After an internet outage that put a damper on my creativity for much of last week, this weekend I decided to try something I’d been thinking about for a while: identifying my best work.

And because this is me - and I am wont to overthink such things - I immediately ran into issues of definition. How do I define best? Am I a good judge of my own work? Can I reconcile the idea of best with the variety of creativity on this site?

Perhaps more pressingly: can I bear to whittle away at my body of work to decide which pieces I like the most?

A lot of this comes back to my thoughts on curation over the past few months. I don’t put anything up on this site which I’m not proud of, but there are some microfictions that work better than others. There are photos that achieve everything I wanted from them, and others that just about get the point across.

Perfection is worth aspiring to, but actively harmful as a metric of success.

And of course, as I’ve seen with reactions to my microfictions on Mastodon, sometimes stories that I thought were good but not exemplary really land with readers. Art, after all, is a communication between artist and audience, and you all bring your own preferences, your own tastes and appreciations to a piece. So I have to recognise that my best pieces are highly subjective.

Which pieces of work am I the most proud of? Which stories speak the most deeply to me, which resonate with my soul and which I have a reasonable belief will resonate with the majority of my audience?

Trimming the possibilities down to five written pieces or ten photographs per category was sometimes painful, but I found the process fascinating, especially trying to winnow down the last couple of options. Sometimes I just had to accept that two pieces satisfy my creativity in very similar ways, and fall back on which of these could I not do without.

So, I’ve curated four collections of what I consider to be my best work so far, in the fields of microfiction, videogame essays, photography and in-game photography (in this case, strictly limited to photos of Elden Ring, since that’s been my main focus this year).

I plan on revisiting these collections over time, updating them with my current favourites, and hopefully there will be a decent amount of change as I grow and expand my efforts.

I hope these serve as an effective intro to my work for those new to the site, and an insight into how I judge my creativity, for the rest of you!