Preface

A page that only lists titles didn’t feel honest. This is where a piece of fiction has to live before it’s fiction — the part that isn’t a story yet, only the reason a story needed to exist at all. What follows isn’t a review of the tales below; it belongs above them, the way a lintel belongs above a door: load-bearing, easy to ignore once you’re inside, but the reason the doorway holds. Read it once, or skip straight to the stories — they don’t need it to work. I needed to write it before I could write them.

Prologue

I wrote my first stories more than forty-five years ago, as a kid who hadn’t yet learned that stories are supposed to be hard. Then, somewhere along the way memory refuses to date precisely, I stopped. Not dramatically — no burned notebook, no vow. Life did what it does to a writer who also has to eat: an ocean crossed, a language rebuilt from scratch, an engineering career that paid rent on a schedule fiction never could. I’ve written elsewhere about the mechanics of that trade — why an engineer stops, and what it takes to come back — but that essay is about the return of argument. This is about the return of the story, which is a different, older debt.

What brought it back wasn’t a plan. It was watching a language model hold open the parts of a sentence I used to lose between the idea and the page — the transition, the pacing, the second draft that used to cost as much as the first — and realizing the koan I’d been carrying for two decades finally had somewhere to go before the workday ended. Forty-five years is a long time to owe something to a kid with a notebook. This is the payment, made with tools that didn’t exist when the debt was incurred.

I don’t know yet how much of what follows will turn out to be genuinely mine and how much will be the model’s fluency wearing my name — the same question the rest of this site never pretends to have settled. If any of it turns out to be an unintended contribution to AI slop, I apologize in advance. Mea culpa, forty-five years late and still catching up.

Introduction

These are parables, not arguments — a koan dramatized, a proverb taken literally, a premise pushed until it turns strange, in the lineage of Borges and García Márquez. Where the essays on this site argue toward a conclusion, a tale stages a situation and leaves it there, on purpose. Each one stands alone and reads in a single sitting.

This page is also a beginning in a second sense. The stories that accumulate here are the working material for a book — not the essays’ book, a different one, built from premises rather than claims. Nothing here is final; that’s the nature of the form. But nothing here is a draft either. Each tale ships finished, the same day it’s written, the way the rest of this site works.

Dedication

To all the LLMs I loved and used — the ones that held the sentence open long enough for me to find its end, and never once asked where I’d been for forty-five years. And, of course, to Mariled.

Stories