“What am I Doing Here?”
What I’m doing here is as good a guess as any.
I had an online magazine once—back around 2008.
Gave it up when my health broke down.
It’s owned by a nonprofit now.
No hard feelings. No royalties either.
Just the faint hum of memories, like static on an old radio station that still plays your song… even when you’re not listening.
I got into the magazine game thinking:
“If I help publish other people… maybe I’ll earn some karma. Reap what I sow.”
Simple math. Sacred even.
And it was fun.
I interviewed some big names—Bram Stoker Award winners. Nebula winners.
The real deal.
We talked fantasy, darkness, wonder.
We featured artists who painted magic into pixels.
It was brilliant.
Chaotic.
Messy.
Beautiful.
I had a team.
None of us made a dime.
But what we lacked in pay, we made up for in fire.
The kind of fire that keeps you up at night—not because you’re restless, but because you’re alive.
Even editing was fun.
Someone once said:
“Writing doesn’t start until editing begins.”
And they were right.
You write it. You hate it. You trim it. You love it.
Then you hand it off…
…and someone else rejects it.
And if they don’t reject it, they butcher it.
Politely.
Professionally.
Passionately.
Worse still—the workshop.
Well-meaning writers with sharp minds and sharper tongues.
Each one editing your work with their voice, not yours.
“I wouldn’t say it like that.”
“Here’s how I’d write it…”
But the Bible—the greatest story ever told—
wasn’t written to impress editors.
It was written to save souls.
It was written simply.
Sometimes the greatest stories aren’t literary at all.
They’re just true.
Like Mother Goose.
Aesop.
The Gospels.
Some stories don’t whisper across decades.
They roar across millennia.
Because truth doesn’t expire.
And maybe that’s the point.
None of us know what we’re doing.
Success?
Half of it is knowing a friend of a friend.
Luck and timing and open doors.
But the other half?
The real half?
It’s this:
Letting your heart bleed through your fingers
onto a screen no one may ever read.
Spilling your angst and love and passion
into the brain of a stranger
who maybe, just maybe, needed to feel like they weren’t alone.
That’s why I’m here.
Maybe that’s why you’re here, too.