Here we go again.

If you’ve been around The Confusing Middle for any length of time, you probably already know about the April A to Z Blogging Challenge — but for the uninitiated, here’s the quick version: every April, bloggers around the world commit to posting every day of the month (Sundays excluded), working through the alphabet one letter at a time. Twenty-six posts. Twenty-six letters. One month to either pull it off or spectacularly combust in public. You should participate, too. Go ahead and click that link above if you’re interested.

Anyway, I’ve done this before. I’ve reviewed movies. I’ve written short fiction. Last year, I went full serial novelist and turned the whole month into a connected story called The Lost Letters, one chapter per letter, which was either an ambitious creative exercise or a cry for help — honestly, the jury’s still out. The point is, I like to use the challenge as an excuse to do something a little different, a little outside my usual wheelhouse.

This year, I’m leaving the planet. Or rather, I’m leaving this planet. All twenty-six times.

The Theme: Alternate Earths

Every post this April will introduce you to a fictional alternate Earth — a parallel world that diverged from our own at some crucial moment and became something wonderfully, strangely, sometimes horrifyingly different.

Think of it like the TV show Sliders.

If you don’t know Sliders — first of all, I’m sorry, and second of all, here’s your thirty-second education: it was a sci-fi series that ran in the ’90s (and then limped into the early 2000s, but we don’t talk about that) following a group of travelers who “slid” between parallel dimensions through a wormhole, never quite in control of where they’d end up. Each week was a new Earth. Earth where the Soviet Union won the Cold War. Earth where the penal system was replaced by a lottery. Earth where I didn’t just spend my entire Saturday watching old episodes on YouTube instead of being a productive adult. (Hypothetically.)

I watched Sliders as a kid and never really got over it. There’s something about the premise — the idea that one different choice, one altered event, one slightly different roll of the cosmic dice could produce an entirely different civilization — that has stuck with me for thirty years and apparently refused to let go.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. The multiverse? Really? Again? And look — I get it. We are all deeply tired. Marvel spent the better part of a decade throwing alternate timelines at us until we were numb, and Everything Everywhere All at Once was brilliant but also made several people I know need a quiet lie-down afterward. The multiverse as a concept has been thoroughly, perhaps exhaustively, explored in pop culture recently.

But here’s the thing: Sliders was doing this in 1995, before it was a blockbuster franchise strategy. DC Comics has been doing the multiverse since the 1960s! And the version of alternate Earths I find most interesting isn’t the “what if superheroes existed” variety — it’s the quieter, stranger, more genuinely unsettling kind. The kind where you look at this other world and think, that could have been us. Where the divergence isn’t a cosmic event but a single unpublished paper, or a different election result, or one scientist who had a really bad year.

That’s the space I want to play in this month.

What to Expect

Each post will introduce a new alternate Earth: how it diverged from our timeline, what daily life looks like there, what was gained and what was lost. Some of these worlds will seem appealing. Some will be quietly terrifying. Some will make you feel uncomfortably wistful for a version of reality you’ve never actually experienced.

I’ve got twenty-six of them planned, and I’m genuinely excited about where this goes. To give you a taste:

A kicks things off with The Analog Earth — a world where one mathematician never published one paper, and as a result, the digital age simply… didn’t happen. No internet. No smartphones. Libraries became the most important institutions in the country, and librarians became some of the most powerful people in any community. It’s not a dystopia. It might not even be a utopia. It’s something more interesting than either.

B takes us to The Benevolent AI Earth, where algorithmic governance replaced politicians in the 1980s. (Whether the word “benevolent” in the title is sincere, ironic, or deeply ambiguous is something you’ll have to read to find out.)

C brings us The Cold War Victory Earth — a world where the Soviet Union won. Not conquered, not invaded. Just… won. And what that means for a civilization, decades later, is stranger and more complicated than you might expect.

Twenty-three more after that. Some letters gave me obvious entry points. Others required staring at the ceiling for an unreasonable amount of time. At least two of them I’m still slightly afraid of, which I figure is a good sign.

Why This, Why Now

Honestly? I think I’ve always been drawn to the question underneath all of these stories: how fragile is the world we live in?

Not in a doomer sense — more in the sense of genuine philosophical curiosity about contingency. The fact that history didn’t have to go the way it went. That the world we inherited, with all its particular features and textures and problems, is one of a vast number of possible worlds, and the only reason it’s this one and not some other one is a long chain of choices and accidents and moments of luck, bad and good.

Sliders understood that, even when it was being goofy and low-budget and having its characters slide into an Earth where the dominant sport was some kind of extreme bowling. The premise held genuine philosophical weight even when the execution was a little wobbly — which, if we’re being honest, is a description that could apply to a lot of things I love.

So. Starting April 1st, we slide.

I hope you’ll come along for the trip. Pack light — we don’t know exactly where we’re landing.

Join me April 1st for the Analog Earth — and the first of twenty-six worlds waiting just beyond the edge of what we know.