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The Door

I have given much thought to the phrase, when one door closes….

There’s an old consolation we offer each other: when one door closes, another opens. We say it at funerals and layoffs and breakups, pressing it into each other’s hands like a coin for the ferryman. And there’s truth in it. But I think we’ve domesticated the phrase into something smaller than what it could be.Because here’s what the saying leaves out: the interval.Alexander Graham Bell, who is usually credited with some version of this line, actually put it more honestly. He said we look so long and so regretfully at the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us. Note the structure of that sentence. The regret comes first. The staring comes first. The new door is not a replacement handed over at the moment of loss. It’s something you only notice later, after you’ve finished grieving the handle you can no longer turn.This matters, because the cheerful version of the proverb asks you to skip the hallway. It implies a kind of cosmic customer service, where every withdrawal is matched by a deposit. Live long enough and you learn this isn’t quite how it works. Some doors close and nothing opens for years. Some close and what opens is worse. A person dies and no compensating gift arrives; there is only the shape of their absence, which you learn to carry the way you’d learn to walk with a limp.

What the hallway is for

And yet.What I’ve come to believe is that the hallway, the unglamorous, disorienting middle, is not wasted time. It’s the only place where certain things can happen.When a door is open, you don’t think about doors. You think about the room. Your life organizes itself around the assumption that the room will always be there: this career, this city, this person, this version of yourself. The room becomes invisible to you, the way water is invisible to fish. Closure is violent precisely because it makes the structure visible. Suddenly you can see the walls you’d stopped noticing. You can see that your life had walls at all, that it was one arrangement among many possible arrangements.That visibility is painful, and it is also the beginning of freedom. In the hallway you are forced to ask questions that the room never required: What did I actually want from that? Was I in there because I chose it, or because the door happened to be open when I was young and tired and looking for somewhere to sit? Who am I when I’m not being the person that room needed me to be?Most people, given a comfortable room, will never ask these questions. The closed door is an unwanted gift of inquiry.

The door is not out there

The second thing the proverb gets wrong is its grammar. It’s all passive: a door closes, another opens. As if we were waiting in a hospital corridor for doors to be operated by someone else.But most of the doors that open in a life are not discovered. They’re built. Someone in the hallway, having run out of exits, starts making one: badly at first, with the wrong tools, out of whatever material grief has left lying around. The new relationship is not found, it’s risked. The new work is not offered, it’s attempted, usually in a form that embarrasses you for the first two years. The new self is not revealed; it’s assembled from parts, and some of the parts are salvage from the room you just lost.This is the harder and better version of the saying: when one door closes, you discover you have hands.

What you carry through

The last thing worth saying is that nothing is actually left behind in the closed room. We talk as though loss is subtraction, but the years you spent in a place don’t evacuate your body when you leave. The love you gave someone who is gone has already changed the architecture of how you love. The work you did that came to nothing taught your hands a competence they’ll keep using, in some other context, for something else. The version of yourself that was required by that marriage, that job, that country does not die at the threshold. She comes with you, and she knows things.So the metaphor of doors may be too clean. A life isn’t a sequence of sealed rooms. It’s more like sediment: everything you’ve been remains underneath everything you are, compressed, load-bearing. Nothing is wasted, though plenty is lost, and those are not the same thing.

A better consolation

If I had to offer something to someone standing in a doorway that has just shut, I don’t think I’d say another door will open. That’s a promise no one can make, and promises that can’t be kept make poor company.I think I’d say this: you are in a corridor, and corridors are survivable. You will be here longer than you want to be. You will not be able to see the next thing from where you’re standing, and that’s not a failure of your vision; it’s a property of corridors. In the meantime you can do the small work: eat, sleep, call people, notice the light. And at some point, not on a schedule you control, you’ll find you’ve either stumbled onto an opening or started to make one, and you won’t be able to say exactly when the shift happened.That’s not as comforting as the proverb. But it has the advantage of being true, and in the long run, true things are better to lean on. They hold weight.The doors will keep closing. That’s what doors do; a door that never closes is just an arch. The question was never how to keep them open. The question is what kind of person you become in the hallways, and whether, by the end, you’ve gotten good at building.

There is a season in every life when the architecture of one’s days begins to rearrange itself without permission. Recently, several doors have closed. A few I had already begun to mourn in advance; others shut with the abruptness of weather, leaving me standing in the sudden quiet of their aftermath.

What remains are hallways. Some are brief, almost merciful: a few steps and then the next threshold. Others stretch beyond what the eye can measure, and I have learned that no two are alike. Each possesses its own temperature, its own length of shadow, its own particular silence. The corridor is not merely the absence of a room; it is a place in its own right, and perhaps the place where most of living actually occurs.Still, the rooms I have left behind refuse to remain behind. They return in that permeable hour between waking and sleep, when the mind loosens its grip on the inventory of the real. Some arrive as specters: reproachful, unfinished, asking questions I cannot answer. Others come as angels, luminous and forgiving, offering not what was but what might have been held more gently.

And so I write. Novels, poems, some pages that will never be read by anyone but the lamp above my desk. I write not to document the closed doors but to feel along the walls for one still open, to press my palms against the plaster until some seam gives way. Writing, I have come to believe, is a form of searching conducted in the dark: you do not know what you are looking for until the sentence finds it for you.

Fellow traveler, what does your journey look like? Which doors have closed behind you, and which hallway are you walking now? You are not alone…

The Uncomfortable Truth About Writing Contests: Where’s the Feedback?

Let us speak of something that has been troubling me, and likely many of you, about the writing contest industry. It is a thing that hums beneath the surface of our submissions like a second heartbeat we have learned to ignore.

The Business Behind the “Opportunity”

Here is the hard truth, plain as the words that appear unbidden on a blank page at three in the morning: writing contests are a money-making business. There is nothing altruistic about the companies that hold them. They rely on your ego, your dreams, and your hope to willingly surrender that entry fee for a chance at recognition. The fee slips from your fingers like sand, like memory, like the last line of a poem you swore you would remember. Sound familiar? It should. This strategy is not new. The lottery counts on your optimism (and perhaps your misunderstanding of probability) to keep buying tickets. Vegas has built an empire on this exact psychology for generations. Writing contests? They are playing the same ancient game, only dressed in literary clothing, their true nature hidden behind promises that shimmer and shift like heat rising from summer pavement.

My Real Frustration: The Silence

What bothers me most is not the business model itself; everyone needs to make money. It is the complete lack of engagement with the work we submit. Our stories vanish into the void, swallowed whole, and we are left listening for an echo that never returns. Is it too much to ask for some modicum of evidence that someone actually read our stories? Even the smallest bit of feedback would transform the experience:

“Your opening didn’t hook me.”
“Did you read the prompt?”
“Strong voice, but the pacing faltered.”

These words, however brief, would be enough. They would prove that our stories had weight, that they existed somewhere beyond the submission portal, that they touched, however briefly, another human mind. With platforms like Reedsy, I understand that a five-dollar entry fee is not breaking the bank. But still, is it really too much to ask for something in return beyond silence and a form rejection? The silence is its own kind of haunting. It lingers in the inbox, in the space between refreshing the page and accepting, once again, that no reply will come.

The Bottom Line

We are paying for a service. Should that service not include at least a sentence of human acknowledgment? A single line to prove that our words, however flawed, were witnessed? Tell me your thoughts in the comments below. Am I asking for too much, or is it time contests stepped up and broke their long, strange silence?

What would you surrender for a story that won’t stop knocking?

I surrendered the glow. The soft, blue hum that filled the room after dinner. I set the remote down the way some people set aside sugar for Lent—deliberately, almost ceremonially—like I was laying a coin on a ferryman’s palm. The one-eyed monster blinked into its own reflection, and the living room exhaled. No laugh track. No canned cliffhanger. Only the fridge whispering, the clock ticking, the house going quiet enough for another world to speak.

That was the night my AR clicked on.

Not augmented reality. Author Reality. The dimension that lives behind every closed door and blinking cursor. It doesn’t need a headset, and it doesn’t apologize for being demanding. It’s the world that asks you to show up with the same seriousness you bring to your job, your family, your grief, your joy. It rewards the faithful, and it keeps its secrets from the curious who wander in for a minute and wander back out.

Is it worth it? Depends on what you want from a story: to be carried, or to build the boat.

Here’s the rhythm I’ve learned, the three-beat cadence of making a book: if I’m not writing, I’m editing. If I’m not editing, I’m sharing—sending flares from my lighthouse so readers can find the shore I’ve drawn by hand. The work doesn’t pause when inspiration does. The tide moves with or without me, and the only way to get anywhere is to put an oar in the water every day, even when the fog is thick.

In AR, everything means more than it looks. A mug of coffee stops being a mug. Steam rolls out like sea fog over the harbor city I sketched in a January notebook—the one with crooked alleys and market bells and a lighthouse whose stair treads know my footsteps by now. The keyboard isn’t plastic and wires; it’s a compass that points toward scenes I haven’t met and scenes I’m avoiding. The cursor blinks like a beacon: here, here, here. Come back to work.

Characters are the first to step through. They don’t knock; they appear mid-argument, mid-laugh, mid-betrayal, dragging weather from their world into mine. A woman with ink-stained fingers and a secret she thinks is hers to keep sits across a table I’ve never owned, tapping out a rhythm that nags me until I write it. A courier with a map stitched into his jacket refuses to sleep until I let him miss his train. They bring me their trouble and their hope and ask me to be brave enough to tell the truth about both.

Writing is the first excavation. It’s the rush of discovering a bone in the sand and imagining the whole animal in a heartbeat. Then comes editing—the archaeology that happens with a brush instead of a shovel. Line by line, brush, brush, brush. I dig out the clean edges of the story from the clay of my habits. I cut the clever lines that don’t serve the skeleton. I sand away the splinters of scenes that snag but don’t support.

Editing is humbling. It asks: if you were a reader with a train to catch and twenty minutes to spare, would you keep turning pages? It makes you honest. It makes you protective of the reader’s time like it’s your own. It teaches you that your favorite sentence is sometimes the one that has to go.

Then there’s the sharing. I used to call it marketing and feel like I’d swapped my compass for a billboard, but that was before I understood it as lighthouse work. A story without a reader is a ship locked in the bottle: complete, exquisite, invisible. So I keep the glass polished. I write the note that says, “This is the world waiting inside,” and I send it in a thousand bottles. I accept that some will wash back to my own feet. I light the lamp again tomorrow. Maintenance isn’t glamorous, but neither is missing land because the light went out.

What did I trade for this? The easy glow of someone else’s story. The comfort of predictable arcs and neat resolutions. I traded hours that evaporated into hours that accrue. The time I used to float became time I build.

Not all trades feel noble. There are nights when the couch calls me by name, when the news scrolls like a slow-motion car wreck and every good show has three seasons ready to swallow me whole. There are mornings when the alarm sounds like a dare. I don’t always win. But I keep a little ledger—a trade log that tells me, honestly, what I gave up and what I made instead.

Gave up: an hour of television, a mindless scroll, a snack I didn’t need. Built instead: 827 words that moved a character from lying to telling the truth. Reshaped a chapter so the secret doesn’t leak too soon. Jotted a note about how the lighthouse uses a lens I’d never heard of before—Fresnel, a word that tastes like a bell.

Some nights the ledger holds only this: showed up. Sat with the blank and did not run. That counts. That’s a bead on the string.

Is it worth it? I don’t pretend I don’t miss the weightless time. Ease is its own kind of bliss. But there’s another kind: the exhale that comes when a paragraph clicks into place after a week of sanding. The email that says, “I brought your character to the doctor with me; she kept me company in the waiting room.” The message that says, “I didn’t think anyone knew how this felt until I read your chapter.” Those are the moments when the ledger pays interest.

Author Reality is not glamorous. It’s not a montage scored to moody piano. It’s a series of ordinary choices that turn into extraordinary pages. It is the practice of saying no to something pleasant so you can say yes to something that will outlast you. It’s a room you have to reenter every day because the door locks when you leave. And it is, somehow, always worth the key.

Maybe you feel the familiar itch in your palms. The tug toward building instead of consuming. The quiet knowing that you are meant to make something you cannot yet see the edges of. If that’s you, come with me. We can navigate together, even in different boats.

Here’s how to open your AR door:

For one week, switch off the one-eyed monster. Thirty minutes a day is enough to crack the seam between here and there. Put your remote in a drawer, set a timer, and let silence stretch long enough to get uncomfortable. On the other side of discomfort is a voice that wants to talk to you.

Choose your role each day so you don’t fight your own weather. Calm sea? Write new words, even if they’re ugly. Wind picking up? Edit yesterday’s draft with gentle eyes. Fog horn blowing? Share a piece—a paragraph, a line, a feeling—with someone who might need it. Writing, editing, sharing. Every day has a job.

Keep a tiny trade log. One line. What you traded. What you built. Gave up: 40 minutes of scrolling. Built: 3 new pages and a better scene transition. Gave up: a second helping of dessert. Built: the energy to reread my own work without hating it. The log is proof. The log is a map.

Offer a postcard from your AR. A sentence, a sketch of a character, a logline that scares you a little to say out loud. Tell me why it matters to you. We anchor each other when we speak our worlds into air.

You don’t need a headset to live in augmented reality. You need intention. You need a door you’re willing to close and a light you’re willing to switch on. You need the courage to choose your story over the millions that want to borrow your attention for free and charge you with regret later.

I won’t pretend it’s easy to keep that light burning. But I can promise this: the worlds we build in AR have a way of building us back. They give us patience and precision and a tenderness for our own imperfect drafts. They teach us to wait for the fog to lift and to move forward anyway, even when it doesn’t. They send back echoes in the shape of readers who bring our characters to breakfast, to chemotherapy, to bed. They make meaning out of minutes.

The light is on. The keys are warm. The door is unlocked. If you’re ready, step into your AR. Leave your shoes at the threshold and carry only what you need: your stubbornness, your curiosity, a pen that doesn’t mind being chewed. I’ll be in the lighthouse, keeping watch, sending signals. When your boat appears on the horizon, I’ll wave you in.

We have worlds to make.

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