2025-12-20

I woke up a few minutes before my 8 AM alarm this morning, which to me is always something I appreciate. It can feel as if my body is telling me "hey, I’m used to this little routine we have. Let’s keep it up." I felt confident going through my morning routine as usual, but after my first dose of caffeine and breakfast, I felt tired. I decided to lie back in bed because it felt comforting to lull myself back into rest, but as I was beginning to drift back to sleep, there was something in me that drove me out of bed. That thing was the rest of the routine: my self-directed obligation to come here and write this entry before lunch with a fresh mind.

It was difficult getting myself back out of bed to come onto my computer and start writing, but now that I’m here, I feel proud of myself that I came back to the page with discipline. It’s a small win, something that I need to keep track of more. So with that, I’ll state it plainly for posterity:

This entry is a small win. It will build into something greater.

With the year coming to a close, I want to look back on my progress with this blog. I started it later this year, back in August. I had been writing these entries but not publishing them publicly since July 2024. Back then, the entries were much more emotionally visceral and were more like venting. Today, though, these entries feel like vignettes—small personal essays with clear themes and theses. It’s been a pleasure receiving positive feedback from readers and maintaining an audience that receives something good from my work. I feel motivated to keep pursuing this venture and foster positive change in the mindsets of my readers.

My life is quiet and mundane. There’s not a whole lot of external variance day-to-day, but this mundanity is the essential backdrop to my internal world. New thoughts on life consistently emerge and I enjoy wrestling with them publicly. Many of us wrestle with ideas internally, but seldom does anyone really show what it’s like to think through something from beginning to end and put it in a neat little package. For me, I hope that my work exists as a time capsule. It’ll be interesting for those in the future to read these entries and get an insight into what it was like to be alive at this time in history. I get to make my mark indelibly.

No one will be able to take that away from me.

I look at my literary heroes and see how much they were able to accomplish in their lives. Vladimir Nabokov published 17 novels in his lifetime. Not only was he prolific, but also a stylistic genius. It’s something that makes my work here feel insignificant. Granted, there’s a difference in the times to contend with.

I think that the literary giants of the last century would have had a much different fate if they knew about blogging and digitized writing. It’s a vastly different world than print, that’s for sure. But even still, I haven’t even written a single manuscript for a novel, let alone published any. I’m getting closer to 30 years old, and it’s easy for me to feel behind in my career, if one could even call it that. I haven’t even come close to breaking in yet. Writing those longer, more coherent pieces is something that’s been such a challenge for me.

Over the course of my career so far (about 2 years), I’ve self-published maybe 20-25 pieces. These have been mostly essays and short fiction, and many of them I have since deleted and removed from the internet. As it stands, I have all of these Cogito pieces (this might be somewhere between 60 and 80, but I’m not sure) and my six or seven IOKTIKN pieces that I feel proud of that I put on this site. I haven’t written any novels. In terms of published writing, I would estimate that I’ve published around 50,000 words worth of writing. If I include non-published writing, I’d venture to say that I have written about 200,000 words over the course of two years.

When I write it out, I know that I’ve been diligent in refining my craft. The biggest obstacle, as always, is myself. I constantly feel reluctant to put myself out there. I’ve only submitted one short story (Riding Into Caskets) to publications despite the fact that I’ve written several. I always teeter between wanting to be published by a larger publication and putting everything on my site for my audience that I’ve built myself. There’s a distinct mix of pride and shame I feel towards that. As I move into next year, though, I hope to have more confidence in keeping pieces in my back pocket so that I can submit them and maybe even get them published elsewhere.

I know I have what it takes. I just hope that God gives me the courage to follow through.

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