Resolutions

Happy New Year!

I posted a few goals for 2025 on Bluesky and Twitter as 2024 came to an end the other day, and I wanted to put them out into the universe here too. 

The biggest one is publishing THE FIRST KID ON MARS with Big Sea Books. This is the story that brought me back to writing for the first time since I was a kid, and it's the story that my kid fell in love with as I was writing it. I'll be editing/revising this spring, and the plan is to publish it by the end of the school year. 

I've only been able to write a little bit of SEVENTEEN MINUTES OF RAIN in the present so far - the rest exists only in my imagined future. I'm planning to catch up to that future this year, with a full first draft complete before the calendar flips again.

With three published short stories (BLUE SKIES and FROM NOW ON in The Accidental Time Travelers Collective Vol. 1 and Vol. 3, respectively, and DAY TEN in the first issue of Bunker Squirrel Magazine), I'm starting to feel like a real writer. I've got two more ready to publish this year (BLIND LUCK and (almost) out of the woods), and a whole bunch more in the works. How many can I get published this year?

Speaking of Bunker Squirrel Magazine, I'm planning to submit a flash fiction piece based on their prompts every month. You should too - it's run by great people, and it's putting some great writing out into the world. 

I want to write more haiku this year. Lots and lots and lots of haiku. I gave my parents a @haikuformykids calendar, and maybe it's time to start selling them somewhere. 

And finally, I want to blog more regularly. I guess I can check that off my list.

For today, anyway.

Summer Mode

Summer, I posted the other day, has begun.

Since I was a little kid, I've spent at least some time visiting family in Maine every summer. Now that I've got little kids of my own, I'm grateful that I get to bring them to this magical place. In the spring of 2020, we packed up the car and came out here for what turned out to be a four-month respite; a small town on the coast of Maine was a much better way for two young kids to endure a worldwide pandemic than our crowded Chicago neighborhood. 

That was a strange spring, and it was a wonderful summer.

It was also a reminder that we could do this every year. My wife and I are both teachers (my parents were teachers, too, and it still seems strange to me that normal people have to work in the summer), and this seemed like a lot more fun than the summer teaching gigs we'd pick up in the Before Times.

This year we stayed in Chicago for a few weeks after the school year ended to see friends and enjoy summer in the city. It was fun--Chicago is a fantastic summer town, packed with block parties, movies in the parks, and beautiful beaches--but it didn't really feel like summer to me. 

We left on Canada Day, coincidentally camping in Canada that night so we could spend a day at Niagara Falls (10/10 by the way, I should write a bit about that amazingness) before arriving at my forever summer home. It just feels right here, you know?

The first morning, we took the canoe across the Creek (we call it the Creek, but it's a lot more impressive than that makes it sound--it's actually a branch of the Kennebec River, a few hundred yards upstream of where it feeds into the Atlantic Ocean) to a magical sand bar beach that only appears at low tide.

We have a routine there: we all get out on the pristine sand, I haul the canoe up far enough that the rising tide won't take it before it's time to go home, and we spend a few hours playing in the gentle waves. If we get the timing right, small islands appear briefly as the water rises; I wrote one of my favorite haiku about that moment a few years ago.

Now it feels like summer. 

Why haiku?

Again, I don't really know.

When I started writing seriously again in January 2021 (more on that later), I was thinking about a lot of different directions I could go, and trying to listen to the directions my passion wanted to take me. 

I started a crazy story about a couple of kids who move to Mars (lots more on that later), jotted down some notes about some other hazy ideas that floated through my brain, and remembered a couple of old haiku I had written way back in high school:

always the water
pounds the sand
looking for nothing

and

old men press buttons
while the next generation
can only ask why

And I thought, hey these were pretty good. Maybe I can write more of these - in fact, maybe I can write them for my kids. So I wrote a new haiku:

haiku for my kids
seventeen syllables to
tell them everything

And then I thought, I bet I can match this up with a picture and it'll be even cooler:

And it was. And then I made my very first Instagram account, and I started writing haiku every day.

And you know what? It turns out to be a really helpful tool for my fiction writing. It helps me exercise my writing muscles and forces me to be concise and precise. Plus it's a lot of fun!

I hope you enjoy the haiku too! Let me know if you have a favorite. 

haikuformykids on Instagram
haikuformykids on Twitter