Thank you for the advice. Honestly, I'm a young 20 something that just wants to output creative stuff for people to read and enjoy. None of this really popped in my head, so thanks.
I still want to host my own site for it though, but I will consider the self publishing angle as well. Thanks for the advice.
I cannot reply to everyone, but genuinely thank you all so much for the help. I'll be going with a simplistic zola setup suggested by one of the commentors. I barely expected a handful, let alone all these comments. It really means a lot, especially to a noob who felt like this was a really dumb question.