"There plenty of loneliness in the world. I don't know why we have to seek it out and horde it up..."

On some level, nearly every piece of fiction I've ever written has been about love and / or loneliness.

This is not because I believe that all great works of fiction require a love story in them somewhere to appease a certain type of audience, or to help illustrate the protagonist's growth. It's because I believe that all great works of fiction are ultimately love stories.

I often feel that I have hundreds or thousands of tiny fragments of stories or ideas that are jumbled up in my head, waiting to gel into something greater or grander eventually. More often than not the little pieces never gel and instead fade away and are forgotten as days and months and years pass by. And it's a loss, because many of those fragments were pretty darn good on their own.

So I have begun making the effort to post a fragment of some kind on this blog each day. It's an excuse to write, which is good, and it's an excuse to get a fragment out of my head that very likely would have just vanished, and that's also good.

And because I believe that most stories are essentially love stories, you're going to see a lot of these fragments dealing the subject of love. Or loneliness. Because I'm pretty sure that the two things are wrapped together so tightly that you might never be able to tell one from the other.

In a sense, even this post is a fragment, as it gives me the chance to finally release an idea from my mind -- the notion that love and loneliness are tied together. It also gives me the opportunity to say that the reason I think all great stories are essentially love stories is because, deep down, I am a romantic at heart who likes to believe in happy endings.

It's just unfortunate that I am also a cynic who, while liking the idea of happy endings, doesn't think that they happen anywhere near often enough.

I'm not sure why it is that loneliness and loss and desperation seem to be in the cards for so many of us, whether that's simply a part of the human experience, or whether it's supposed to teach us some grand lesson about how the universe is cruel and we are all, ultimately, alone. I'm also not sure why I have learned to allow myself to feel content in this state of loneliness and loss and desperation I tend to find myself in, but it's here that I am the most comfortable, and here that I always seem to find myself returning to, even when alternative options present themselves.

It's a danger to become comfortable in anything, I suppose.

These pieces that will appear here in the days and weeks and, should I be so lucky, months to come are fictions. They will take on a variety of forms -- letters, stories, rants, monologues, short plays, anything that comes to mind really -- and will, for the most part, be about love and loneliness. And, like most good fictions, there will always be a hint of biographicaly fact in them.

The trick, for me, is not letting on to which is the truth, and which is the fiction.