I didn’t post anything on the actual first day of the year because
1. I didn’t actually have that much to say (apparently)
2. This isn’t going to be a new year’s resolution thing where I post every day, no matter what
3. Actual events of the day were, after waking up: some youtube; a nap, like, got a blanket off the bed and settled in and really napped; forcing myself awake because I did in fact have somewhere to be; showering and the necessary things to be out in public; spending the afternoon with my folks, and a traditional New Year’s dinner¹ —
4. and after driving home and settling in with the blanket again I didn’t feel like writing. Or blogging, anyway; if inspiration had struck I probably would have been willing to write out a story idea or scene fragment

So there, you get the play-by-play of the 1st anyway (with an extra side of thought process) on today, the 2nd, probably around 3 in the afternoon when I get home to post this and not around 8am when I actually wrote it.

This being the internet, despite a certain bias towards the new and newly-updated, the time between creation and consumption doesn’t really matter so much. My words will likely be just as valid on 2 January 2040 as they are today, except perhaps for the detail where it is chilly enough to require a blanket.

So if the goal isn’t to produce a daily diary in web log format, or to engage in daily writing exercise as part of a new year’s resolution to “write more and make it a habit”, then what the hell am I doing here?

I write every day and have for years but way too much of that has been on Twitter, particularly in the last four years or so². I need to refocus away from that platform, and I already have a blog (with its own domain name and web hosting and the CMS and *gestures broadly at everything on this page*) so doing some very rudimentary mental calculations: here I am. Again.

I still don’t have an overall site topic, or focus, like I used to when RocketBomber was about bookselling³. I have a lot of interests, I read voraciously⁴, I like to consider myself broadly literate across many categories⁵, I have a tendency to both think I am impartial while simultaneously forming strong opinions about things⁶, and if nothing else I find it particularly easy to settle into a self-reflective mode and basically just talk to myself⁷. So the topic-of-the-day could be anything, really, or nothing⁸.

The blog should be an outlet for me to share, when I feel the need to share (or overshare; see endnotes) and scratch that itch before it incubates and then ends up on Twitter as a “Buckle in folks, I need to tell you 1/X” situation. Among other things, here I have the space for all my parenthetical asides and other digressions⁹ and can perform formatting tricks that are either impossible to do even in threaded tweets, or supremely awkward given the character limits.

You might also hear more of my “authentic” voice in the blog. Editing to fit on Twitter is actually really good practice for an author (including comedians and humorists , as the constraint is a great way to find the joke in a joke) but constantly writing in headlines is not the best way to write. Even in a thread, the rhythm of 280-characters-per forces you into less-than-ideal phrasing and constructions. You can ignore that and just post your paragraphs in their entirety, unedited, and let the breaks fall where they may, but the fact that twitter will display the tweet-chunks with those breaks forces the reader into the clunky twitter rhythm anyway. This is probably the number one reason people hate Twitter threads even if agree with the author and like the points presented: reading a twitter thread is exhausting¹⁰.

You might find my ‘true’ writer’s voice and damnable habit of digression at least as exhausting. But at least here I can vary the rhythm of the writing to suit, and you can read it as a single page and not telegraphed cue-card style, one poster-board all-caps shout at a time.

That’s probably enough “nothing” for today’s post. I’ll see what topic grabs my attention for tomorrow¹¹

##

¹ traditional German, with roast pork sauerkraut, because they’re from Ohio. I’ll fix cornbread, collards, and black eyed peas at some point for myself later. Probably Julian-Calendar New Year’s, 14 January, because why not

² the last four as a daily thing but also looking at ten years total on twitter at this point. damn.

³ “RocketBomber” as the name is itself an artifact from a time when I thought I’d be blogging about science fiction. See also: archive.rocketbomber.com – or maybe not, on second thought. The words are all still there, and links to individual articles should still work, but the formatting has not adapted well to its new home and it’s a bit of a jumble at the moment.

⁴ too much of my reading is online only, I need more books. Literally more fiber (things printed on wood pulp paper) in my media diet

⁵ literacy in the age of digital print is about more than just being able to read; parsing and understanding information now also requires both some basic understanding of the visual but non-verbal ways we communicate—art and charts, sure, but also things like font choices and formatting and page layouts—and also approaching sources with healthy skepticism and a critical eye. Too often “a thing” is seen as “more true” just because the presentation was slick and the tone authoritative, actual facts aside. Literacy can also mean a certain grounding in a few of the more important fields, i.e. scientific, financial, cultural and multicultural literacies, and civics, and etiquette (online and off; rules often unwritten and never really covered well) and increasingly, being “literate” across a couple different fandoms. This endnote would really have been better as a post all on its own; I’ll drop myself a reminder to revisit the topic in a few months.

⁶ …the actual worst possible combo for writers on the internet. I only hope my self-awareness of the problem serves as possible inoculation against being “that guy”.

⁷ When writing for myself, I tend to write both first-person and in constant dialog with myself, with past-me and future-me, so much so that I often use the pronoun “we”. Like, note-to-self-style, “We should probably check and see if talking to yourself is still a symptom of something in the DSM-5”. We find it fairly easy to write in the mode, and we find it helps with planning and projects that are going to span a length of time that will require more than one “me” to accomplish. This is a mental-processes thing (not neurotypical, but I like it and it’s mine) and not an identity thing – my pronouns are still he/him. Not least because it’d be Supremely Weird to ask others to use “we” and we ain’t that special. And without access to a time machine I’m pretty sure you’ll only ever talk to one of us at a time. This is another endnote that would have been better as a stand-alone post and I fear that if I continue to use endnotes this will continue to come up as an issue.

⁸ Today’s post—this post—might be a good example of what “nothing” from me looks like. I hope you like the content because if nothing else, I can guarantee a lot of “nothing”

⁹ exempli gratia, vide supra

¹⁰ obscure history threads are an exception. I love me some obscure history threads. Twitter-threads-as-a-medium seems all but custom designed for ‘em

¹¹ If you’d like my take on a particular topic, perhaps an expansion on a point in one of these end notes, you can let me know on Twitter. Of course on Twitter. obviously.