Feel something.

Once a month I share a story to move, unsettle, or illuminate my readers. In early 2024, I committed to doing this a hundred times. I will complete my catalog of grace, cruelty, love and loss in May, 2032. A hundred stories. A hundred months. You and I.

On a practical note, paid subscribers have access to the full archive. Free subscribers have a month to read the current story. There is a 48-hour warning before a story is pulled from circulation. I am experimenting with reading my stories aloud for my paid subscribers. My paid subscriptions come to less than $1.50 a month. Above all, your investment in my writing helps promote it on this platform. There is a certain “skin in the game” too.

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As I write this, seventeen have been published. Six wait patiently in the wings. Along the way, one turned into a slim novel. One is a brief, tongue-in-cheek book jacket bio. There is, to my own surprise, an Emoji Book of Genesis.

My stories span genres, themes and time. You won’t know what you’ll read. I don’t know what I’ll write. I don’t know what voice they’ll speak to me in. The stories lead me where they will. I try to follow. As I should.

Writing a story is like trying to teach oneself to ride a bicycle: it’s wobbly, instructions are useless, and the whole business comes down to speed and letting go. But for all the dings and skinned knees, every now and then there are a few joyful yards of free-wheeling over green grass.

And then it’s a new month, and I’m off to learn to ride a bicycle all over again.

A word about you:

Until I wrote regularly on Substack, I thought the writer did the writing and the reader did the reading. Since then, I’ve witnessed how much of a story’s power is actively created in the minds of my readers. It’s astonishing. I’m charmed and moved to glimpse the stories through my reader’s comments. We get to participate in a magical act of co-creation together. You are my spice drawer. I will try to always respond to your comments.

(Stealth readers, know that you are loved equally.)

Read slowly and these characters will be as much yours as they are mine. I promise you I have written them with great care and have dreams for each of them: the astronaut floating untethered, the Yankee knuckleballer, the boy who sneaks into homes, the daughter of Dionysus…

I am introducing my family to you. Faults and all, I want you to love them. They are only human.

Or long to be.

Adam