I had a fun story idea that I wanted to write about a week ago and I haven’t written anything since I thought of it. But I don’t want to actually write it, because it will take a lot of time to write it out the way I want to write it out, and I feel like if I do it wrong the first time, I won’t want to try and do it again. I wrote down, throughout the week, a few fun story ideas. I mostly think of them right before I’m about to go to bed and my brain is closing up for the night and removing all the security barriers that let the hellscape dreams I have every few nights seep in. One idea was “a man who collects usernames”. Looking at it now, I don’t remember what was funny or interesting about that. I do remember, right after writing it down, that I would not remember why I thought it was funny, or the extra details that would go along with that hook to make it into a story and not just an idea.

That’s probably why the next entry on my list is “failed stories list”. This is also obviously not really a fun or interesting idea for a story, or at least I don’t remember what I thought was fun or interesting about it. With this one, I definitely thought that the me who would wake up and look at this list again would see that and go, oh I know what to do, I know how to have fun with this. But I don’t! Maybe I did the night after I wrote it, but definitely not anymore.

So you could consider this, the one that is being written right now, as the grandchild of the story of the man who collects usernames. The story that birthed the failed stories list story, who would become the parent of this story, which also isn’t really a story, it’s just a blog post. Maybe, if I was a lot stupider, I would have written down “The Perfect Idea” under those names on my list which is split into a notepad file on my computer and a nebulous notepad app “file” (?) on my phone, and eventually I would be writing a story about how I don’t remember what that one means either. If I had held off long enough, would this family have birthed the Next Great American Novel? Instead of this? I think so, and it’s tragic I’m only realizing this now.

Or… maybe there’s still time… what if I just don’t write the first fun story I talked about and wait until I forget what I was going to do for that…