Continued from an earlier post: Short Stories (Part One)

I dug in.

I figured that challenging myself to write one short story per month would be exactly that: a challenge. And two months and two stories in, I’m finding it to be a comfortable one.

A few years ago when I set out to write a novel in my newfound state of semi-retirement-slash-unemployment, I spent a couple months world building.  I had a grain of an idea but wanting to focus on a proper character-driven novel in a quasi-science fiction setting, I had long decided I couldn’t just sit down and start writing. No pantsing that. 

World building can be a whole discipline in itself. One can get too easily lost in fleshing out elaborate imaginary places for your beloved characters to find themselves existing.

I locked in, though. I built an alternate reality at the edge of my own, fabricated a make-believe city mashed together out of the two places in the world where I spend most of my time, gave it a new name and mixed in a paranormal science-fiction vibe. 

—then I wrote the better part of three novels there.

It is within the world of that same city where I have been penning my short stories.

Short story is a curious art form and so much different than writing a novel, and having a world that is pre-built in my own mind—and previously experienced through a fiction writers eyes in three previous novels—has been immensely helpful. Two or three people encounter something strange and unusual in the mundane day-to-day of life there, and it makes for ready fodder to build an interesting tale.

I’ve penned two stories so far, have my third queued up, and am getting my head around an editing plan for each. I’ve wrapped this challenge in many things: habit and public accountability, sure, but making it part of my larger project, too. 

Writing shorter works becomes an act that not only further fleshes out my world for future novels but becomes artifacts in their own right. 

Continued from an earlier post: Undramatic Scapes (Part One)

I got some flack the other day from someone who (jokingly, mostly, I’m pretty sure—wink, wink) suggested I shouldn’t post so much on Instagram. This followed an afternoon walk of marathon posting where I took about fifty pictures of the colour splotches of the turning autumn leaves, a kind of abstraction in organic oranges, greens, reds, and browns—then proceeded to post at least a dozen of them one-at-a-time into my feed.

I shrugged.

If you don’t like it, don’t follow me, I joked back.

It was a momentary delve into the undramatically mundane.

There is nothing wrong with taking glorious photos of magnificent landscapes, but life isn’t all spectacle. Sometimes it’s the dull moments in between, and we’re far too used to only highlighting the best of the best, and forgetting to tap into the everyday. Sometimes we need to seek out the abstractions of colour and shape from normal things and stop getting tangled up in perfection.

There is beauty in undramatic scapes, or at least I think so: patterns in the autumn leaves, yes, but too footprints in snow or whorls in the clouds or shapes in the bark of a tree or the geometric curiosities of clashing architectural styles. The list is infinite.

If you aren’t looking at the normal things and seeing beauty, you are missing something in the everyday that can bring you immense joy and creative success.

Just shoot me, but I want to share some of that vibe.

Continued from an earlier post: Permission Trap (Part One)

We’re all frustrated with social media these days, and sometimes the only recourse seems to be to point at anyone even tangentially involved and yell “Stop!”

That friend who posts a little too much: STOP!

That coworker who is oversharing: STOP!

The relative who can’t seem to look at a comment box and walk away: STOP!

As someone who posts routinely I get my fair share of real life people questioning my participation: it’s not directly telling me I shouldn’t, but it is a subtle dig and a semi-revocation of permission.

Once, long ago, we all joined these networks and connected to each other in this giant circle of digital trust. I’ll connect to you, we said, but you need to be respectful of that.

Then the algorithms filled those feeds with advertising and slop and rage bait and memes, and we shrugged and said, well, I can’t yell at Zuckerberg or Musk or any of those assholes, so—

—so we started revoking permission from our friends. And we almost do it unconsciously: we scroll past the stuff from people we know just like it was part of the rest of the mess, not recalling that the photos and words and stories and messages from the people we connected to were the whole damn reason we downloaded the app to begin with. We ignore them, just the same.

The result is a great big gap where there was once celebration. There is a quiet rule that social media sucks, but a rule the neglects to differentiate between content from people we know and like, and content that is overwhelmingly corporate, influencer, or algorithmically generated.  

We lump it all together and shout STOP! But we keep loading the apps—to find only our friends heeded the request. All that is left is the slop. All that is left is the ads. All that is left is the manufactured reality that doesn’t care if you want it or not, and shrugs when you push back. 

We scolded the wrong creators.

I was ordering my tea and standing beside the cash register were a couple stacks of self-published books for sale, local poets mostly from what I could tell, who had hung out their work with a little sign and a price tag and basically said, hey, “I wrote this… and I live in your community.”

Maybe that’s my next step, but I will say that it inspired me to do something similar: set up a book stand on my website and offer these words for sale.

I know I’m going to come across like a bit of self-promotion here, but I think it’s more than that: I’ve been writing away in obscurity for literal decades while simultaneously fearing the big dangling blade of traditional publishing.

The internet, for all as much as it has sunk into a kind of slop warehouse of inane content, is still filled with more great indie content than I will ever be able to consume in my life. It’s much harder to find in 2026, but it’s there. I’m certain of it.

My effort at the cafe book drop then comes in the form of code: I whipped up some custom software to convert all these hundreds of posts into something that very much resembles an ebook—and then I dropped it into a page where people might see it there and buy a copy as they are passing through, as much as me saying, hey I wrote this… and I live in your internet community.

I know it takes guts to put words into something quasi-permanent and then ask someone to pay you for them. I know, because I have spent a long time not having such guts.

But maybe as I get older and give a few less fucks about the people distracted by fashion reels and shiny influencer slop, those guts are a bit easier to come by.

Branched · Part One Continued in Short Stories (Part Two)

As October arrives and I’m just a few short weeks away from turning fifty—five-oh—and of all things to be worried about, I’ve been thinking about my approach to writing fiction.

I’ve got a half dozen half-written novels stored away on the very computer that I’m writing these words, dangling tales parked on my hard drive and glued in place with countless good intentions to finish each and every one of them.

Now look, the problem with making some big public proclamation is that there is just as good a chance that I’ll trip and land on my face as cross that distant finish line with my hands triumphantly up in the air. I write for another project all about running, and the thing about running is that it is all about setting out one step at a time and taking each activity, each race, each recovery as it’s own thing—and occasionally you literally do trip and land on your face (or smash into the trunk of a large tree with your shoulder, but that’s another story)—but then you get up and keep running.

I have a goal for my fifties and it’s something of a marathon of short fiction writing.

See, all the while that I’ve been accumulating half-written novels, I’ve also been penning an occasional short story. They’ve always been side projects.

Short stories are not just an important medium in their own right but (going back to that running metaphor) training reps for writing fitness. They train us to think about plots that resolve in a meaningful way. They train us to build daily stamina for nurturing characters. They train us to write good, cohesive fiction.

So about that goal… Starting in October, my last full month of my forties, I’m going to write and post a single short story. And then I’m gonna write and post another one in November. And another in December… and, well, I’m just going to keep writing a new story every month.

We’ll try that for a year. 

And maybe it’ll build a new habit for my fifties. 

Or maybe I’ll trip and land right on my face. But I gotta try.

Branched · Part One Continued in Permission Trap (Part Two)

I fell deep into the permission trap while on vacation recently. 

We went on a summer trip. It was exciting. It was picturesque. It was the city of lights and every turn seemed like a new reason to point my camera and click the shutter. I took a lot of photos.

So of course… I posted a few of the best pics on Instagram so that my collection of friends and fam who follow on my private account could enjoy those same photos.  And, genuinely, the first day that I posted the response was overwhelmingly positive. 

But… well. I posted more pics on the second day, and a couple more on the third… 

The following days were less positive. People had tuned out.

Fair enough, I suppose. Vacation photos while everyone is back home getting ready another work day. The patience for that is limited. I get it.

But we are funny to each other this way, aren’t we?

I’m not saying this to dive into a pit of self-pity about my social engagement. There are an array subtle social cues that are conveyed by modern interactions on social media platforms, and being shrugged off by one’s own friends and family, and I would suggest that a big one is the subconscious permission structure around sharing.

People are online. People are on these apps. People are scrolling, looking at advertisements and AI slop and influencer drivel, so in my own mind I am considering that I can offer something better by sharing: Me, a real person that the people on my private account all personally know, travelling the world and sharing his photos.

But then the permission trap emerges from the inaction of the masses: a fraction of the likes and indifferent shrugs and my anxious, approval-seeking artist’s mind reads that right to the thought of least resistance: people don’t want to see it. I’m oversharing. I’m boasting. I’m swamping the feeds of friends with a reality that breaks their comfortable slop-ridden, algorithmic vibe and I don’t have their permission to break into that for more than a single post.

I’m overthinking it, of course. Because that’s the trap.

We live in a world far too impressed by perfection. In my opinion, we want too much newness. We overvalue mint condition. The concept of new-in-box might be ideal if one is buying underwear, but the scuffs and stains and cracks and creases in a vintage sweater might be the very thing that gives it character.

I bought my violin eight years ago and I was not the first owner. I bought it at a shop that sold exclusively old violins. There is a label inside that says it was built in Germany in 1929. That violin is ninety-seven years old and has travelled the world, traversed history, and been held by more hands than I can imagine. It has a story.

There is a concept in Japanese called wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) or roughly defined, the embracing of the imperfection of an object, maybe because the scars and cracks and rough edges tell a story.

Perfection and newness is a commercial trait, not a human one, I think.

Decay and error are hallmarks of life and humanity.

As an artist I think about how to put my own humanity into the things I make: my art and my stories are richer, I think, when imperfection gives them an edge and the perception of something deeper than the vibe of boring manufactured aesthetics. 

There are layers to beauty.

Under the category of Broken & Bewildered I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

I came back from Japan last year with a dozen urban sketches in a notebook, and it has become one of my favourite souvenirs. And yet, invariably, when I show anyone their first question is always: how long do these take you?

Sketching isn’t a camera, obviously.

It’s not fast, and so saying that I can draw pretty fast is a relative expression of time investment. I can draw pretty fast, but that means I usually spend less than thirty minutes with my pen sketching out the details of a scene.

Again, it’s not a click and go. It’s find a place to sit, out of the way of the bustle, and then work through the scene, chewing out the shapes and shadows, poking in the details, and trying to get as much as I can before either I attract an audience or annoy my ever-patient wife.

Urban sketching is the opposite of urgency.

I may have enjoyed it in my youth, and maybe even been pretty good at such forms, but I think my patience would have been less available to the pages.  Sitting somewhere with no pressure to keep exploring the bigger place but instead soaking in the details of just one spot, one scene, one moment… that’s the persistence of maturity, I think.

My grandparents were knitters. My grandfather spent his life as a mail carrier working for the the postal service here in Canada. Then he retired and bought a whole lot of cheap yarn and made mittens for the neighbourhood kids. So. Many. Mittens.

We spend our working years being productive for other people, for our employers, and suddenly it seems as if the default is keeping productive for ourselves and our sanity.

I write in a similar overlapping topic about being Late & Ready, the ideas of picking up new skills late in life as a creative pursuit, what that means about our expectations, and what it contributes to the output. 

But also I find myself thinking a lot about nurturing hobbies and creative life skills that will keep me active, happy and interesting when I’m the old grey-haired guy, it’s me, with his laptop in a cafe.

I certainly won’t be running marathons anymore, so planning on having skills and interests that fit with my age, health capacity, and the demands of the craft is a two-sided coin of figuring out what works as age creeps in—and learning to start letting go of everything that doesn’t work.

I’m just here pondering this stuff now, thinking aloud because I know it’s inevitable, but then maybe I don’t have a clue what’s really in store for me.

Under the category of Hobby & Hope I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

There are a few hard realities of learning a new craft after a certain age. Heck, like almost anything there is a ticking clock for greatness. Me picking away at the piano at nearly fifty is almost certainly not going to open up a spot at The Juilliard School any more than my dabbling in urban sketching this late in life it going to give me the time and energy to pursue a scholarship at Emily Carr University.

The reality is that after certain doors in life, close most of the world will almost certainly regard your pursuits of artistic and creative skill as little more than a retirement hobby.

And maybe that’s fair.

…but it also isn’t.

Art, fiction, music, all of it is as much about translating life experience into something outside of our memories. Fine whiskeys are aged to make them better, so why not artists, too?

I am on the fringes of an age category transition myself, looking at much of middle age as something I’ve been through and starting to think about not just age, but the general idea of starting on a creative path as a late entrant.

I got into watercolour when I was older than my first instructor.

I took up the violin at forty.

I didn’t start seriously trying to play the piano until just a year ago.  

And something tells me that my flailing sense of urgency about aging might be a wee bit overblown. 

Under the category of Late & Ready I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.