a prelude for 2022

So, here we are, not quite a week into the new year. The snow is gone, the rain is back, and by now I think everyone has settled back into their routine after the holidays, more or less. It is time at last for some concrete hopes for this year. (I will here refrain from writing about the continued onslaught of bad news, just for today. I'm so tired.)

I want to write more. That's always a given. And I still want to create a place where I can put all of my writing, to finally retire this old place, to let Dreamers Often lie, as it were. Or at least to return it to its old purpose, of housing the little fractured vignettes and melodramatic microfictions of old. I talked about this last year and didn't get around to it.

Over the years I've had . . . several places for my writing. I had this place, which I've described; I had a domain name which I've since let lapse, which was for nonfiction and sometimes poetry; I had a tumblr, which I mostly used for poetry and other miscellaneous things; I had a Medium account, for nonfiction essays; I even used to post short fiction at fictionpress.com or .net or whatever it was, before I used to just shove them in Google docs and throw links around. (I think I still had the publication mindset: maybe I'll want to sell this, maybe some magazine will accept it. And having been on the "accepting stories" side of things, I really never ever want to put up with that.) All disparate places, for disparate fragments of my works and my self. All of that makes updating anything regularly difficult, and presumably makes it hard for anyone who wishes to to follow it.

So this place has been limping along, my oldest extant blog, doing the work of all those places, but still trying to hold onto that old identity. I want to put it all under the name of Vaudeville Ghosts, which . . . I don't know, it fits, I like the name, and those old stories deserve a place to live, too. (Like many early works, they're probably a bit problematic in retrospect, but I'd be lying if I said I don't still think they are some of my finest works.)

But mostly, even if I don't get around to that, I want to put out another short story or two. And finish working on some of the various other projects I have going on, or at least get enough of them together that I feel okay sharing it publicly. Maybe that sort of notetaking/worldbuilding scratchpad will be interesting to someone? Who knows.

I hope 2022 is treating you all well.