So about three years ago, I did something really, really, really stupid: I started a Patreon and made promises.

I probably should not use promises like this, but to me, a promise is like a challenge. Not a throw-down-your-gauntlet, slap-’em-with-a-white-glove kind of challenge, but a challenge to ensure I’m staying on top of being the type of person I want to be.

So often I profess that I’m a writer. To myself, my family, my friends. But you know the old pique of critique, “you can lie to me, but can you lie to yourself?”

When I open the workshed, I find it half-empty. Dust settles on whatever old manuscripts and story treatments have survived. The bindings peel, and the words, though legible, no longer glow. They are old-fashioned. Quaint images and tricks of a younger writer just trying to figure themselves out.

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Some days, I look at them and turn sour; how can I be a writer if everything I write is crap? How can I be a writer if I don’t even write every day? To whom am I lying?

If they have a function, then they are proof. Proof that I have always possessed a natural disposition towards writing. That I actually enjoy the thrill of scribbling and scribbling and scribbling. Sweat may not slip from the brow, but the muscles still flex, they still run hot. There is a fire and there is steam and there is a thirst that cannot be quenched by any normal or mundane means.

The issue has always stemmed from the first word. The first sentence. To work up that thirst, I needed to start somewhere, anywhere. And too often I would discourage myself because of that first sentence. How could that little pile of kindling compare to the bonfire in my mind?

These questions have been the obstacle. Slippery and shifting shape, but always coming from a place of doubt.

But not today. Today, I published my first Patreon-exclusive short story. It’s about Bill Walton and the Portland Trail Blazers——write about what you know, y’know?——and it’s available to all Patreon subscribers. It’s not perfect, I’ll admit, I may even go back over it in the future. But it is finished. And it has been published.

I hope you enjoy it (or not) as I prepare for the next story.

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