Wow, it has been a long time since I’ve written anything for the public!

What happened? Where have I been?

Well, it turns out I’ve been doing a lot, but it has mostly been internal and personal work.

I’m one of those introverted-type people who tends to need a lot of quiet and deep thought in my life in order to feel balanced. The book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain explains my personality type, and the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport explains how I aspire to live my ideal writing day—with long stretches of deep work, followed by meaningful interactions with people I care about.

I have social media accounts, but I’m pretty much never on them. At most, I log on once or twice a year. The interactions on these sites don’t feel very deep to me. I’d much rather meet my friends face to face, and go on a long walk together so we could truly catch up on each other’s lives. Social media posts are shallow and external, when what really makes me feel connected to people is the deep and internal.

Last year, I decided to wean myself off from doomscrolling the news as much as possible because my mental health was starting to suffer. This year I’ve also been experimenting with going on a news blackout. This interview on Hidden Brain with Steven Pinker, titled “Beyond Doomscrolling” captures the fallacy of the news: in a time when humans are at their most peaceful and cooperative, the news is a glowing, screaming screen, inches away from your face that scours the globe looking for the worst bits possible. News sites purposefully ignore the good in humanity in order to throw you into a state of fear and anxiety, which makes you more reactive and more willing to click on whatever ads are floating next to their doomsday headlines.

A book I read this year with my son was Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter. I know cynics like to make fun of Pollyanna for being naïve or overly cheerful. But I loved that book. I thought, If there was ever a personality from history or literature that I wanted to emulate, it would be Pollyanna. I loved the Glad Game, where you purposefully look for things in your life to feel glad about. It’s a lot like those [gratitude journals] that happiness psychologists recommend to rewire people’s brains for happiness. Pollyanna even goes so far as reframing challenging and uncomfortable things as opportunities for personal growth.

I think that’s why I love reading so much—especially reading fiction. These last two years have been tremendous reading years for me. Last year I read 166 books. To date, I’ve read 140 books this year.

What’s wonderful about reading is that you get to have these wonderful, deep interactions with someone. Fiction stories, in particular, often involve a character struggling through a horrible experience in a compressed period of time. But where fiction differs from life is that these characters are often on the lookout for how they can learn and grow from these terrible experiences. The character on the last page is often wiser than who they were on page one. 

I love this. I love being reminded of the human capacity for change, and that sometimes the sweetest fruits can spring from the rockiest soil. This is inspirational to me.

And it’s something I always try to include in my own stories.

These last two years I’ve been mostly focused on short stories because those are an even tighter form of characters forced into a crucible of change. Short stories are more challenging than novels, in some ways, because it’s a lot harder to “stick the landing” on a believable moment of character transformation in 2 pages than in 200 pages. 

Whereas an epiphany at the end of a novel often feels like a nice coffee after a long, luxurious three-course meal, an epiphany at the end of a short story usually feels like the floor dropping out from beneath you. Totally different feeling.

I’ve been working on gathering together the best of the short stories I’ve written over the last 17 years in a collected titled, What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse. 

For you literary nerds out there, the title is a spin on Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.” These are relationship stories.

My stories are also relationship stories. Couple relationships, friendships, neighbors, parents and children, and humans and animals. These are stories where a character is forced to re-evaluate what they thought they knew about themselves, their relationships with others, and their place in the universe. That’s what I aspired to do.

My stories often involve characters interacting with our current world, but I also play with genres a bit. I have stories with angels, stories with ghosts, stories with vampires, and stories about how technology is shifting our reality.

I hope to publish this collection by the end of the year. While you wait, you can read “Prove It,” which was published by Club Chicxulub online. You can also hear me read the story. They did a fantastic job setting a soundtrack as background to the stories. I highly recommend you check out my story and the rest of their literary magazine. They did a great job.