The Progress is Real

• Post By: Jason Santo
• Date: January 28, 2026
• Category: life

It sometimes shocks me that, after many years of stasis, I’ve finally, truly begun to produce work that might be consumable by someone other than, you know, one or two of my nearest and dearest. Yet somehow that’s exactly what’s happened since I took my Boston-based job a little over a year ago and started using my very long passive commute as private time. Incredibly, the discipline I’d exhibited as a filmmaker in my twenties and a poetry/short story writer in my forties has manifested into a train-bound working machine, and as a result I’ve got one book finished, another quite possibly all done, and a third that’s now in proofing stage. And while I wait for that third book to come back from the printer, I’m diving ahead into a fourth book!

This is an unexpected mid-life rebirth, and one I’m immensely thankful for. I’d taken this job with a big-tech firm on a bit of a whim, knowing full-well where I’d landed previously wasn’t a good fit and was only going to become a worse one. Now, I cannot imagine how I worked for as long as I did with lengthy active commutes that found me, teeth gnashed and knuckles white, behind the wheel of a car for hours each day. On top of that, I was unhappy most of the time at every job I’ve had since my twenties. That is not the case any longer, and it’s has an enormous impact on my life in almost every way imaginable. Family dynamics healed, hobbies were engaged, physical health and energy improved, and creativity, thankfully, has awakened – even if it’s not wholly “creative” work right now, and more editorial.

I’m feeling thankful, especially as there have been some headwinds, including corporate layoffs, department restructuring and, oh just a little thing like the destruction of our constitutional democracy happening in real time. It’s likely all getting worse before it gets better, but as always I’ve been in a rather privileged place and have been able to largely get on with whatever it is I’ve got going without having my livelihood or rights ripped away from me. I wish I could say the same for everyone else. It’s an ugly world right now, but maybe that’s exactly the right time to be creatively productive? It seems – at worst -inappropriate and tone-deaf, and – at best – weirdly trivial. But it’s what’s happening every day for me and until it’s time to join a protest and start punching nazis, I’ll keep on keeping on.

The work on Filmjitsu continues and the show is now around 80 hours deep in its second run, meaning Mike has actually done more time with me than his previous co-host. I’d always wanted to go at least 76 episodes deep, and now that we’re past that, I’m not seeing any reason to stop. It’s good fun with a good friend, even as it is wildly time-consuming: cutting each episode to exactly 60 minutes, as I’ve somehow decided is 100% required, can take as many as 8 hours of work on top of the writing and recording hours that go into each episode. It’s a lot, but it’s also strangely gratifying. We began creating episodes for our version of the show in November of 2021, but didn’t post that first recording until April 1, 2023. As such, Mike and I have recently celebrated our fourth year anniversary as co-hosts and are nearing our third year anniversary posting the results. It’s hilarious to me that we had such a huge head start, only to see it disappear by 2024. We’ve been recording on a week-to-week basis now for damn-near two years with me handling all editing and website duties. That’s not me complaining, but simply doing an accounting and thinking it’s been a pretty great and worthwhile effort.

As for the books, “Gut Punch,” the poetry book, has been done since April, 2025. It’s a solid piece of writing, perhaps too long at 120 pages and too obtuse for most readers, but I think there’s value to it as a memoir, and it was something I simply had to finish in order to feel unblocked enough to keep going.

My first short story collection, “All these Versions of Us” is just about wrapped. I appear to be done with the second proofing stage of this 288-page tome, so I think it may well be as complete as it’s going to get, although I gave away my only copy to a friend. We’ll see if he comes back with anything while I await what I anticipate is the truly final copy before I start sharing the link to purchase.

The third book, another short story collection clocking in at 216 pages, is centered around genre, pulp and speculative fiction. Called “When the Margins Crowd In,” it’s 85 or so compact narratives that are less personal and more streamlined than the other books. I’m thinking, with any luck, it’ll be done by April 2026.

That leaves my train rides largely open now for further work on collections, with the new one on the docket being “Searching Endlessly, Reaching Infinitely, Always Living,” or “S.E.R.I.A.L.” That will be a collection of much longer stories, including at least one novella, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the page count will net out on something like this as I suspect the five stories I plan to include in the collection might be longer than any of the other books.

There’s also “Pages,” a book of short stories I wrote in my twenties that are all set in the 90’s (hence the play-on-words title – remember pagers?) It’s a labor of love, that one, and it’ll hopefully feature at least one story that has spent decades unfinished.

So, what’s the takeaway from this update? While the whole world seems to be on fire with madness and democracy-threatening taint-stains in position of power, I’m somehow at the most peaceful I’ve been since I can remember.

Leave it to me to be my usual contrarian self.