I’ve written around thirty-three thousand words this year for the 2023 Gallimaufry. It falls short of the eighty or ninety thousand that last year’s 365 project possessed. Nor do I think it’ll make up that ground between now and the turn of the new year.

The point of this section wasn’t to do the same thing as the previous year. It wasn’t to push myself to complete a story or write daily. But still, it has this vaguely unfulfilled nature to it. As if by not giving myself a clear goal— I curbed the ambitious spirit of what this could have been.

When looking at it from a gentler viewpoint, I can see that I’ve continued to be productive as I’ve weaved my way through a turbulent year. So, it serves that many of the pieces in this section were reflections — as I tried to unscrew my head and hold it out to look at where I stood. To cast upon my footsteps with eyes that didn’t look down and contain the body in the same frame.

I’m trying to ask myself more questions about what scares me and what can drive my days onward in a more fulfilled manner instead of the hand-wringing that occurs occasionally. As if I were here, I was also waiting backstage for the curtain of a show to open. But there is no othering the sections of our life. It is all one rigamarole (or so it seems).

Some days, I don’t know if I write at this shorter length because of the simplicity. Suppose it’s the expedited fashion that appeals. Or if I’m scared to create something more significant— because then I know I’ll have to share it with the world. And once I share it with the world— it will no longer be mine. This is funny since I’m writing this on my public website— albeit without my real name or any real promotion.

The one thing I do know is that I have to write. Ideas come and scream in the cracks of my brain that trickle down to my ears, and they beg to be written down. I hear lines of dialogue that have woken me from dead sleep. I dream these dreams so vast and wild— beyond what’s written in the tomes of deciphering the meaning of dreams that I would swear to you I believe they are different worlds. Or different lives. Or both.

There’s a compulsion to scratch notes on parchment and tap on my phone screen into my fifteen hundred-something notes I’ve compiled since 2016 (android notes did not carry over in the great purge and transfer to the separatist kingdom that is Apple). I have journals in all my bags, and on a thirty-minute plane ride, I got antsy because I didn’t have a pen (even though I had my phone). That’s the level of background noise that fills my mind. I don’t even have one big, singular idea like I once had with Canyon Run and Alex Largo. It’s been shattered into a thousand pieces as I weave short stories together— intermittently stepping back to see the connections between them— gossamer thin.

It may be that this year’s project served to remind me to be bolder. Or to enjoy the ridiculousness of ferrying thoughts from my head to the page. Or both.