Something happened in the last few months that I didn’t plan for. I started acting like a writer again.

I’m not writing in a journal everyday. It is much more of a “I have stories out on submission and I built a website with a books page and I tricked Sarah into reading a story about the bureaucracy of having a dragon hoard” way. The kind of acting like a writer where you look around and go oh no, I think I might actually be doing this.

The Site

I rebuilt dylanreed.com. It used to be a pixel-art link hub with cats walking on platforms and falling sprites. It was fun. It was chaos. It was not the kind of thing you put in a query letter.

The new version is an actual author website. There’s a books page. There are universe sections — Slow Light, Thistlehollow, Compliance Territory, Acme Hero, Frankenstein’s Daughter. There’s a newsletter called The Margin Notes where you can sign up and get a free copy of The Amazing Squirrel, which is a short story about a part-time superhero in a purple and orange squirrel suit who fights a cyborg with goo bombs. Because of course that’s my reader magnet.

The whole thing looks like a writer’s notebook. Ruled lines, a red margin, taped-in photos, little margin annotations in monospace. It’s still me — it’s just me in a nicer shirt.

The Submissions

I have four pieces out on submission right now. Pressure Rating. The Backlog. Damsel Protocol. Dragon Hoard. I sent them out, and now I wait.

And wait.

And wait.

If you have never submitted fiction to a literary market, let me describe the experience: you spend months writing and revising a story, you research which magazines might want it, you format it according to their very specific requirements, you write a cover letter that is somehow both professional and personal, you hit submit, and then you enter a void where time has no meaning and every email notification makes your heart do a thing.

I check my inbox like it owes me money. It does not. It owes me nothing. It doesn’t even know I exist.

But the stories are out there. That’s new. That’s real. I used to write things and put them in a folder. Now I write things and put them in front of strangers who might say yes. The folder was safer. This is better.

The Time

Here’s the thing nobody talks about: where did the time come from?

I work a full-time job. I have ADHD. I have three cats who believe my keyboard is a bed. I have a rotating cast of hobbies that would concern a therapist. And yet somehow I’ve been writing more in the last few months than I have in years.

Part of it is that AI has genuinely freed up hours in my day job. I’m not going to write a manifesto about it — the short version is that tasks that used to eat my afternoons now take minutes, and I’ve been pouring that recovered time into fiction. Not perfectly. Not consistently. But enough that the word counts are actually moving.

Sarah has noticed. She hasn’t said “you’re writing a lot” in so many words, but I keep finding excuses to hand her a draft. “Hey, can you just read the first chapter and tell me if it’s boring?”

The Community

The other thing that changed: I joined Critique Circle about a month ago. If you’re not familiar, it’s a community where writers critique each other’s work. You earn credits by giving feedback, then spend those credits to get feedback on your own stuff.

I expected the feedback to be the valuable part. And it is — getting fresh eyes on your prose is irreplaceable. But what I didn’t expect is how much giving critiques would energize my own writing. Reading other people’s drafts and thinking carefully about what works and what doesn’t has sharpened how I look at my own pages. You notice your tics faster when you’ve just spent an hour spotting someone else’s.

And honestly? Just being around other people who are doing this — who are writing and revising and submitting and waiting and writing some more — makes the whole thing feel less like a solo act. Writing is lonely. It doesn’t have to be isolating.

The Point

I don’t have a neat conclusion. I built a website. I submitted some stories. I found a community. I accidentally turned my wife into a beta reader. I’m writing more than I have in years and I’m not sure if it’s momentum or mania but I’m not going to question it too hard.

If you want to see what I’m working on, dylanreed.com/books has the full catalog. If you want to read something right now, sign up for The Margin Notes and I’ll send you a superhero in a squirrel suit.

Stay weird. Keep writing. Trick your spouse into reading your drafts.