As I sit here this morning, I’m still churning through yet another batch of “back burner” essay projects. I can’t help but marvel at how, after all these years of getting my writing organized, I still have over 400 essays that feel completely unworthy of publishing. It’s not even that I’m overly picky with what ideas to pursue—though my relentless editing habits might suggest otherwise. 

Truthfully, for every essay that gets filed away, there’s another half-dozen that languish in limbo, waiting for the magic of “completion” that never quite arrives. Some of these have been sitting on the shelf so long they might as well have cobwebs on them—if only they were physical objects. Alas, my digital graveyard of Word documents knows no such mercy.

What’s truly absurd is that I’m still generating new ideas at an alarming pace. You’d think that with all the effort I’ve put into cleaning up the literary dumpster fire that is my essay folder, I’d slow down, maybe finish something for once. But every day presents a fresh cascade of thoughts, experiences, and observations, all clamoring to be turned into prose. Thus, the pile grows ever larger, adding more half-finished essays to the mix like some mad scientist building an army of unfinished chimeras—an amalgamation of thoughts from high school, college, and probably even junior high.

If I ever publish a book called Collected Ramblings of Amelia Desertsong, it’ll be the longest volume of unwritten essays the world has ever seen. Some of these writings, if they can even be called that, are marvels of incoherence. There are fragments of ramblings that start with lofty philosophical premises only to collapse into nonsensical drivel after a few paragraphs. Then there are the essays that are startlingly business-like, as though I briefly believed I could moonlight as a corporate consultant. 

Then, of course, we have the essays that teeter on the edge of absolute lunacy—those unhinged musings that defy categorization. These are the ones I secretly love the most, even though they’re probably the reason I’ll never run for public office. Fortunately, I’ve developed a framework that, if not corralling the bedlam in my brain, at least gives it some semblance of structure. 

Dark humor and sarcastic wit have become my default mode—not just in writing, but in real life. It’s mostly a safety net, a way to filter the absurdity of existence into something that can be managed or at least laughed at whenever things get worse. Life is horrifically weird, after all, so if I didn’t find some humor in the madness, I’d probably have to retreat to a cabin in the woods and start writing manifestos.

The other tool I’ve developed over the years is the long-form template. Series like Chronicles of Absurdia are my secret weapon for taming the beast that is my creative process. With such templates, I can mold all those disconnected thoughts into something resembling a coherent narrative. I say “resembling” because, yeah, even my most polished essays tend to take sharp turns into the weird and wondrous. But at the very least, the templates give me a sense of order, a roadmap to guide my rambling mind toward a destination—even if I don’t always know where that destination is when I start writing.

But even as I’ve found ways to manage so many of my works into finished products (for now), the fact remains that so many of my essays are still patchwork amalgamations of experiences that span decades. It’s not just that the ideas keep coming. They also refuse to settle, to stay static. For it to be worth pursuing, an idea must always be evolving, shifting, growing like some kind of intellectual mold. I can’t just write something and be done with it. No, I have to revisit it, rewrite it, and stitch it together with other ideas, until it’s barely recognizable as the thing I originally intended to say. No wonder people don’t know what to make of a lot of my older work! I don’t even know what it was supposed to say!

Even my published works aren’t safe. Yes, there are four whole books out in the world that I’ve managed to finish and let go of for now: one poetry collection, one short essay collection, one long-form essay collection, and one YA novel. But they, too, are in danger. I’m never truly done with anything. I will always feel the pull to go back, to edit, to refine, to “improve.” Nothing is ever final. Everything is a draft. Honestly, Life itself feels like a draft half the time.

This is my ongoing struggle: I can’t ever just finish something and move on. I must always watch my work evolve alongside my own sensibilities. I must always be vigilant, lest I let an essay sit for too long without tinkering with it. It’s like the essays are living beings, demanding attention, refusing to be left alone. Maybe they’re afraid that if I don’t keep rewriting them, they’ll wither away into irrelevance. Or maybe it’s just me who’s afraid of that.

Either way, my essay graveyard continues to grow. But hey, at least I’ve got a sense of humor about it, dark and sarcastic as it may be. I’ll never pretend that I have nothing left to say, and no writer is truly finished that’s still breathing.

~ Amelia Desertsong