When I began Budaeli a little over three years ago, the original plan was to use the site as a vehicle for my fiction writing. Today, over at fiction.budaeli.com – I’m finally opening up my stories to everyone. The first story is up and while I make no claims to the quality, now anyone can read my work.

How Budaeli Fiction works

Comments are enabled on every new story for discussion and constructive criticism. Comments will be moderated for relevancy, but I want to leave an opening for readers to tell me what they like and don’t like about the works, or to discuss aspects of the stories and writing. Over time stories may be revised and if they reach a state where I don’t want to work on them any more, they’ll be retired to a permanent page on the site. All works will be published with a liberal copyright adapted from a Creative Commons license because I don’t want to artificially limit the distribution of any of my ideas because they could be improved upon by more creative people.

Oh right. The title of this post needs an explanation.

Over the years that I’ve been writing, I’ve only shown one or two pieces to other people. And for a long time I never bothered to finish anything I started (this was a problem for a lot of other projects, and is a recurring theme in my life). About a month ago I was laid off and suddenly had lots of free time, so I devoted part of that time to getting back into writing and launching a site specifically for my fiction.

This time the problem wasn’t procrastination so much as a fear of failure and a perfection complex. Over the last several weeks I’ve accrued about a dozen great starts and no completed stories. But today I stopped worrying about whether my writing was good or not or whether the story was interesting or not and just wrote out a vignette published it. I finished the site design and layout for Budaeli Fiction weeks ago but it was useless without content.

By ‘not giving a fuck’ I’m settling with a state of my writing that is complete enough to be presentable. I may not be a good writer, I’m probably a terrible writer at fiction – but I won’t let my misgivings hold back any work from being published. However, I accept responsibility for anything published with my name, meaning it will be authentic and adherent to my personality and beliefs.

There is a chance that I’m a terrible writer of fiction. If, after a decent attempt at writing fiction, the stories are as horrible as they are right now, Budaeli Fiction will shut down and I’ll find something else with which to spend my time.

The first story is a vignette, “Only Once”. Let me know what you think in the comments or contact me at correspondence at budaeli dot com.

Note: since Budaeli Fiction has been shut down, links to the short story and the copyright page have been changed to the current versions on this site.