I spent a good chunk of the day going through my archives of published and nearly-published stories from the last (mumble mumble) years, and have a story a week queued up on Substack and Medium well into April. With a little tinkering, that’s going to get past May before I have to start writing new things, so if you subscribe you probably won’t see any gap in a Friday story until next fall. I’m also posting things on this site, and on Mastodon and Twitter (“X”, whatever), so you can follow me there, too, for updates.
The first Friday story is “Famine“, a reflection on the economics of the workplace. I don’t know if it’s representative of the rest — it’s a quite varied portfolio — but if you like this one, you’ll probably like the rest as well. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at a lot of these stories, and as I go through them I keep thinking, “Damn, that’s some fine writing!” And reader, I normally don’t like what I write once it’s out in the world …
I’d recommend Substack for your following, as it’s free for readers; Medium is weird when you start putting stuff behind a paywall. The archive is set so things will start to go “paid subscriber only” once they’ve been published for a few weeks, but I’m more than happy to comp you a subscription if there’s something you want to read. I do think paid subscribers will get something in addition to the stories at some point, I’m not sure what yet, so while I won’t turn away any paid subscriptions, I’m also not expecting them.
A lot of my previously published stories happened during the early aughts, back when the internet was fun. There were all sorts of weird little webzines that published fiction and essays and things that blurred the lines, with names like “Failbetter” and “Eyeshot” and “Pindeldyboz,” and they were a delightful outlet for writers wanting to experiment and for readers looking for something a little outside the norm. Since those quirky days we’ve been living in the age of enshittification, in which stories are replaced with “content” and everything is geared toward the fungible attention economy. The stories I’m sharing are the antithesis of that: I want your attention, yes, for the five or fifteen or thirty minutes it takes to read my story, but after that I release you to go about your day, with the understanding that my story may periodically rise up to haunt you in unsuspecting moments and unexpected ways, not to get you to buy some new shoes or invest in a cryptocurrency or vote for a particular candidate, but to make you squirm or giggle or wonder for just an instant before you go back to your day to day.
I’m excited to bring these stories back from the cryogenic chamber in which they’ve been lounging for close to two decades — most of them have aged a lot better than I expected them to. Some of them I’ve completely forgotten writing, and I look forward to tightening those up and getting them in front of your eyeballs.
Let me know what you think of them, and let your friends know if you find them enjoyable.