Happy New Year, readers!

This blog's been gathering dust for a while, now. It seems that for the last year or two -- throughout the duration of the pandemic, really -- I've been doing a fair bit of writing, but finishing very little, almost nothing. It's hard to feel sure of having finished something when you're not confronting a deadline. It's the deadline's job to negotiate the release of whatever's held hostage in drafts. I imagine a lot of writers can do without them, but I think it's something I need, even if it is self-imposed.

So here's the plan: by the end of each and every month in 2022, I'm going to post a piece of short fiction. I was tempted for a minute there to say something weaselly, like "I can't promise that they'll be any good, but they're getting posted, all the same." But that would make for a lousy and dishonest resolution. I'm going to try to make them good. That's the goal. Maybe a still a bit rough here and there, but good. That's not so much a prediction as a commitment to hold myself to some kind of standard. Fear of embarassment should do that much. The claw of shame.

I think this will lend some momentum to the blog again, and just get me in the habit of posting here. I've decided to take another break from social media (twitter and facebook, in any case), which in the past seemed to lead to me posting more here. So who knows? I think that'd be nice.

Updates

• I think I might be running a few days late with the first one. It should be up by the end of the week. Is it too late to amend my resolution to say "by the first Friday of every month, beginning in February?" Probably. I'll do some sort of penance for this.