What I learned from 12 weeks of writing

Or: the clarifying joy of a financial gun to your head

12 weeks ago I made a pact with you people: one post a week, or I owe you each $50.

Today I’m officially marked safe from the financial bruising I’d have incurred had I let my laziness win. Thank you for playing! Keep reading if you want to play again!

But first, what have I learned from this whole shebang?

Home Lessons, Ralph Hedley, 1887. Or: me every Sunday night.

First: putting money on the line worked. When I was in elementary school and starting to get very into Xbox, my mom made me a deal: she’d pay me to read books. I don’t remember the exact financials we hashed out - maybe ten cents a page, in 2004 dollars mind you - but I do remember that to get my payday, I had to write a book report. I was a pretty capitalist kid, and was happy to trade labor for dollars.

Here’s the thing: I wrote one, maybe two book reports before the theme from the Eyewitness show started playing and I found myself in the throes of a lifelong addiction to reading. I stopped caring about the money; I stopped writing the reports. My mom had successfully tricked me, and I’m grateful to her every day for it.

This whole writing experiment was an attempt to flip that same magic switch, and it worked. Before this, I liked writing, yet was scared of it. Twelve weeks later, I love it; I’m not scared anymore.

Second: I procrastinate. This experiment didn’t change that. I wrote almost every post in a flurry on Sunday evenings, the deadline standing over me tapping its watch. When I started twelve weeks ago, I fantasized about a golden future in which I took 30 minutes every morning to write. Instead, I spent those mornings watching videos on latte art technique or trudging against the wind to the G train. But running against the clock did teach me something else…

Third: I’m confident I can write quickly - without, I think, sacrificing too much quality. I got noticeably better at starting with a vague topic around 5pm on a Sunday, dedicating a few hours to exploration, and coming out on the other side with a nugget of truth. To me, this is the essay’s reward: the way the struggle of writing leads you places you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

All in all, I’m very happy with how this went. I needed to publish my notes on Voodoo, hard as it was. It felt good to reflect on how much you glean from brief interactions with strangers like Gary. I began to welcome the anxiety of a Sunday sundown with nary an idea of what I’d write about for the week, because it led to posts-from-the-heart like this and this.

The Carmagnole (Dance Around the Guillotine), Kathe Kollwitz, 1901

So what’s next? I have always wanted to write a novel. I’ve fantasized about it forever. I’ve dabbled in fiction sparingly, and I’ve always found it intimidating.

Maybe I’m bourgeois, but money got me to love reading, the fear of lost money reshaped my love of essay writing, and now I want to see if putting my wallet on the line can squeeze some fiction out of me.

So let’s up the ante: I’ll write and publish two chapters of a novel/novella¹ here by end of June 2026, or I owe each of you $100. Same rules from the first experiment apply: if I miss my deadline, you need to email me with your Venmo handle to collect.

To give myself a little grace, I’m warning you now: these chapters might be bad. Or even worse, just okay. I mostly want to see whether I enjoy the act of fiction writing so that I can stop fantasizing about it. Either I’ll love it and keep walking down that path, or I’ll hate it and go try something else, like the bouzouki.

But I figure this gives me roughly two months to figure out characters and plot. I already have a world I’ve been spinning in my mind — and pitching to some folks privately — that I want to explore. In the meantime, I’ll try to keep you updated via this Substack at least monthly.

Lastly, thank you to everyone who said something kind after reading my posts. I loved hearing what resonated and what didn’t. It’s a joy to hear from you every time.

1. OR two short stories, jury’s out.