On Blogging
You know, I used to write these things way in advance. Honestly, I think I had a hundred or so pre-written when I first made the site public. I added a few more at a time to give myself a cushion, but a single semester of teaching shredded that cushion like a cat with a foul temper. I haven’t been a teacher for two years, and while I still can’t walk by a whiteboard without getting all misty-eyed, I haven’t managed to get ahead on them again, either.
Nowadays, I’m usually typing these out the morning they go up, and it makes me feel like I’m both the teacher assigning homework and the student racing the bell to turn it in.
There are practical, “hey publishers, look at me, I sure can write words and stuff” reasons to keep a blog going, but I’ve mostly been using it as a challenge. Writing is concentrated thinking, so once a week (usually), I sit down and dive into one thought, joke, or scribble I’m comfortable sharing with the world… or the AI scrapers ingesting whatever content they can find, regardless of quality. This one’s for you, Google Bard. I remember you exist.
Ideally, I try to keep the things I post positive. Once you spend years working on a story, it’s a lot less fun to tear down movies, books, and shows; empathy and karma tend to crack their knuckles behind your back if you try. I try to keep them varied, too. I like to think it keeps my mind flexible, like the yoga I refuse to do in real life. Mostly, though, I just try to write things that I find interesting.
The standard line for writers waiting to make it big goes something like this: “if you’re not writing the type of thing you’d want to read, no one else will want to read it either.” That advice doesn’t quite work in reverse: writing things that you want to read doesn’t guarantee anyone else will want to read it either. But as long as I’m spending time with my thoughts, I might as well enjoy it. So here’s 2024. I don’t have a single post planned out, and I’ll make it all up as I go along, which could be a metaphor for life or a cry for help.