Perhaps the greatest pitfalls I navigate on these excursions are my desires to vent.

Too often, I sit down and do just that. Then I stop, read back over what I’ve written and realize it’s rubbish. That’s when I start asking questions.

What do I want to write? What would I want to read?

The answer to both of those is pretty fucking simple.

Something awesome.

Recently, I was gifted the maxim that humility is not thinking less about yourself, but thinking about yourself less.

This has probably been the most rewarding challenge I have accepted in this project. It’s one that I consider especially testing as this is essentially a continuing collection of minimal, experimental, personal essays.

Writers are taught to consider their audience. I have come to address this simply by asking myself if I’m doing anything beyond tending my own ego.

Ultimately, what people want from narrative—and me as both a writer and, I truly feel, a person—is the reassurance that everything is OK. And that it always will be.

Happily everafter.

So maybe, instead of adamantly reasoning out what I perceive to be the truth, I decide to fudge it. Just a little bit.

Or maybe a lot.

I change names and places and events.

I challenge my own knowledge. Create a context where I can judge it by comparison.

That everafter, after all, is yet to be written.

Might as well write something you’d like to read.