Blog 81 - Pinky Promise

Blog 81 - Pinky Promise

October 2025

There is a covenant I keep. It’s not written in blood, but it is sealed in a fashion that pre-dates time; by the wrapping of little fingers together, and it binds me more tightly than any publishing contract. It is the core ethical framework of this blog, and it comes courtesy of my three beloved inspirations: my grandchildren.
The promise? Simple, stark, and terrifyingly clear: “Don’t make stuff up.”
And this, my friends, is the confession of a near-fatal lapse in professional judgment and personal integrity. Tonight, for the first time since I started sharing these musings, I nearly reneged on the deal. It was so close I could almost feel the digital heat of the "Publish" button burning on my index finger.
Let me first explain the gravity of the situation. When you tell stories, whether it’s for a living or just for the joy of hearing your grandchildren’s exclamations, there is a natural gravitational pull toward exaggeration, toward smoothing out the dull spots and adding a fictional passerby who delivers the perfect witty line you only thought of three days later. It’s the writer’s instinct—we see the world not as it is, but as it should be for maximum narrative impact.
But when it comes to this Blog, that instinct is aggressively monitored. My grandchildren were the inspiration behind my work. They know that when I sit down to write a novel, the rules are off; I can build spaceships out of old spaghetti strainers and give my protagonist three left feet if I choose. But this space—the blog—this is the real world. This is where I talk about the burnt toast, the embarrassing miscommunications at the grocery store, and the moments of genuine, messy insight.
The thought of my Grandchildren reading this blog is my internal fact-checker. If I were to invent an uncle or a specific ridiculous incident involving a duck that never happened, I know that they would spot it a mile away. They are my moral compass. And the fear that I would disappoint them is usually enough to keep me marching strictly on the path of non-fiction.
That is until tonight.
The pressure of consistency is a strange beast. You promise yourself, and your readers, a rhythm. Once my work is done and the Theme Park is at rest, that is when the ideas are supposed to flow. But tonight, it seemed like the well had run dry. Not just dry—it was cemented over, paved, and fenced off with barbed wire. I sat there, staring at the screen, drinking lukewarm coffee, cycling through the usual desperate mental maneuvers: Should I discuss the geopolitical ramifications of the neighbor’s new gnome collection? Was there a profound lesson in the time I locked my keys in the car?
Nothing. Every real-life event I reviewed seemed utterly pedestrian, duller than watching paint dry on a tax form. The panic began to set in, that cold creeping fear that every writer knows: I have nothing left to say, it was a total writer's Block. And before you say it, I’ve already used the writer’s block as a topic within this blog (More than once I admit) so, even that was an out-of-bound topic.
The disciplined part of my brain, the part that honors the promise, was weakening. It desperately wanted to close the laptop and postpone, postpone, postpone! Unfortunately, the committed writer part of me—the part that hates missed deadlines, even those set by me—started whispering terrible, beautiful suggestions.
“Just one little character”, it suggested sweetly. “Just a tiny, completely fabricated situation that encapsulates the truth better than actual truth ever could, what could it hurt?”.
And that’s when I let my imagination slip its leash.
The beauty of fiction is its efficiency. Reality is cumbersome; it requires long set-ups, awkward exposition, and often ends inconclusively. But fiction? Fiction allows you to cut straight to the emotional core.
In my moment of weakness, I didn't just write a made-up anecdote; I wrote a masterpiece of fabrication.
The story was of my observation of a man sitting in a diner, waiting for a delayed train, how I observed the strange, silent ritual of the cook and the waitress—a ballet of shared glances and unspoken history. I gave the waitress brittle hair and kind eyes that had seen too much. I gave the cook a glorious, specific mustache that hid a lifetime of regrets. And through their small, invented interactions, I wove a perfect, witty, completely relatable musing on the nature of routine, the comfort of the familiar, and how we often derive our greatest joy from the quiet background characters of our lives.
It was good. Really, truly good.
It had the right amount of moody observation, paired with a light, self-deprecating wit. It had narrative momentum. It was the kind of piece where, had I published it, you would have finished reading, nodded sagely to yourself, and thought, "Ah, yes. That is exactly how it is."
No doubt, it would have been a successful post. And I would have felt that familiar, delicious flush of completion. No more block. Problem solved. I scrolled back up, proofreading the final paragraph and my fingers hovered over the mouse, ready to click the confirmation box that sends the post out into the universe. And then, just as my finger tensed, I froze.

It wasn't a philosophical revelation or a sudden burst of moral clarity. No, it was the image of my Grandchildren reading the words I had written, now or sometime in the future and perhaps nodding along too, convinced by my contrived words. The fictional reality I had created wasn't just a story; it was a huge lie in the context of the promise I had made with them.
This blog is built on a foundation of trust. We, the reader and I, have a contract: You give me your time, and I give you my genuine experience. When I write about my life, I don't get to borrow tools from the fiction toolbox. I don’t get to insert the perfect, tragic waitress just because the real waitress I encountered was perfectly lovely but narratively uninteresting.
I realized, with a sudden shiver, that if I published that story, as a true event, I would have irreparably altered the dynamic between us. You would never know which parts were real and which were simply convenient narrative devices. I would have tainted the well. The story wasn't just untrue; it was a shortcut. It was the easy way out of writer's block, and the easy way out is often the least ethical.
It took perhaps twenty seconds to delete the entire fabricated piece. Twenty seconds to eliminate something that had taken forty or more minutes to craft, and it felt utterly satisfying. As the words vanished, giving way once again to the horrifying blankness of the screen, a different, quieter satisfaction settled in. I had done the right thing. I had kept the promise.
My blog is not a work of great literature; it is a document of a flawed, funny, mostly ordinary life. Its strength lies entirely in its authenticity. If I lose that authenticity, I lose the only thing that makes these words worth reading in the first place.
So, here we are. You are reading the actual, true blog post about the night I had nothing to write about, panicked, wrote a beautiful lie, and then deleted it out of fear of my promise to my grandchildren. The lesson that took the closest of margins to learn is twofold: Write truthfully, even when the truth is boring. And never, ever break a pinky promise.