In Ghost Little's 2016 relaunch, I decided on a whim to create a wiki for the site. It's been a rewarding experience. It remains a work in progress. I've been adding and updating pages for each story's production history, as time allows. This has been a remarkable history lesson for me. Looking back at what has become 5+ years of writing for myself on the Internet, my growth, changes in style, changes in motivation, and the development of real direction.

And, hey, despite the rampant unchecked impostor-syndrome that any creative person worth their salt will feel, it's pretty reassuring that writing all this stuff did not literally kill me with anxiety for thinking I had a cool idea for a story.

The goal now is to do something every day related to Ghost Little. This hopefully means daily updates to the blog. It's a fun process. The very act of doing something each day keeps me honest. I also hope it might motivate others to realize that despite it being a difficult commitment, it's doable. Even if every day doesn't work, I owe it to myself to do some action with regularity.

To young writers out there, rest easy, your friends will not abandon you if you write original fiction and publish it on the Internet.

Another notable point: the shared world connecting the stories on Ghost Little have been through so many drafts and versions that there are now canon- and non-canon elements. How cool is that? The wiki helps me keep track of my own stupid ideas and remember, "oh, yeah, I originally invented that term or character, thank God it was retconned in a later draft." On the other hand, some parts have held true through the years. Again, this reflection is critical in the creative process.

I did not set out to create a wiki of things I'd made. I had a backlog of writing, drafts, and ideas, both good and bad, that I had to reconcile to understand where I had come from and where I might go next. I've been able to write a number of wiki pages entirely from memory. Others, I've had to look up actual dates from 2011, you guys! The iPhone wasn't really a thing back then. I've been writing longer than it takes a person to go through high school. Consider how much changes in a person's life in that timespan? Like most people, I would kick the balls off of me-from-4-years-ago. Then I'd tell him he's going to stick with it, and that it will take a long time to get better, and that there will be slow moments, but you won't be able to stay away.

Don't be selective in saving your work, and don't be ashamed of how bad it was.

Try to save everything. I was fortunate to hold onto the very first real blog post I wrote. It was a weird little thing, a mimicry of Penny Arcade to accompany comic I'd drawn. Even then, I knew I would only do 10 posts in this style, and see what became of it.

I learned I didn't like drawing that much. I learned I had outgrown Penny Arcade.

I started writing about movies I found interesting. I wrote about The Fountain, which I called, "the saddest movie of the 21st century." I didn't know it then, but I was trying to understand why certain concepts interested me.

I wrote about video games. I wrote about books. I wrote about the world that surrounded me. I wrote a short story called The Stonecutter, about a guy floating in a skiff on an freshwater ocean that was dead-flat and only a few feet deep. I love this story, even if it wasn't well written.

I wrote about Paradise Lost in 2011, an epic poem I called "the greatest thing ever written." I'd like to write about it again, more than half a decade later. I started to realize I liked big ideas and high concepts. I didn't like casual stories. Rather than reading them, or watching them, or playing them, I wanted to create my own.

These were remarkable pieces of entertainment. I wondered if I could do it better? It's an innocent thought. Time was on my side. It would take years for me to accumulate the requisite evidence to understand myself. That is what I think certain people fail to understand.

Until you can fathom why you feel the way you feel, and you become comfortable with that, you will struggle to create anything genuine or honest.

I wrote the first draft of The Diffused States of America. Everything came from there. Everything became possible after that. I could sit and write about video games, and movies, and pop culture all day, but now that I understood them, and I understood my own opinions on them, I understood my own taste, at last. There was confidence. There was comfort. Reconciling my fandom and why I felt certain media materials were remarkable, or moronic, or redeemable, or overrated, I knew I didn't have to talk myself into my own ideas anymore. It was okay to make something I really liked.

For example, I think Quentin Tarantino is over-praised. In my study to understand why I thought that, I confirmed that feeling, and yet I also learned a valuable lesson: Tarantino makes movies about stuff he really likes. He has so much confidence in his own passion and knowledge, that he wants to make something just like that, maybe even better.

I stand by my assessment that Tarantino's movies can be meandering, idea-fart vignettes, but he makes them to be as he intends them to be. While I do not have to adore his work, I can extract an cog from his creative machine and fix it to my own.

I want my audience to understand why I love these stories and ideas. That's why I've cataloged everything, crafted a wiki, and made this process as transparent as I can. Come along, this is going to be fun.

If that doesn't appeal to you, well, then I'm confident the right people will get it.

-- @Alex_Crumb