"Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories." Yuval Noah Harari
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of wandering through maps and staring at stars. I spent hours following rivers and roads, chasing settlements and imagining their stories. Those stories took me to the stars and to the worlds around them. With age they led to history, Reader's Digest and the solar system. In high school, poetry became my tool to sculpt them. Later, programming took over as the tool of choice. Then a career began, professionalism took over the artist, and that was that. Yet the unease remained. The stories stayed, waiting to come out somehow.
What a story is
Before you relate stories to fiction, a clarification. By a story I mean some imagined thought presented in some medium. Stories can be paintings, poems, programs, musical compositions, films, games, and so on. It is hard to limit them by definition, as hard as putting a leash on imagination.
And then there is the beauty of expression. The same imagined thought can be expressed in many mediums. A piece of fiction can be a book, an epic, a film, even a game.
A place to make them
What these stories need is a workshop, real and virtual, where they can find their expressions and the light of an audience's feedback.
There are obvious challenges of time and money. Time, I think, is best handled by habit. For money, the free-price model, the kind Patreon made familiar, seems the better fit. Collaborations can stay on the wish list for now.
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." Maya Angelou
Drafted in 2020
Updated for site in 2026