One Hour - An Update

It's been a while... a long while. I originally came across this website after my wife stumbled on it due to a contest that was running. She thinks I'm a talented writer for some reason (ha.) and suggested I look into it. I did, made my submission and the more I looked into this website the more I wanted to continue to submit short stories here. After writing my first I had decided I wanted to write one quick short story each month in addition to all the time I was spending writing my novel.

That was all the way back in... wow... February or March of 2021? Suffice it to say, despite having noble ambitions I fell of the wagon... and I fell hard. Not only did I fail to write anything for this website, I failed to write much at all. I even stopped writing my book and was barely doing anything with it even in terms of brainstorming.

The initial cause of this was a promotion at my day job. With it came a whole slew of new responsibilities, expectations, and stressors. During the first few months of my new position I hardly had any energy at the end of the day to play video games (a big hobby of mine) not to mention the creative faculties to actually write anything. Then early April came and my wife and I found out we had been chosen to adopt our first child. (Adoption is a long process... you can be waiting for months or even years sometimes.) Well he couldn't wait to get into the world and decided to come six weeks early. He was healthy and only had a short stay in the NICU but it was a stay in the NICU nonetheless. This only added to the stress. (in a good way. Love the kid to death. But it was all still very stressful. New baby, new Dad, AND he was pre-mature? phew)

Anywho, what small amounts of energy I had soon vanished into the nights of helping my wife take care of our new son. A few months down the road we decided to bring home a new puppy too. Might as well do all the hard things at once right? haha. (puppy is pictured above though she's much bigger now.)

During all of this my mental health took a dive. Some other things happened as well that only made things worse but I won't get into those. But the point is, I wasn't happy... Even when I did have the energy to sit down and play video games or something I wasn't having fun... had I gone to a doctor like I should have I'm sure I'd have been labeled depressed. But I've worked through that now due mainly to my wife being a long standing bastion of hope and love... but something still felt off and I thought about it for a while and realized I wasn't feeling fulfilled. I was succeeding at my new job and at being a Dad but something was missing... and I'm pretty sure that something has been writing. Even now, writing this, things feel better... almost more simple in a way... its strange.

All of this is to say that I'm going to be giving myself a new goal... one hour a week. One hour where I just sit down and write... even if it's at midnight while everyone else is asleep like they are now. My hope is that I can build this back up into a habit again and get back to focusing on my book. But for now, I want to keep this "one hour" to writing here. It's unlikely that it'll be in a "blog" style post like this in the future. It'll likely take shape in the form of a random short story that entered my brain earlier in the week.

So that's my goal. One hour a week at least. Hopefully it blooms into more than one hour but at the minimum I want one hour. One hour at the keys click-clacking away... and if you're reading this and you've noticed I haven't uploaded anything recently. Yell at me. Hold me accountable. One hour isn't too much time. I should never be too busy for one hour.

If that sounds like something you'd enjoy then stick around. I can't promise to stick to one genre or even always be thematically consistent... (I usually write darker things but I'm not ALL doom and gloom... just mostly. ;) ) but you never know. You might find a new favorite.

PS: While you're here, feel free to drop a comment or something telling me what kind of stories you might like to read. :)