I don’t consider myself a writer. Since leaving university, I’ve only written corporate emails and reports. Nothing close to fiction. Yet somehow, that was the itch that kept coming back.
For months, I accumulated notes, drafts of drafts, mind maps, sketches. Never quite sure what was forming, but feeling it just out of reach.
Even as I grappled with the idea itself, I kept asking: why bother? In a world saturated with AI-generated content, what’s the point? In a world where everyone is watching video, who will read all this? Who will ever understand what I’m trying to create? And why would it matter if they did?
Then, while in therapy, it finally clicked. This whole project is for myself.
This is a project that feeds me: the exploring of ideas, the learning by doing, the wrangling of words, and perhaps most of all, the part of me that needs creative expression.
This project is also how I process my own existence. I’m not writing about characters navigating life in their city and the moral choices they face because it’s an interesting intellectual exercise. I’m writing it because I’m trying to make sense of my own life in my own city: the choices others make about it, the power structures at play, the impossible balance between growth and everything else that matters.
As the itch grew stronger, I knew this formless idea needed form. I need to give it an online home to make it tangible. I researched platforms, consulted AI chatbots, compared options. Then I stumbled upon Astro, a static website generator. I had no idea how to use it, but I was intrigued by what it offered: a blank canvas to experiment on, not just a template to fill. And so, without any web-building or fiction-writing knowledge, I flung myself into it.
Earlier today, I registered a domain to make this project real. I was met with a steep technical learning curve full of alien workflows and terms: command-line interfaces, Git repositories, markdown formatting, deployment workflows. Hours disappeared into error messages and documentation, my screen filled with code I barely understood.
Wrestling with these technical challenges made me feel like I was earning this space. Every small victory from successfully deploying a test page, figuring out how to structure the document archives, finally posting this blog post, reinforced that this project was worth the effort.
I still don’t know if this will work. I have draft documents sitting in folders, character voices I’m still refining, plot threads I’m not sure how to weave together. I’m still learning how to build this damn website. But I’m writing this post to remind myself that the point of all this isn’t perfection. It’s to metabolize my experience of being alive through the act of creation itself. I’m no longer waiting for others to witness me exploring this idea to justify its existence. This is where I will scratch the itch that refuses to go away. This is where I figure out what this story and maybe myself, want to be.