This project was originally going to start many moons ago. Way back when, I bought this domain as kind of a gag—my joke was that if I ever started a band, I would call it “Small Shiny Objects” so the college reviewers could be snarky and say “the crowd was not mesmerized by Small Shiny Objects.” The plan was to use this as a portfolio for copywriting and also a repository for fiction and personal essays, but it never got off the ground. Eventually I let it lapse, and someone bought the domain and tried to use it for e-commerce.
More recently, I’ve done a fair bit of writing online, and for some reason people seem to like what I create. After hearing enough people say I should write a book (I’m working on two) or that they wanted to read more, hubris mode kicked in and I decided to see about putting up a site. I looked at the domains I currently maintained and wasn’t super happy about using any of them, and then out of curiosity punched smallshinyobjects.com into a domain search engine and wouldn’t you know, it was available again.
Swept along by the relentless tide of history.
So this site is going to serve as a home for the things I write. Primarily, it will be a place for me to post snippets of the fiction I’m working on, as well as a place to tell stories from my life. I’ll also undoubtedly use this to comment on things I love or hate, random pop culture musings, you name it. I’ll use this to collect things I’ve written in the past as well as showcase my ongoing writings.
A word about content: I have a very bleak sense of humor and melancholy is kind of my “Free Bird.” I’ll go into some more detail on this subject in upcoming posts, but just be prepared for the occasional post that might have you thinking, “hey, buddy, you okay over there?” I assure you I am. I’m a big believer in the fact that life contains both light and darkness, and without one or the other, you lose context. So if you’re the type of person who always wants things to be sunny and cheerful, this might not be your cup of tea.
I will however attempt to stay well the fuck clear of politics here. Primarily because when I talk politics, I tend to piss everybody off. (No, I’m not a “centrist.” I’m so left-wing neither of the parties in this country can see me from where they’re standing.) If you want to put me in a frame, consider me a devout Carlinist. Saint George is my spirit animal.
And I’ll promise you this right now: no fucking LLMs. You might have seen an em-dash earlier; rest assured that comes from the fact that I’ve been stacking words on top of each other since I was a child and generally know what the little dots and lines and squiggles mean. I don’t even like grammar checking, which will probably become evident due to my overuse of semicolons and run-on sentences. So you can rest assured this nonsense I spew isn’t the kind of nonsense that comes from an algorithm. Some of us just write good.
(Yes, that’s a joke. It’s depressing how many times I’ve made that comment elsewhere and people didn’t get it and immediately swarmed to “gotcha” me. C’mon, son.)
So, I’m sure I’ve forgotten something, but that’s the important stuff, I feel. So with those ground rules in place, let’s see what happens.