Historically speaking, making a public pledge is a dangerous game. People hold you to things. They expect results. You successfully defend a doctoral dissertation, and suddenly society expects you to have your life together forever. You spend a few years writing about supernatural oddities and urban fantasy, and people naturally assume you have a direct, working relationship with every spectral resident south of Broad Street.
Expectations are a heavy, burdensome cloak.
Which brings me to the blinking cursor currently mocking me from my Ulysses dashboard.
I have spent a deeply unreasonable amount of time recently contemplating the nature of the internet. The digital void demands sustenance. It insists upon being fed, constantly and without mercy. And after much deliberation, soul-searching, and staring blankly into the middle distance while my coffee went tepid, I have decided to give the void exactly what it wants.
I am officially committing to posting every single day.
Pause for applause. Or profound concern. Both are entirely valid reactions.
Now, before you begin frantically adjusting your daily schedules to accommodate this incoming tidal wave of content, we must have a frank discussion about the parameters of this arrangement. Consider this the Terms of Service that you usually blindly scroll past, except I am forcing you to read it.
When I say “I will post daily,” the only legally binding concept in that sentence is “daily”—defined here strictly as “one full rotation of the Earth.” The word “post,” however, is going to be subject to aggressive, avant-garde interpretation.
I am making absolutely zero warranties regarding the structural integrity, length, or profoundness of these daily dispatches.
- What you might get on a Tuesday: A meticulously crafted, three-thousand-word vignette full of sparkling prose, rich atmospheric tension, and gripping narrative drive.
- What you might get on a Wednesday: The word “spatula.”
- What you might get on a Thursday: A slightly out-of-focus photograph of a feral cat I saw near a dumpster, accompanied by a caption that just says, “He knows.”
Some days, you will receive a polished piece of writing. On other days, my solitary contribution to your intellectual life will be a single punctuation mark that I felt particularly drawn to that morning. An em dash, perhaps, if I am feeling generous.
The content will be wildly, delightfully unpredictable. It could be a profound meditation on the human condition, or it could just be me complaining about a moderately inconvenient pothole in the grocery store parking lot.
So, brace yourselves. The daily era has begun. The bar for what constitutes a “post” has been formally lowered into the Earth’s mantle, and I am absolutely thrilled to see what we find down there.
