh, and a therapist.

Guess which one of them gets the most honesty out of me? The one across the country, of course, not my therapist.

So, I’m not isolated, and I’m definitely not alone. I have people in my life, but there are still things that I think about, worry about, and struggle with that I don’t feel comfortable telling anyone.

That’s the hardest thing, and one of the hardest feelings I have to sit with, and we all experience it at least once in a while in our lives, I’m sure.

Don’t you know the feeling of being with someone but feeling completely alone? Loneliness isn’t exactly about being alone, it’s about feeling lonely because you don’t feel like you have anyone you can be completely honest with.

As a writer, a poet, and an avid journaler, I know I should open up and share more of what I am creating, but opening up makes me vulnerable, and I am very uncomfortable with vulnerability. Despite reading a number of Brené Brown books, I still haven’t found confidence in telling my story. I still worry about how people will perceive me and think of me if they know what I’m really thinking. I don’t see why that’s uncommon, because a lot of feelings I have aren’t particularly flattering: jealousy, resentment, anger, regret, insecurity, and damn near crippling anxiety.

It would be nice to express my thoughts and ideas to people without feeling like I have to defend or justify them, but my fear of confrontation makes staying quiet easier than speaking up.

This recently happened at work when a major decision was being made that I had a say in, but it was two against me, and my fear of any kind of confrontation makes staying quiet seem easier than speaking up, even if it’s really important. Now, I’m in an uncomfortable position that, if I hadn’t just smiled and nodded and gone along with the crowd, it might never have been an issue.

The irony here is that keeping peace with everyone else creates considerable turmoil inside my own head. I get angry with myself for not speaking up, I get sad and resentful when things don’t go my way and I haven’t even tried. Then I realize that in the attempt to avoid conflict I’ve completely silenced myself, and I hate myself for it.

Are you surprised that journaling is my lifeline? It’s somewhere to put the thoughts I can’t say out loud. The journal doesn’t interrupt, judge, argue, or demand that I explain myself. Sometimes, I don’t even know how I really feel about something until I start putting words on the page.

But writing privately and publishing articles publicly are entirely different experiences. Every writer has things they can’t or won’t share with their readers, there are always parts missing, and leaving those parts out make me feel less known, and more alone.

When I write here, I am not necessarily looking for advice, reassurance, validation, or someone to solve my problems. I just want someone to listen and help me untangle what I am feeling, and sometimes reflecting back from a journal is safer and easier than putting myself out there.

With journaling, obviously, there is a big difference between talking at something, and talking with someone and having a conversation where I can be honest without fearing the consequences.

Everyone needs somewhere to tell the truth. A diary, an online journal, a voice recorder, whatever works for you. Because I’ve realized at this point that complete honesty with people in your life isn’t actually realistic.

The anxiety and fear I have over the potential pain of being rejected for what I say, think, and believe keep me silent, because my journal is the only place I can be unfiltered without an emotional cost.

Writing in my journal, almost compulsively throughout the day, is comforting to me, and it does help me feel less lonely, but it certainly doesn’t replace the need for meaningful human connection.

Having a place to put your truth is important, but having someone you trust enough to share it with is something else entirely.

Like Robin Williams said, being alone isn’t the hard thing. Being lonely and feeling like you have no one to talk to when you’re right beside someone? That is the thing that hurts the worst. That’s what gets you.

It’s really hard, having a million things to say and spending your entire life deciding which ones are safe enough to speak out loud.

How do you feel about sharing your personal life online?

008 - Dr. Hiro Ataki, JEDSA Astrophysicist, Zen Buddhist

Dr. Ataki lives in a retirement community on Mars, and is one of the oldest living survivors who were in the JEDSA control room during the time of discovery. Ataki was a student of Zen Buddhism all his life, and served as a spiritual advisor to everyone “in the room”, a calm presence in the midst of a storm.

Good afternoon, Dr. Ataki. I am here to interview you about your time at JEDSA. Do you mind answering some questions for me today?

Not at all, my son, come here, come here, we’ll have a nice little chat.

Thank you, sir. I’ve heard from a lot of people at JEDSA that you were the biggest supporter of announcing the discovery as soon as possible, but you had a lot of pushback, is that right?

People, they are all so different, aren’t they? Some people wanted to get the word out as fast as possible, others held back and wanted more time to research and be sure before they caused a panic. Some people wanted another thing, which was to not tell anyone that Wormwood was coming at all, and let it just happen, but that became impossible.

Because of the media leaks?

The media leaks were unfortunate, but that wasn’t what I was referring to. I was thinking about when we could first see them in the night sky, and then, when we could see it even during the day as it burned toward us. Then, the media leaks didn’t matter because its presence was undeniable.

What camp were you in, Doctor? Did you want to announce it?

Dr. Ataki was quiet for a while, resting his chin on the tips of his fingers, staring at me from across the table. I began to get uncomfortable with his stare, and he knew it.

It’s hard, isn’t it, when you don’t know how things will turn out?

I think one of the hardest things for humans is the uncertainty they have to deal with in life, when all they want is to be able to control every minute. But not every minute can be planned. Not every minute can be expected.

Most people in that room were out of their minds with fear, because they knew, we all pretty much knew Wormwood would be an ELE. Before they considered announcing to the world, they were already considering how they would escape it.

Can you explain that acronym, ELE?

Of course. It stands for Extinction Level Event. It’s what we call the event that wiped dinosaurs from the earth and relegated them to history.

But this can’t really be considered an ELE, could it? Some people on Earth did survive. And, of course, everyone who got to Mars or a station.

That’s a good question, and I suppose it depends on who you ask, but I don’t have an answer. Some people on Earth survived, yes, but at what cost? Most lived and died horribly unless they were already underground.

Not everyone. There were survivors in Africa.

Ah, Africa. There were plenty of survivors there, but no way off Earth. There were no space stations there. There was also not much food or water. They didn’t last long.

And Antarctica - plenty of survivors there, at the inland research stations.

Also isolated and stuck.

But it was only the Australians that had a chance?

They were the only country that had both survivors and launch stations to get them off-Earth. There weren’t many that made it, though, and only the most violent and selfish of them survived.

What do you mean, Doctor?

I mean getting on a shuttle to a station was a fight. A fight, sometimes, to the death. I spent a lot of time after arriving here reading about the people who didn’t make it from the people who did.

Do you know how many murderers there are on Mars, Peter? Well, I’ll tell you, there are even more of them on the stations.

You’re a Zen Buddhist, a spiritual advisor. How did you handle this?
A person has to come to accept in their life that they can’t control everything, and in fact, they can’t control most things. I grieve for humanity like everyone else, but I focus on the living; I want to make lives better.

I’m sure you have, Doctor Ataki, but you haven’t answered my question yet.

What question is that, Peter?

What side were you on? Did you want the world to know Wormwood was on its way?

Dr. Ataki folded his hands in his lap and looked down. He was quiet for a long time, long enough to make me shift uncomfortably in my seat, and then he looked up at me, and disarmed me.

If it were my choice, which it wasn’t, I would not have released the information.

The thing about humans, Peter, is that we are very scared creatures. We’re scared of bad weather, we’re scared of illness, we’re scared of our own shadows sometimes, but more than anything else, we’re scared of the unknown, and we’re scared of the end.

No matter what anyone tells you, Peter, everyone is afraid of death. Tell me. Are you afraid of death?

I, uh… I try not to think about it.

Because you are afraid?

I was the one who sat silently, thinking of how I wanted to answer.

I suppose I’m afraid that it’s going to hurt. That it’s going to be scary and it’s going to hurt.

Yes, Peter, it’s a common thing, nothing to be ashamed of. It’s healthy to fear death. If we didn’t fear death, we’d be too reckless and die anyway.

So you didn’t want to tell because you didn’t want people to be afraid?

Precisely. We aren’t meant to know when we are going to die, Peter. We are meant to be left in the dark about that. But then…

Dr. Ataki sighed deeply and stared out his window to the dry, dusty red planet.

Then it didn’t matter what any of us in the room thought, and it didn’t matter that the announcements were made. There were plenty of people that didn’t believe Wormwood was real. Plenty of people who were happy to live the rest of their lives in denial, but most people…

Most people saw it.

Yes, it was six miles wide, Peter. Everyone could see it.

And then everything was chaos.

Start Here

It was days before we found her, and when we did, it was a pretty sight.

Yes, I mean that.

There was beauty in finding the last victim, but finding her as she was, her body rigid and cold among the brambles deep in the woods, that was beautiful, too.

Like she deserved to be laid to rest there, and here we came to take her body and turn it into evidence.

It isn’t fair, how some lives end before they really had a chance to begin.

What a beautiful dress she was wearing.

I wonder where she was headed.

I’m on a mission to write 1,000 one hundred word stories.

‘The doctor says your heart is still beating,’ I write, tears rolling down my face. ‘But it feels like you’re already gone.

You may never read this, I’m not sure what you’ll be able to do, after. Maybe you will walk again. Maybe you will speak to me. Maybe you’ll hold my face in your hands and kiss me.

I promise I’ll do everything it takes to keep us together, forever.

I have the potion. I just have to push it into your veins and they promised you’d wake up!

I just have to do this before your heart stops...’

I’m on a mission to write 1,000 one hundred word stories.

If you’ve been following me around for a while (I’m looking at you, Shawn), then you’ve been actually following me around for quite a while, because if there were an olympic medal for starting projects and not finishing them, I would win the gold every time.

I’ve spent years starting things, abandoning things, changing platforms, getting discouraged by low or no engagement, and I really wonder whether I am actually capable of finishing anything.

Wordpress, Squarespace, Substack, Medium, you name the platform and I’ve built something there under my own name, or an alias… and I have more than one alias. None of them, my original self included, has ever finished anything.

The resistance is strong in me. For me, it manifests itself by the devil on my shoulder that’s always telling me:

“It’s not good enough, it’ll never be good enough, you aren’t good enough.”

And yet, despite all of my failures, despite everything I’ve worked on and thrown away, my desire for a big, bold, creative life has never gone away.

When I say I want a big, bold, creative life, I don’t necessarily mean fame or lots of money, though both of those things would be very nice.

It’s more like: I want to write books and blog posts, I want to publish online regularly and build a following, I want to have multiple projects going at once in a way I can juggle them easily.

But, you know, I have to make a living too, so I need to make money with my big, bold, creative life. To do that, I need to be known for something I have created, and have a body of work that I’m proud to share with other people.

I need to not worry about what anyone thinks of me and my small, but relatively consistent attempts, and just keep creating like no one is watching. Which isn’t so hard, because not many people are watching.

It’s always been my dream to write for a living, ever since I was in high school, and all I have to show for that is evidence against the dream. I have unfinished novels, and novels that are finished but I think are too crappy to bother taking the time to rewrite. I don’t publish consistently on Substack or Medium, and without consistent posting, you pretty much stay invisible. Projects that I start will excite me and keep me engaged and then I will feel some bit of negativity toward them and abandon them.

The biggest problem for me as a “creator” is that I feel like I have nothing to show for all of my creating, even though I’ve been writing daily for years. I just haven’t shared. Because I’ve always told myself that no one cares, and I’m not good enough for people to care.

My therapist always tells me “Look at the evidence” and it’s probably the most helpful thing any therapist has ever told me. Maybe other people don’t see it, but I know how many files and folders I have full of writing that I’ve never shared.

The evidence for me being a creator is that I keep returning to writing even when I think it sucks and even when I think no one will read. I keep building things, and I abandon them or don’t, but at least I give it a try.

I keep inventing worlds, newsletters, fiction serials, personal essays, notes and notes and notes of book ideas… Even when I am discouraged, even when I don’t even feel like it, I am almost always creating.

With, as far as I believe, nothing to show for it.

Maybe I’ve written a few things here and there that have helped people or made them feel better, but you won’t find them here because here, I’m brand new.

Friends will tell me not to be so hard on myself. I am always writing, I am always trying, I am never giving up - but, man, if they knew what it felt like to work so hard and so long for no recognition, maybe they’d encourage me to find another dream.

The deeper question, I think, is at what point does persistence stop looking like failure and start looking like identity?

I keep trying, and I keep failing. I’m a failure, I could tell myself. I’m not good enough for this, I tell myself.

But then I give myself a mental slap across the face and say, “No, Cheney, this is your dream!” and I think maybe the fact that I keep trying, that I keep coming back to the page even when I don’t think anything is good enough to publish, is more important than the fact I haven’t “arrived” yet.

I will keep writing, every day, for the rest of my life (unless there’s a doctor’s note). I will keep writing without hope or despair, just like i got tattooed onto my arm so I can be reminded to keep going no matter what.

But I won’t lie - I DO want to see results from my writing. I want to publish books, I want a real audience, I want the income, I want a body of work that I am proud of and proud to share with the world.

I’ll keep writing anyway because I genuinely love doing it - sometimes the metrics just make me forget that. Sometimes I feel like I am chasing a result more than I am chasing an idea, and that won’t make things work out for me.

I need to follow the dreams that I love, not the ones I think I should accept.

I will always want the big, bold, creative life, because the alternative of giving up and being someone who no longer tries would feel much worse than continuing to try, and continuing to fail.

I think this dream of mine has survived this long because it isn’t just a dream, and it isn’t just a phase.

It’s the life I keep trying to grow into, and I never want to stop growing.

007 - Isibel Non, American supermodel

Isibel Non is a former American supermodel who happened to be in a relationship with the Commander of the Pacific Air Forces at the time of impact. I visited her at the most luxurious retirement home on Mars. She has never married, and based on what she was willing to tell me, she also had nothing to lose. Isibel barely looked at me, just down at the fingernails she was grooming while we spoke.

Michael was a good man. I couldn’t marry him, of course, he was far too ordinary for my taste even back then, but he was a good man.

We met at a charity dinner at the White House. I don’t even remember who my date was at the time, but Michael was so handsome, and so powerful looking in his uniform, I couldn’t keep my eyes off of him. Naturally, I made eyes at him, and he had the courage to come to me and introduce himself.

His looks and his rank got to me. We were together for almost two years, but after the discovery, well, things changed quickly for everyone.

Please, tell me where you were and what you were doing when you found out about the asteroid?

Michael was on a brief leave and we were at his townhouse in D.C.. We were laying in bed, as we often were when he was on leave, and he got a phone call. It was late, but in his job, he was always on.

The call lasted no more than two minutes but I was sitting right next to him and I heard almost every word. It was President Cortana’s Chief of Staff, and he was telling Michael it was time to head to “Site R” and clearly that was not something Michael wanted to hear.

Michael asked repeatedly if it was a joke or drill, and his face was getting redder and his hands were shaking, and then I heard the voice on the other end of the line saying: “It’s six miles wide and it’s headed straight for us.”

Then Michael looked at me with his eyes all wide, maybe wondering if I’d heard, and then after another few moments the call ended, and Michael asked me to leave.

I was not about to leave, not after overhearing what I had.

Back then I could be very persuasive to get men to spill their guts. Usually by grabbing them by the balls and not letting go until they promise to give me what I want. In his case, Michael’s balls were purple before he admitted to me that what I’d overheard was real, and that he had to leave immediately.

What did you do then?

Well, he got up and started packing his bags, so I got up and dressed and told him I was leaving him. But then at the last minute I hesitated. Maybe it would be good, I thought, to know someone so high up in the military when there’s an asteroid headed toward Earth, and there was plenty of room for people in space.

I made a sudden change of heart and told him that I loved him too much to let him go like that, and mind you, I’d never told anyone that I loved them, and I didn’t mean it with Michael, I just said it. I knew it would help, and I was right.

He took off for a few weeks and I had to get through the initial panic on my own, well, proverbially on my own. I was with another man while I waited for Michael, and then he finally contacted me and told me he’d secured me a flight off Earth.

But not before you told that other man about the asteroid.

Well, how could I not tell him? He wanted to know why I contacted him because he knew I’d been with Michael, it was all very complicated, but I just knew I couldn’t get through such chaos alone.

But of all the people in the world, of all the men you knew and dated, you had to tell him?

Isibel shrugs and blows on her wet nail polish.

It’s not like it wasn’t going to get out to the media, why not give my special friend a leg up in what was left of the world?

He was one of the top news anchors in the country. You should have known he would leak it.

I didn’t know for sure, but I also didn’t care. Why should I have cared? What happened was going to happen.

If it hadn’t been me who leaked it to Trevor, someone else would have leaked it to another journalist within a day or two, I’m sure. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could keep secret once you could see it in the sky.

At first no one believed him, is that correct?

He faced a lot of backlash, that’s right, but in the end he was revered for being a truth teller in a time when a lot of people were saying a lot of crazy things about the end of the world.

But it was only for two days. Two days later another outlet leaked a story on the asteroid, and by then, things were… starting to happen.

Please elaborate on that.

Well, it doesn’t really matter whether you take an oath to protect the nation’s secrets. When a woman has a man by the balls, literally, he’ll probably spill.

Even within the first few days of the asteroid being discovered, there was chatter all over the internet and news about it, but that’s all it was, just chatter. But the chatter wouldn’t have been happening if there weren’t other people leaking the information out to the rest of the world.

I told one person. The world did the rest for me.

Some may say it was Trevor Blanche who did the rest for you.

Isibel shrugs again.

He wasn’t the only one, there were other news outlets willing to just speculate, or report the…well, the unconfirmed reports of the asteroid.

It was the unconfirmed reports that began starting the panic.
I don’t think that’s true, Mr. Eggars. I think President Cortana’s announcement caused the real panic to begin. Before that, it was just people in the know, taking action.

You mean getting off Earth as fast as possible?
Precisely. That’s why I called Michael; I thought he could help me to get Mars, and I was right. He had me on a shuttle the very next day.

Did you care at all about these men?
I cared for them as much as they cared for me. Some relationships are transactional, that is just the way of things.

What about your friends, your family? None of them went with you.
You know that saying, you can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink?

It’s an old saying, but yes.
Well, I could have led them to the water, but for them, there would have been nothing there to drink. Evacuation was for the elite, not the everyman. Before the official announcement, there were a lot of shuttle taking dignitaries and the rich off Earth. I was fortunate.

It sounds like you’re the type of woman who made her own luck.
Yes, Mr. Eggars. You may not be an elite, but you do seem erudite. Surely you understand the world has always worked this way.

Unfortunately, yes.
Well,

She blows on her drying nail polish without looking at me.

It may have been unfortunate for you, but I knew my privilege. And I didn’t care if I was getting ahead of anyone else. In fact, that was my primary goal in life.

It looks like you did well, Ms. Non.
Certainly, Mr. Eggars. Now, are we done? I’m having a massage in thirty minutes.

Start Here

It happened again, only this time it was real, not something out of a nightmare.

The sirens were wailing and I could hear gunshots in the streets. There was no more time. I had to leave.

Occupation had always been my greatest fear, ever since they appeared in the night sky.

Aliens and soldiers in the streets? No thank you.

I got my bug out bag and fled.

Burst of gunfire and explosions lit the night around me as I ran, toward what I didn't know, just away from home for the last time.

Who thought it'd end like this?

I’m on a mission to write 1,000 one hundred word stories.

006 - Dr. Carrie Delbene, PhD - Ex-Girlfriend of Jeffery Dorrance, JEDSA Custodian

I find Carrie Delbene living a happy life with a husband, children and grand- children on MS1, and we sit in her kitchenette while she bounces a baby on her lap. She doesn’t seem at all like the kind of person who would cause a panic, but here we are.

Good morning, Mrs. Delbene, thank you for meeting me.
Please, call me Carrie. And it’s nice to meet you, too. June, can you say “Nice to meet you, Peter?”

The baby cannot say this, nor any other words just yet.

I see a lot has changed for you since the time of impact. Clearly you’re not still with Mr. Dorrance.

He had no ambition. He was perfectly fine being a JEDSA custodian while I was working on my PhD with the astrophysicists. We met there, and we worked the same shifts with each other most nights for years, and eventually, you know…

JEDSA was a lonely place, you’re out in the middle of nowhere on an island with no one you know… You just be with who you’re with, you know?

It was never that serious between Jeffery and me, it was more convenient to me than anything else.

You’re not going to repeat any of this to him, right? Is Jeffery going to be able to read this?

Yes, that is entirely the point, to collect oral histories and compile them for the public. Anything you say here will be on the record unless you tell me it’s not.

Oh, well, I don’t want to hurt the man’s feelings. Is he even still alive?

He’s alive and well, living on another station.

Well that’s good to hear, anyway. I hate to think of what happened to him after, you know, after everything started to come out. I still feel really bad about it being blamed on him.

Tell me what happened between you and Jeffery the night he told you about the asteroid?

Well, it’s not a pretty story. He came back all riled up and I was half asleep, but I could hear him pacing around the living room dictating something into his phone, and when I went in there to try to shut him up, he looked guilty, so I pressed him.

I was a lot less confident as a person then than I am now, and I accused him of cheating on me and trying to hide it.

He got so angry with me. More angry than I’d ever seen him, and he kept telling me to go back to bed but the more he tried to shoo me away, the more insistent I was to know what was going on.

Finally, I just told him, “If you don’t tell me what’s going on right now, your ass is out the door!”

So he told me.

What did he tell you?

That there was something big in space, and it was headed straight toward us.

He actually calmed down quite a bit after he told me. I think he needed to get it off his chest, you know? That’s a big thing you’re carrying alone in your head there. No one wants to be alone with those kinds of thoughts, world-ending thoughts.

He kept repeating to me that I couldn’t tell anyone, that he wasn’t supposed to know, that he wished he didn’t know.

Tell me what? I kept asking him. Is it going to hit us? Is it going to hit us? I kept asking, and he just had this blank, wide-eyed stare…

And then, finally, yeah, he said all but one person in the room thought it would be a direct hit.

And Jeffery explicitly told you to not share this information, correct?

That’s correct, yes. But I didn’t give a shit about his orders, I was just told information that would impact my life and the lives of everyone on Earth and off. I did the first thing I always do when I’m scared and confused. I’m a southern girl. I called my daddy the next morning after Jeffery went back to work and told him everything.

Tell me why you did this, even though your boyfriend was adamant about you keeping quiet? You knew he worked at a facility where you both needed top security clearance. Pardon me, but, who did you think you were when you were leaking this news?

Do you really think I knew what would happen after that? Come on. I am not taking any responsibility for the panic or anything that happened in it. I told my daddy what I was scared of, and he did the rest.

Your uncle was a four-star general, the commander of the Pacific Air Forces. Didn’t you know when you told your father about the discovery, the first person he would tell was his brother?
Well, that’s exactly why I told my daddy first. I figured if this was real, Uncle Mike would be one of the first people in the world to know about it and know if it was true.

Nobody could have counted on his… girlfriend listening in on the conversation.

His girlfriend, the model, Isibel Non?

Yeah, that was her name. No one really liked her. Everyone liked her a whole lot less when he she went to the press.

I don’t think my daddy would have told Uncle Mike everything I’d told him if he knew Isibel was in the room with him. I’m surprised he didn’t make sure he was alone, but maybe Uncle Mike really trusted her. He’d proposed to her a few times, but she always turned him down because they hardly ever got to spend time together. Also, maybe, because she was a bitch.

But yeah, it was her fault things got out, to the world, not mine.

And yet, it wouldn’t have gotten to her without you telling your… father.

Carrie shrugs and picks at her nails.

Well, it was out of my hands at that point.

Start Here

I just turned 44 last month, and I can’t believe this is my life.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching and work on myself to figure out what I really want in life, and I am so far from where I want to be, I can’t even see the shore.

Wasn’t I supposed to have more of life sorted out by now? Money, career, relationships, parenting, the future? I can’t consider any of these things settled or sorted out.

When I was younger, I assumed adulthood would look quite different than the life I have now. It’s not like I had a detailed plan or anything, I didn’t even really set goals for myself like I should have. But I did have a vague expectation of what I wanted my life to look like: I wanted to be a wife, a writer, a homeowner, financially secure, and certain about what comes next.

The uncomfortable reality of my life is the complete opposite.

My life is currently ruled by money - specifically the lack of it. I want to be financially independent from my boyfriend and my kid’s dad. Child support will end in two years, and I need to be able to count on myself when it comes to paying all of the bills.

I’ve worked it out and figure I need to be making around $62,000 a year to live comfortably, and by comfortable I don’t mean taking vacations or upgrading my car. I mean comfortable like I don’t have to worry about rent getting paid, or if I’ll lose my job when my boss has a bad day.

When it comes to the things I really want in life, I’m nowhere.

I’m so far behind schedule in life, for making my life good and having peace of mind.

There are so many things I’m trying to build, change, earn, figure out, and recover from.

I know there is no universal timeline for adulthood, and no certain age where one should be expected to “have it all figured out”.

Most of this “behind” feeling comes from comparing my real, complicated life to someone else’s visible accomplishments, or to an imaginary version of myself.

We know that most people usually only share the best parts of their lives, so comparing my life to someone’s on Instagram is stupid, yet I do it anyway.

What’s worse is how I compare myself to my sister, who has multiple degrees, owns a home, is married, has a real career, and is financially secure.

The truth is, I resent her, and hate spending time with her because I feel so small in her presence.

I look at her and see a woman who has everything I want in life, and who as far as I know has never suffered a setback, loss, or any kind of trauma in her entire life. As far as I know. But I don’t know, because she’s twelve years younger than me and we have never been close.

On the other hand, I have to deal with the always on, underlying hum of severe depression and anxiety.

Just my baseline in life is shitty.

And if you’ve never been depressed, you probably can’t imagine how hard it is to get up and keep going every day. I think that’s what depression is, really; the resistance to get up and keep going. Depression tells you to give up, and it’s dangerous.

So many things in my life haven’t worked out.

I’ve lost jobs that I love, a home that I loved, men I have loved, friends I have loved.

I can look back and and see a million different moments when, if I had the chance, I would go back and do over to try to give myself a better life.

Now, I just want to move forward.

Some things, a lot of things, didn’t work out., and I’ve had to start over in multiple ways throughout the years, but I’ve kept going.

Despite depression telling me to just give up, Cheney, it’s never going to happen, I keep going.

A few days ago I said I felt stuck but now I realize starting things over and changing my mind about things in life is still movement, and changing direction doesn’t have to mean failure.

So, I do my best to shift my attention away from the things I’m lacking in adulthood toward what I actually have: the people I love, the things I enjoy doing, the experiences I’ve had, the things I’ve created, and plans I’m still making.

I’m literally halfway through my life, and was today years old when I learned Tolkien was 45 when he started writing The Lord of the Rings.

There may be some hope for me yet.

If life doesn’t have a timeline, maybe I need to give up on the idea that I’ll ever feel really settled and comfortable.

Maybe this messy, unfinished, still-trying to do better version of life is just going to be my life for a while longer, but it’s still life.

I don’t have to wait until everything is figured out before deciding it counts.

I've never been here before, standing in the rain on the sidewalk with a man running the back of his hand down the side of my cheek.

I've never felt this before, this sweet electricity, this furious pulse.

But all I can think about are the folds of my stomach, the skin that stretches my shirt too tight, my lumpy thighs in these pants.

He moves his hand down but before he could get past my neck, I stopped him.

"No, I'm sorry," I said. "My body is not yet ready to be loved."

"You are quite wrong about that."

I’m on a mission to write 1,000 one hundred word stories.

In 2019 I started writing on Medium under an alias that still lives on today, but back then, I was doing it for a specific reason: to make money.

I wasn’t in it for the community, friendship, none of that. I just wanted to write and get paid for it, and for a while I did. I made great money, enough to live on for years when I worked on NewsBreak, too, but that went kaplooey, and my entire writing “career” fell apart.

Medium has really changed over the years. It’s grown considerably, and dare I say its overcrowded with people who were just like me back in 2019 - people with nothing much to offer, but all wanting so desperately to make gains.

I gave up on writing for the money, and I gave up Medium for a while, too.

I came to Substack because I wanted more of a social component to things. I wanted to really make friends with the people who commented and shared my posts, not just be another story in a very random feed.

For a long time, Medium didn’t fill that social hole I was looking for… until now.

TK has been around for a while now, and I was an early user so have seen it grow and change in a lot of ways since I first signed up.

The Public Journal where everyone shares raw brain dumps on the daily has grown to the point where it’s hard to keep up with the people whose days I want to read about.

(Hint: Please make a “Save” button so we can read stories later!)

I feel like my own posts in the Public Journal are getting lost in the shuffle, as most writing does if you aren’t already arriving with a following.

But that’s not to say it’s all gloomy for people like me, people who aren’t very “popular” as things go.

I have been able to connect with some editors of publications who have given me the chance to submit to them, which is great.

I use the daily Scratch Pad to keep up with writing projects, using the carry-over to-do list feature in each post so I never forget what I’m procrastinating on, and I really enjoy exploring the new libraries that are popping up here and there.

But it’s easy to say what I love the most about TK, because it’s one of the things I love most about Medium:

It’s a clean, beautiful, easy place to write.

I go to these pages and they’re like “bring it to me, baby!” in a way that Substack does not call to me, nor my own Wordpress site.

I can organize my writing with tags, I can push things directly to Medium if that’s where they’re destined to be, and I can do it all in a familiar area that I trust not to lose or corrupt my stuff.

Best of all? I can ask individual friends for feedback on my posts and collaborate on them before I publish them.

That is just COOL.

Another cool thing about TK is that it comes with its own built-in AI that learns from you and can make you prompts based on what you’ve written, as well as just answer questions or help with grammar (among many other things) right inside the text.

It could, in theory, write your articles for you.

I noticed that there have been some people who have sworn off TK completely due to the AI component. These are people who probably feel strongly against AI in the first place, but definitely don’t want it anywhere near writing on Medium - and I get that.

I pay for a Medium membership, and I don’t want to be paying for the majority of things I read to be AI slop, writing about writing, writing about writing on Medium, and making money anywhere with writing.

Once you swim through that you can get to the good stuff, but TK just… doesn’t have that kind of writing on it.

It’s pure, it’s new, it’s shiny, it hasn’t endured enshittification… yet.

And another thing I tell myself about things like this is - if you don’t like it (the AI), don’t use it.

You can still use TK without using their built in AI. Using it is an option, not a requirement, and I certainly don’t think it’s worth leaving a platform over.

I think what Medium is trying to do with TK is make writing a more social experience, and in a way, with Public Journal, it’s bringing back old school blogging in a way I never thought I’d see things written online again, and that’s refreshing!

If you have the ability to try out TK, I recommend you do it.

If you want the ability to try out TK, send me a private message and I’ll send you an invitation.

It really may be where the future of writing socially is going. It’s, like… the anti-Substack, though.

TK just isn’t something easy to sum up and explain to people.

It’s Medium’s rough draft corral.

It’s Medium’s slightly social writing platform.

It’s Medium’s AI writing partner.

It’s Medium’s newest adventure, and I am totally here for it.

Just so you know, I was not compensated for this post, but I am writing my own opinions on TK as part of the TK Ambassador program. How am I doing so far? 😂