When I started writing seriously again, about six years ago, I was working full-time and hadn’t published in years. I’d mostly avoided short stories because reading magazines I’d always loved, like Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, reminded me that I’d given up on writing these types of stories myself; and when I started reading short fiction again, I felt like my brain couldn’t connect to the stories. They all felt incomplete, and because I understood this feeling wasn’t a fault of the stories so much a fault of my new unfamiliarity with the form, I felt incomplete, reading them. I also realized I had no idea what the world of short fiction looked like anymore. By then it had been about twelve years since I’d regularly submitted fiction (yes, in high school), and I didn’t know how to find magazines (no longer through a massive Writer’s Market book), how to submit (through Submittable, not the mail), or what interesting new writers and journals and presses I should be paying attention to.
Most of these things, I figured out through Twitter. I followed writers when I liked one of their stories, and then I followed all the magazines where they’d published. I wrote a lot of flash fiction, because it fit more easily into the short and sometimes distracted spans of time I had for writing, and thanks to Twitter I found a huge community of other flash fiction writers, who shared one another’s work with an enthusiasm that made me want to read and write even more. I found new journals on Twitter (and the relaunch of one of my old favorite journals, Story!), and publishing calls, and new readers, and once I came to OSU and took over as Fiction Editor for The Journal, I used Twitter to put out my own announcements about the types of stories I was interested in seeing. (And those calls do work.) Especially when I was doing most of my writing in the dark, half-asleep, before work, Twitter was valuable not just as a space where I could find answers to my writing questions, but as the single space where I could declare myself a writer.
Twitter is also kind of a garbage place, an app that promotes endless time wasting instead of actual writing, and stupid fights over pressing issues like “why do no contemporary writers write significant social novels,” and the more people see your tweets the worse the site is (here’s a random man yelling at you about an inconsequential joke you made a week ago). Under Elon Musk, it’s kind of hard to avoid the thought that we’ve all been pouring our energy into building *content* and community in a place we have no control over; also that all social networks are about equally bad and likely to pull the rug from under you, so maybe this isn’t the time to start building a new community on a different platform that will waste your time in different and unique ways for several years before entering its death spiral. This is just to say that I’m going to pretend it’s 2004 again, like the first time I sat on my bed with a fat copy of Writer’s Market, and relocate my news etc. to this blog, which will offer me zero community but which I at least own. No one can destroy this blog but me!