The reserve bucket is empty.

The reserve bucket is used for emergencies.

I do not want to write a novel. It has never been my goal. I have the attention span of a bouncy ball, or a drunk person who forgets they are in a public restroom. I can write 50,000 to 80,000 words, but not on the same topic. At some point I might publish a collection of essays, but for now I will stick with writing and publishing those essays as stand-alones. You wrote a story, why should you keep it?

This is the thing that I have come to call my reserve bucket. It is a bucket of stories and articles. You put stories in because it is never ending.

Sometimes I feel creatively drained when “Fuck it” feels the best route to take. Sometimes I can write three stories a day, swiftly and with grace, and at other times I am willing to lose sleep to keep going. I used both of them as positive and negative.

The definition of a writer is not to just sit down and write, but to finish the work for the day. That is not how a writer works. We are going to come up with the same number of bad ideas as we do good. We will write as many bad stories as we can. It is part of the writing process. We were prepared to keep our writing career going no matter what, even though we weren’t prepared for some aspects and loopholes.

Every writer should have a reserve bucket of stories and articles.