Welcome to Inkwell-er!

Howdy! It’s your least favorite New Year’s tradition checking back in five days into a brand new year to pollute your inbox just a little more.

That level of self-deprecation is something that I’m hoping to tone down in the rest of 2025. After spending 2024 making so many massive changes to my life, I feel like I should try to start tuning up the little subtleties that can often go overlooked. My propensity to shoot holes in my own hull is one of those things that I’m not gonna let slide any more. Specifically in regards to writing.

I’ve been a writer my whole life. No matter the situation or the age, words on paper (or a screen) have always felt like the most natural way I could wrench whatever was inside of me out into the world. They’ve always been familiar tools to me, certain ones molded slowly to the palm of my hand and the tip of my pen, honed by years and years of use. But lately, I’ve noticed that I’m not as adept as I used to be. When I sit down to write, I find myself stumbling over sentences, making mistakes that aren’t the usual kinds of messy oversights to which I usually succumb. (At least I never end sentences with prepositions!) Overall, I find that I’m starting to lose my ability to communicate in the only way that’s ever felt truly normal for me, and that scares me.

So, I’m gonna try and do something about it. Probably gotta stop starting sentences with “So,” but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. Mainly, what I want to do is a little writing project. The kind of project that usually would be doomed to fail for my ADHD-ridden brain, but I’m gonna try it, because neuroplasticity isn’t gonna develop itself. For the rest of 2025, I want to write at least one short story a week. I’m focusing on fiction because, well, the world itself isn’t throwing up much positive motivation right now. Plus, I want to wait until I’m in grad school to actually interact with the reality that’s gonna destroy my will to live. So until then, we’re gonna stick to fiction. Or half-fiction. Whatever feels right.

There’s a hitch to this little plan of mine, and that’s actually attached to another shortfall that I want to address within myself. Last year, I think I listened to the least amount of new music I ever have in my adult life. Early on, a lot of that was an unwillingness to abandon my comfort songs and albums (thanks to Jeff Rosenstock, PUP, and The Wonder Years for getting me through 2024!), but in the latter part of the year, it was mostly a technical limitation. I was still getting used to returning to a non-streaming ecosystem, and after a couple of months, I think that I’ve finally got the hang of it all, and I’ve been hoarding albums like crazy. A lot of those are albums I haven’t listened to yet, so 2025 is gonna be a very musical year, hopefully.

I’m tying this into my creative writing project by making the topic/base/inspiration for each of the week’s stories a song that I listened to within that week. I’m not necessarily going to force myself to make the song a new one, because I don’t want to set too high a barrier for entry, but I do want a little help getting the creative juices flowing. I’m not sure what I’ll write, but I’m excited to write again. Even writing this feels like a victory, just a little 700 word essay outlining an ambitious plan that might not ever materialize into anything; at least I can still kinda do this. And hopefully by the end of the year, I’ll be able to do this better than now, maybe even better than ever before. I think you’ll enjoy it. I hope you will, at least. I never really write with an audience in mind, so maybe I’ll start trying to do that. Who knows?! Natasha Bedingfield really went off when she said the rest is still unwritten, because… yeah. It is! But it won’t be for long.