Yesterday — for almost the entire day — my notes read, in total:

##
Thurs 26 Jan.

Long day.

There was an edit, much later in the day, to add:

Not getting better, really.

We’re all going to have days like that. I didn’t expect one so soon after making certain promises (to myself) but that’s how the pendulum swings sometimes. I also have a draft that I will finish up and post, more likely to be tomorrow’s post than something that you’ll see this evening, but again, that’s how it swings sometimes. Creativity isn’t a faucet, and sometimes the boring thing will have to do, and I have to make it work in the machinery even though I know that part will be the first thing to ‘break’ and then I’ll have to scramble and make an emergency fix but that’s one of the ways the process works. Sometimes.

And enthusiasm ebbs and flows. Yesterday, obviously, the tide was out. It’s also a bit of a crunch time at work, as I shared on twitter

"Note to all staff: requests for miracles should be sent to Rome, preferably with 2-3 weeks lead time, and not to the local 'facilities dept', which I'll remind you is just one guy, at 7am on the morning of."

— m · blind (@mdotblind) January 26, 2023

Edit, 4:50pm 27 Jan 2023, to add: Apparently it’s just as well that my half-a-draft yesterday never made it to post because recent news changes a lot of what I was going to say. No real spoilers here but it was going to be D&D related and this new bit is, a lot.

I am in the habit of writing notes to myself, occasionally long ones. Initially, it was just a draft email in Outlook [not a client I like but required for work] and would be short notes along the lines of “buy butter and eggs” or “attack and dethrone god” – things to remember to do on the way home from work. But over time I moved from just bulletpointing notes to talking my way through projects like building a new computer or buying a new condo or remodeling the kitchen in the new condo, and on top of links to articles and pullquotes and tracking prices and all the rest, I would drop back into a conversational tone and write whatever my additional thoughts were.

“We can probably skimp on the processor since we’re planning on putting an absolutely ridiculous amount of RAM in this rig and also the graphics card. Well, by skimp I mean get a 65W tdp part, but still something with at least 8 cores.”

I have unfortunately adopted “We” as a pronoun. In context it makes perfect sense – these are notes to myself and so this is present me talking to future me, or at some point later when I review the notes, it is present me listening to past me, and in either case “we” are perfectly fine with this form of address.¹ My literary executor will probably think I went nuts in 2015 and will burn every metaphorical page in a metaphorical fireplace.²

The habit grew stronger in 2020 and I switched from emails to Google Docs and the notes became much more, ah… present [?] in my life? I was jotting down short story ideas before they ran away from me, alongside notes for the longer project and board game ideas and resurrected the long dormant RPG notes and (when I’m not distracted by twitter) I found myself writing more. A lot more. The archived notes file from 2021 is over 200 pages long. The file from last year is 483.

Now that Twitter is actively trying to make itself un-useful and I’m not getting the same sort of nice-distracting-side-screen vibe from the app on my phone, I find myself needing another distraction to fill out agonizingly long 8 hour shifts exploring new avocational resources to keep my mind alert, sharp and productive for my employer’s benefit.

What I will miss, maybe, is engagement. Comments are closed on this version of the blog, a decision I made several years ago, and I don’t anticipate ever enabling the feature. Diligent folks who just had to make their feelings known about a blog post could scour the page and eventually find my Twitter handle, which seemed like an acceptable compromise to me. I suppose, when I am fully done with Twitter I’ll need to update that link.³

When I am the only intended audience, writing is easy. The conversational tone I usually take makes sense, the long asides (so many asides)⁴ don’t really distract from my points because I always remember what the point was. I don’t have to find the right words to describe a state of mind or an emotional reaction because, well, it’s me. When I go back and re-read the notes, I know where my mind was at⁵ and I remember why I talked around a thing that evaded exact definition in that moment. Transferring this writing habit to the blog means we’ll encounter a few speed bumps and maybe the occasional detour, but I have a new (new-ish) daily writing habit and I might as well flex it.

This blog activity will not be replacing my habit of writing little⁶ notes-to-myself and you won’t be seeing any version of those notes here. That Google Doc is a different thing that lives in a different space, both physically and in my thinking about it. But if I can adapt that voice and tone, the one I’ve found so easy to use when talking Me-to-Me, I can maybe take what has become a mid-morning ritual and get some additional mileage out of it.

For those of you who remember, and added the RSS feed to your readers-of-choice way back in the day, I used to work retail for Barnes & Noble. Back then I would blog about the things that frustrated me at work, and since the industry was in transition [2008-2013] there was a lot to mine for content. So you might have followed the blog back in the day for the bookselling insights, or for my opinions on Comics & Manga, or for the occasional bits of analysis⁷. The current iteration of the blog isn’t like that – you might read through the new front page to get an idea of what I felt was blog-worthy, the past couple of years. Going forward, I’m not sure where this (new) new writing impulse will take me or what topics we’ll cover or discover. But if you’re game, and can put up with my annoying new habit of using “we” when I write, well: let’s find out.

¹ I live alone and have for over 12 years now and I think that may also have something to do with it.

² At least one very presumptive assumption there but we’ll leave it for dramatic effect.

³ I’ve made appropriate alternate accounts at a number of suggested socials but I haven’t found where I’m ‘landing’ quite yet.

⁴ My brain is multi-core and apparently is always running multiple threads. See, for example, the use of footnotes in stupid personal blog posts.

⁵ …Usually.

⁶ noted earlier, 483 pages in 2022.

⁷ That version of the blog is a bit of a mess because of mildly incompatible software and broken links but still ‘lives’ at archive.rocketbomber.com. And I apologize for crashing into your feed this morning via a long-forgotten RSS – but I hope you’ll stick with me for a bit longer anyway. :)

I have bitten off more than I can chew. In fact, what I have bitten is chewing back and may be bigger than me.

The Unnamed 2022 Project is still an on-going, living breathing beast of a thing. But (yeah there’s a qualifier) — I haven’t risen to the self-imposed challenge and I’m about to blow past my first self-imposed deadline. I would have preferred to announce today that the first “drop” of 2022 was ready and that you’d be able to download PDFs of this first content pack for free (or pay-what-you-want, if you felt like tipping) from at least two digital stores including… um… Gumroad.¹

There isn’t a release this week. So let’s talk about what I *have* been doing for these last 16 weeks—including a selected sampling of the diversions and dead-ends encountered so far—and where the 2022 Project is at.

I have a name, and a website, and that website is running a Wikipedia-like software implementation², which will be the home of the always-free parts of what I’m working on. The working title for the project was “System15” [riffing on the xkcd comic, Standards] and is now called Plinth·RPG

https://plinthrpg.com/

Plinth·RPG, properly, is the game: a rules-light tabletop fantasy storytelling RPG that I’m still working on. When I’m finally done with the mechanics of it and have wrung it through several additional future drafts, it’ll probably be at least 16 pages³ but not more than 64, with art, and available as a slickly formatted PDF⁴. Since the objective is to write a rules-light game, the overwhelming majority of the content (the rest of plinthrpg.com) will be a whole new fantasy setting, more or less as I write it. That’s one reason, though not the only reason, that I went with wiki software rather than a blog format for the Plinth site.

That fantasy world will probably need its own name at some point. Though I’m fine with moving forward under the really-is-that-what-you’re-calling-it, the-name-just-seems-generic-to-the-point-of-obfuscation brand of “Plinth” in that Plinth has at least two things going for it: no one else is using it, or anything close to it, and also (as you might have noticed) I registered the dot-com.

Today is, was, my first deadline, as I noted in the last blog post. This announcement, and the reveal of the still-skeletal website, was not what I intended to release.

##

My goal for the Untitled 2022 Project was to prepare and release a “content drop” every six weeks: digital files available for download and containing, well, something like an old school D&D adventure – some maps, some descriptions, a few notable NPCs and perhaps a new faction (to add to my collection), and if appropriate, some monsters or creatures or critters to go along with.

This was a good first impulse and is still a decent idea. I never got anywhere close, though, because I rapidly careened off that course on onto a different track.

My idea for a simple adventure map was sabotaged when I asked, “Well if I’m making a map anyway why not make it part of the world we’re building?” and that led me down a rabbit hole of medieval and renaissance travel modes and travel times and appropriate map scale and wait, how many kilometers is the Earth’s equator again and what about the distance to the poles, and say has anyone done a world map projection that works with hex maps⁵, and now I have a lot of notes and some fun things sketched — but I’m not really closer to that first Pack drop and I still don’t have a format or template that I can iterate on and drop things into.

[Image caption: you can maybe see how things like this became a distraction]

So I don’t have the neat, initial adventure model that I thought I would have ready at this point. I’m not at the finish line; I am only just now getting ready to run this thing and enter the starting gate. It sucks, and it’s not where I want to be, not where I planned to be, but I know whose fault it is⁶ and all I can do is keep going.

My next self-imposed deadline is six weeks from now, Week 12 of 2022, and Friday 25 March;
I’m already anticipating that I’ll miss that deadline too.

##

One of the blacksmiths I follow on YouTube⁷ has a neat saying that I’m going to borrow for this, “Need a tool, make a tool”. The concise version is memorable and I can’t improve on it, but I’ll expand on it just a bit so you know what I mean by it: If you know what you need for your end goal but you can’t find the exactly right tool to get there, go ahead and make the tool (or tools) first. Which he literally does in many of his early videos, making hammers, tongs, drifts, dies, all kinds of tools.

For what I’m working on, I need a couple of tools first. I need to get up to speed on Scribus and build the PDF template. Of course, it’ll probably be a two-column layout that looks like every other RPG rulebook but even just saying that assumes a lot – font choices for headers, body text, tables, sidebars—oh yeah we’ll need to figure out formatting for tables and sidebars, and we’ll also need allowances for spot art. The goal is to have something that looks familiar to the target audience but in the ‘house style’⁸ that stands out a little bit from everything else. I haven’t done layout since 1990 and that was on the school Macs and I’ll be honest, I don’t even remember what the program was called, and many intervening years of banging my head against CSS hasn’t honed those skills any. But once those decisions are made, the template is a tool, and I can just (hopefully) drop the words into it.

The other tool I need is for maps, and surprisingly, the best tool that’s available may just be Clip Studio Paint. But that’s more software for me to learn and another template to build. I don’t know that I’ll be able to do both in twelve weeks, let alone six.

But that’s fine. And I have two tools that already online and working: The new Plinth·RPG wiki, and this blog. I can keep the lines of communication open, certainly, for anyone who is following me on this weird new adventure, and I can describe the process of learning how to build new tools and also the tools themselves, if they’d be of use to anyone.

That’s where I’m at. It’s a new starting line. And I’ve got a six week sprint ahead of me.

##

¹ if you’re not on twitter or not following enough artists & content creators on twitter you missed the drama: The CEO of Gumroad (a smaller but once a decently well regarded e-commerce platform where you could sell, among other things, PDFs and digital files) was caught out trying to mint his own batch of NFTs. Twitter, at least the twitter I’m following, was collectively not amused. Ko-Fi and Itch.io have been the most commonly recommended alternatives.

² for those who must know, either to suit their own similar needs or just to be nosy: DokuWiki, https://www.dokuwiki.org/, which is available under the GNU General Public License (so: free) and which was both easy to install and easy to get started with

³ If I’m a good editor and manage to reign in all my usual bad impulses, like including footnotes for everything, then I might be able to keep things down to a taut, efficient 16 pages. I anticipate it’ll be more like 32.

⁴ and maybe also print-on-demand, if I barrel past the upper page limit I just set and project bloat inevitably sets in and the whole thing is closer to book size than not.

⁵ the answer is yes, but figuring out how many times it was answered yes and the ins-and-outs of each is a whole week shot, I tell you.

⁶ I’m going to blame ADHD of course

⁷ Yes there is more than one. Alec Steele in this case, and I’ll just note that’s a fantastic name for a blacksmith

⁸ Graphic design is my passion

⁹ I’m not sure why I started leaning so heavily on footnotes for jokes and asides but I think it’s too late to stop now. And that probably means I’ll have to include some sort of allowance for footnotes in the PDF template, dammit.

I’m building a world.

This isn’t that unusual. In fact, it’s so common there’s a longstanding joke about “world builder’s disease”, where creators and authors of many different sorts become a little bit obsessed with all the pesky little details of a fantasy or sci-fi setting and distracted from actually writing characters and story. Or, in the case of someone working in and around RPGs, becomes so occupied with lore and backstory and possibilities they lose sight of players, and the game.

I’ve got a bad case of world builder’s disease. Not terminal, but I’ve suffered for decades. And the project I’m starting *isn’t* about fixing that—because I’m not sure that world building is the problem to be fixed.

If I do have a problem, it’s that I’m easily distracted—and sometimes that distraction isn’t the internet (I know, right?), I’ll get sidetracked by another idea: A new rabbit hole to run down, a character idea that needs to be chased down and properly sorted, a road ‘less travelled by’ encountered in a yellow wood, that sort of thing. To date, I haven’t found a way to avoid the distractions, and I haven’t been disciplined enough to ignore them.

What slowly dawned on me is going to sound like a stupid idea: I had a suspicion that what I really needed was something *bigger*, big enough to accommodate the ideas and the distractions both. A super-large idea container that I could just start binning things into.¹

So I’m building a world.

I have notes. Lots of notes. Lots of disconnected ideas and story beats and fragments of mythology.² The whole thing could use some structure. And of course I mean literal structure, in that there will be maps, and a wiki.

But by ‘structure’, I also mean deadlines. For inspiration I look at how Dickens and many others wrote their novels: a bit at a time and serialized in magazines before it was all wrapped up (and edited) into a book. Many of us are already familiar with how motivating an actual deadline can be. I don’t know if the self-imposed deadlines will loom quite so menacingly over a beleaguered author’s very soul, but I have a calendar set up for 2022 and we will discover that together.

I’ve been working at this big project in fits and starts all through 2021, and going back into 2020 a bit.³ So parts of this project are already set up, but the ribbon cutting and grand opening will be the first deadline, six weeks into 2022, 11 February. My big goal for the new year, the overall goal of the project, is to publish an installment every six weeks.

I’m still trying to decide both what publish means and what the actual product will be for these ‘installments’, but I’m leaning towards a package of materials for folks who enjoy fantasy role-playing games.⁴ A set of maps and some background and some characters, a setting or adventure suitable for a gaming session, along with some notable NPCs and a new faction and a new town or city, another small corner of a slowly unfolding world.

While I’m working on each Drop [working term, I’ll come up with a better name later] I’ll be adding all that along with the other details and proper names of things to the custom wiki. If I get distracted by something shiny, I’ll add that to the wiki too. And between now and February, as I figure out the actual scope and scale of the 2022 project, I’ll be blogging here, talking my way through my process, telling you the tools I’m using—and learning—and sharing whatever the hell this is, both the process and the project.

Sharing is the best part of what we do online, ideally anyway.

And in the interest of sharing, I’d like all of this to be free. (Mostly free) (and some large part of it always will be free.)

I will be giving away what I can⁵, and we’ll work out the financing later. At some point I anticipate that my project will need art, lots and lots of it, and for that I’m going to need an art budget. Though I do like money, and find it has many uses, this is not a project I plan to make money on. (I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an outside chance that I’ll build something worthwhile through this — and worth putting a price tag on — but wherever that place is, we’re not there yet.)

This is the point in the article where I try to wrap things up, and end with something trite like, “So Join Me on This Epic Expedition to a New World! I have a lot of ideas, and hope for the future, and though I don’t know quite where we’re headed I look forward to where this Grand Adventure (And Experiment!) will take us!”

At the moment I can’t think of anything better to end on, and far be it from me to make an unexpected break with tradition.

##

¹ “Bin” is probably the wrong verb to use here but let’s go with binning for now.

² In addition to the notes I’ve specifically made since this started, I also have older stuff that I might, might, recycle into the new World as well, but I’m not sure how many of those past worlds could find a new home here and which should really stand alone and apart (and are best forgotten). There is a difference between a large encompassing world with many influences, and just putting every failed draft into a blender and hitting frappé.

³ Pandemic. Y’all know. And the long slow crawl up this on-ramp is also why I feel like deadlines might help. A new start, a new year, an actual schedule. Motivation.

⁴ The distance between RPG and Fiction is a short one. Not even a brisk walk down the garden path, more like standing on different parts of the lawn, batting things back and forth over a net. So I hope my decision to favor RPGs over Fiction doesn’t disappoint. Hopefully the flexibility of the format allows me to be even more creative.

⁵ And releasing as much as I can under a Creative Commons license. Share Alike or just straight-up free to use.

⁶ Worldbuilding might not be a problem that has to be fixed but the jury is still out on my reliance on emdashes, parentheticals, and endnotes.

Tabletop RPGs [/stylebookinsistsIspellthisout] or “Role Playing Games” [/stylebook] are a popular format of ‘board’ game that one plays with pencil, paper, and dice. Or sometimes cards and dice. Or sometimes on an actual board, though that is rarer; though much less rare is a gridded game mat one sketches on with erasable markers, for make-do terrain, or a set of dungeon rooms and corridors, and usually populated with snack crumbs and small cast figures representing players & “monsters”. The miniatures are optional, as is most of the rest, dice included. There are a lot of variations, which only makes sense because Tabletop RPGs are 50 years old at this point, and draw from various wargaming traditions (simulating battles using representational miniatures) that can be dated to the 1780s and popular (within its niche) through the 19th century, along with “role play” parlor games that date back to at least the 1930s, if not further.

The basics that you absolutely need are one player to take the role of group facilitator and arbiter (a “Game Master”, also stylized “Dungeon Master”, as it is in perhaps the oldest and most popular RPG, Dungeons & Dragons), enough other players to take on the roles of the story characters (I recommend at least two, but no more than seven), and play sessions where these Player Characters join the Game Master in telling a developing narrative, over the course of a single session or several sessions.

Am I done with exposition yet? Has the stylebook been appeased? Y’all know what RPGs are, right?

I’ve been collecting rule books for various RPG systems since my teens. Other than D&D, I didn’t actually play many of them, though I was always the DM for my groups through middle school and high school, so I’d run several campaigns and knew 2nd edition inside & out. The group I started to DM during our freshman year at Tech played a half dozen or so sessions, then decided to migrate to a lab in the College of Computing basement where we’d telnet into Arctic MUD [wikipedia entry; see also mud.arctic.org] on amber-screened IBM terminals—which is still the best way to play an MMO, honestly, sitting in the same room with your friends while you do it (text-only and CRTs totally optional; some things are better now).

But even after moving largely to computer MMORPGs and sticking with those on and off (mostly off) ever since, I was still buying the core rules and various source books for a lot of different systems, and reading these RPG source books as what amounted to a small, but fun, game-adjacent hobby. I don’t think I’m the only person that does this, just based on how many books are sold vs how many people actually GM for a group on a somewhat regular basis.

The thing about reading a bunch of rule books, though, is that your game-brain gets stretched in a lot of different directions and you start meta-gaming the games. Thinking about similarities and differences, and even backfilling from computer RPGs, and you start to get ideas. If you already have “house rules” and homebrew parts of your preferred ruleset to suit player preference (or to “fix” “glaring errors” in the original) you’re halfway there already. At some point, dissatisfaction with available alternatives—or the need for a specific feature or mechanic that won’t quite fit otherwise—will lead many game enthusiasts to develop their own game system from scratch. Though I hadn’t really thought along these lines in a decade or more, or touched a rule book, quarantine gave me a lot of time to think—and to fill. I found myself feeling a pull, to get back to gaming, and while I was playing WoW Classic and enjoying that, it also didn’t quite scratch that specific gaming itch. So I dug up the old books (and bought more recent editions) and read and re-read and opened up a new folder and file on my computer and started writing down the ideas.

I have notes for a lightweight tabletop RPG system that uses intuitive things like a zero-to-10 scale and descriptive comparative terms (borrowed from FUDGE) to borrow/play well with source materials from a lot of different games. I'll probably start blogging it

— m · blind (@mdotblind) March 31, 2020

More than anything else, my initial seed for the system started with the idea that you shouldn’t have to rebuild everything if there were systems or settings you could just borrow wholesale. So it wasn’t so much about how to play any one type of RPG under a specific set of rules, but how to get different systems to talk to each other and play nice, or nicer, with each other. And that would be a very lightweight ruleset, basically defining one actual system mechanic with some sample translation tables (from 3d6,d20 to the “in-between” descriptive system, for example) to show how other games could all “talk” to each other. So if you like one character creation regime, but wanted to use a different combat resolution schema, and a world setting from a 3rd source, you could frankenstein those parts together using the ideas presented in what could probably be boiled down into a single page RPG “ruleset”[sic].

But then I thought, “Well OK but what if you wanted use this mechanic as is, without borrowing — what’s the minimum viable game look like?” and of course down that path lies madness

SO. My 'lightweight' system is feeding well and puts on additional pounds every day. That said:

One base mechanic [Describing 'rpg things' like stats, attributes, quality, and skill with a I-hope-it's-intuitive zero to ten scale] will be pealed off to fit on a single sheet https://t.co/IyrqyoFVlN

— m · blind (@mdotblind) July 26, 2020

I am not sure where this will end up. The game system that started as a “lightweight” or even single-page idea is still in there somewhere but I have a whole system developing now. The worldbuilding bug decided to take a bite, too, while I had my whole ass hanging out, so now that Game System has it’s own World Setting (at least, the draft of one) and I’ll be working on things like character classes (or alternatives to classes) and character heritage & backgrounds (we prefer “background” to things like the classical fantasy “races”, because who’s to say a Elf raised by Dwarves wouldn’t be a whiskey-swilling blacksmith with a Why-Is-Scotland-in-Middle-Earth accent, a two-bit two-handed battleaxe they like to use called “Trollstumper”, and a perpetual hangup over not being able to grow a decent beard like a proper member of their people).

My fantasy world setting probably won’t have Elves or Dwarves anyway. I’m not even sure if there will be analogues for either, though I’ll include allowances. Though the rule set, separate from the setting, will have Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and whatever else lives in the public domain as backgrounds, both for the sake of being kind-of-generically-complete but also as the best way to introduce the game concepts to players (and new-to-this-setting GMs). We’ll start with what is familiar and ground things before taking off over the far horizons.

So that’s the scope of work for what will be likely months-to-years(?) of me fiddling with this thing and piling on and whittling away and whatever other metaphorically-used verbs can be applied to outlining, drafting, and writing. As for what it’s called?

I’m recycling “Amphithael” as the name of the fantasy world setting. I’m also recycling most of the world already built under that name as well, though that map will likely change and comprises only a fourth or so of what will be my new fantasy globe.

And: The rule set. I’m calling it “System15”—this is a placeholder name, and I borrowed that general idea and the numeral 15 from Randall Munroe and XKCD, “Standards”. We all know there are too many competing RPG systems already, we do not need another no matter what the author claims about the system being “comprehensive” “flexible” “genre neutral” “universal” and probably tasting minty fresh while leaving your kitchen surfaces gleaming. So System15.

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.

There was a time, maybe 15 years ago or so, where I was fairly certain just about anything could be learned out of a book, if you were patient and went about learning intentionally.

To that end I read around three dozen books on how to write fiction.

Some of these were (and are) classics about writing in general, like Bird by Bird, On Writing, Telling Lies for Fun & Profit; some were more straight-forward nuts and bolts type books on dialogue, story structure, & building characters; plus a smattering of style and grammar guides like Strunk & White. I immersed myself in ‘how to’ books on writing, took notes (maybe I need to dig those out), and spent maybe six months going through and going back again to books like these, to see if somewhere someone had a flash of insight and managed to boil it down to “10 Rules You Should…” or “One Weird Trick”.

After all that, I did in fact come up with a lot of ideas and felt like, if I invested just a little more time and got to work I really could write a book. But here’s the plot twist: it would have been a book about writing. A book just like the dozens I had read.

…that I’d read back to back, one after the other, with an eye to study them and while taking notes and thinking about the sorts of things that were repeated in more than one book and the different angles each author took to the subject matter.

So what mattered wasn’t that I had picked up a bunch of books on writing. What mattered was how I read them. I studied them, like I was taking a class.

+1 for method. But overall: I’d made a mistake in choosing what to study

I would have been better off if I had spent those six months reading 25 novels – if my goal was to write a novel. I should have gone deep into one genre, or sub-genre, or niche genre, and read two dozen books that were pretty close to what I eventually wanted to write. Because if you read enough of the almost-same thing, and start to study the way the ideas are laid out, and the structure of it, eventually you’ll also get the shape of what your version of that book might look like. A book just like the dozens you’ve read, but *Your* version of that book.

I won’t tell you what you shouldn’t read; read a little bit of everything, & read what you enjoy. But if you want to write fiction, skip the how-to books, and read fiction. When setting off into unexplored territory, don’t just read about logistics and what to pack and how to prepare: know your route. Check out the paths others have taken to get to that border before you pick where to cross it.

This past Tuesday was New Year’s Day and that means we’re not even quite a week yet into 2019 and there are no doubt at least a few resolutions made that are not being kept.

At least, not yet. Don’t give up hope just because it’s been a rough week.

If this blog post were an essay or pamphlet of a vintage, say, around 1790, the title would be something like “A Year’s Resolution, in Three Parts, and a Proposal for a Scaled Back Annual Commitment, ~or~ A Month of Sundays” (I used the shorter title above). So I guess I need to get to those three parts first, and then the proposal.

One thing about a New Year’s Resolution is that mostly, we expect too much of ourselves, and we discount the effort some things will take. If you have a nebulous goal, like, “I’m going to eat better!” or “I’m going to lose weight!” you’ve basically just signed on for mindfully keeping a commitment every waking minute of every day ¹. One stressful day, or a day where you don’t have the time or energy, and you’ll find yourself with a take-out or delivery container [or pint of ice cream] and an excuse; after enough excuses stack up you’ll be back on your usual habits and routines and you’ll actually feel better about giving up.

If your goal is to daily [Do The Thing], make it a small ask. Take the stairs, not the elevator: small, concrete, measurable, often a substitute for other worse behavior, and not more than 15 extra minutes out of your day. If you have a nebulous goal like ‘eating better’, you could make it something small & but actionable like, “I will eat one extra serving of vegetables with every meal.” (Baby carrots, either with breakfast or as a snack between breakfast & lunch, is a good way to get that first one in. Vegetable omelets are good too, if you have time to cook breakfast; most leftover non-salad veg from dinner the night before can be put in an omelet the morning after and usually works).

Health-based resolutions are most common (and sell a lot of gym memberships every January) but creative or project-based resolutions can be fun targets that encourage you to stretch your limits a bit. But if your goal is too big, too broad, or a daily [do the thing] you might find yourself in six to eight weeks eating metaphorical pizza amid the ruins of your 2019 Resolution failure. Possibly also with actual pizza.

Let me drop a section break and restart the article with part two.

##

New Year’s Resolutions could, possibly be traced back to certain practices of ancient Babylon or ancient Rome (…if you believe Wikipedia, and in this case actually no, I don’t) but the idea of making changes for the New Year probably dates back, informally, to a point when we first had numbered years and calendars to track them with.

Odds are good the annual “resolution” as such is more modern, perhaps taking a bit from historical paying of debts before New Year’s Day (in ancient Babylon or more-recent-but-still-going-pretty-far-back China), lenten sacrifices and other religious annual practices of reflection, atonement, and forgiveness, and the Aristotelian idea of temperance, virtue, and self-governance as rediscovered by Europe in the 1200s and then refocused through the lens of the Reformation? At any rate, we have proof of Samuel Pepys making resolutions for 1662 and 1664, “solemn vows”, and gaining cultural traction and wider acceptance by the early 1800s. The idea of a New Year’s resolution as a secular, personal thing as opposed to solemn vows made to God or god probably date to Kant, or the Transcendentalists who followed him — not that I can point to a single essay saying as much, but the timelines match and then the Victorians get a hold of it and a lot of “things we’ve always done” and our collective holiday traditions only date back to like, 1840.

Resolutions are fine, strive to be a better human, yada yada yada, but this isn’t ancient wisdom handed down on papyrus from the first civilizations. More self-help 1960s & 70s, less 1690s or even 700s.

So Don’t Feel Bad™ when inevitably all your resolutions fail in an epic pizza binge on Friday 15 February ².

The main takeaway here is that you’re not breaking a vow to Janus and breaching the ancient compact when you fail with a resolution, as about 88% of us will, and that there’s nothing particular about the New Year (and its 1st day) or the calendar year except as a convenient framework.

We can select different frameworks.

##

There’s actually a whole very long List of Timed Artistic Challenges, including a few you’ve heard of like Inktober and NaNoWriMo, and others for every month and some year-round or year-long ‘organized’ challenges besides. A New Year’s Resolution might be considered the first of these, or at least related as a type. Granted, resolutions predate NaNoWriMo [1999] but now we have a model and a vocabulary for this sort of thing (including but not limited to ‘timed artistic challenge’) and we can see how certain types of New Year’s Resolution (like any other year-long project) are a timed artistic challenge in all but name.

The various WriMo’s and -embers and -obers all have a certain cadence and set of rules: where creatives & others who want to try the ‘challenge’ take a month (30 or 31 days) and Do The Thing — and occasionally, post and share it. There’s an ad hoc community that can form, either organically on social media as everyone posts using the same hashtags, or in official and unofficial forums. The Doing Of The Thing is enough for some people, and the excuse/opportunity of the timed challenge plus their internal motivation is enough. But for most of us, we need the social-support-slash-peer-pressure to convince ourselves to stretch, to go just a bit past what we think our limits are. An opportunity to try something new or to tackle something in a new way. So the community is the more important part, even past the challenge ³.

But the big honking thing in the room with these timed artistic challenges is The Daily Grind: the daily grind is kind of the point — but could also be very off-putting for people who can’t sacrifice that much time OR maybe could but not for a full month OR for those who think they can hack it and will try, but for whom burnout around day 7 or 8 is a real and often encountered thing.

A month of the daily grind is one thing. If we were to stare down a whole year of a daily grind, we’d be forgiven if we just gave up on, say, the 5th of January which happens to be a Saturday and order a Fail Pizza ⁴ and get wrapped up in other things happening because damn, there’s a lot of distraction out there. The Resolution dies on Saturday with pepperoni.

##

And so: the proposal.

There’s an English idiom, “a month of Sundays”, often used to imply a really, really long time or something that happened a long time ago. But if you do the math, it’s only 30 or 31 weeks and that actually fits quite comfortably in a year with a fair buffer on either side.

If you were planning on doing something for ‘a month of Sundays’ in 2019 you could start now(-ish, Sunday 6 January, though most of us just missed that mark so 13 January) and finish up on 4 or 11 August

…Or pick any start week between now and Sunday 2 June and still be able to start and finish a project of 30 or 31 weeks in 2019.

You could use any of the List of Timed Artistic Challenges, already framed for a month, and instead post/finish/finalize one block each week, instead of a daily dash to a scramble finish and a mess it takes weeks to recover from.

The benefit of doing a creative challenge this way is that instead of a daily grind, you only have to post once a week. On a Sunday, so after most of us have Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning — even if we did the ‘bad’ thing and put off doing any creative work during our ‘pays the bills’ work week. And many of the challenges are annualized anyway, “Hey friends let’s break and bust everything and do this impossible thing in a month — but not every month, ha, who’d do that. We’ll do it this one month out of the year”

If the thing is so impossible to do that we’d never manage outside of that flat-run-whole-month-heroic effort, why, it might take A Month Of Sundays to do otherwise. [insert a self-satisfied winking meme here]

That’s it: A neat catchphrase, a recycled idea, and a framework you might be able to hang your project on. I’m not curing cancer here. But if you either made a resolution you’ve already slipped on — or only had half an idea for a project, if only you had the time, let me give you a gift of time.

A month of Sundays.

Let’s go.

##

¹ If your resolution is to quit smoking: Do that! Some days will be rough, and none of this advice applies, but go for it. If you have a really rough day, might I recommend a pint of ice cream instead of nicotine? I mean, it’s not a perfect solution but we can address the extra 15 pounds in 2020.

² Epic Pizza Binge is my new holiday/tradition, to be celebrated annually on the Friday after 14 February because why not.

³ See, it’s the end of the post, so I can reference the whole post in the footnotes and not just the bit with the number on it. If *someone* who isn’t me because I’m not doing it, wanted to do a Month of Sundays 2019 as a Thing, I’d recommend 3 March to 29 September (that’s 31 Sundays) just to kind of work around some of the end-of-year stuff, including NaNoWriMo and also because it gives folks 7 or 8 weeks into 2019 as a runway to ramp into the “year-long” project before the 3 March/first Sunday in March launch date.

⁴ sorry for relying so heavily on pizza-as-metaphor; as I write this, I think I’m just hungry

Any sort of daily writing can feel like a chore. For many writers, it’s a weight we take up willingly, but it’s still a weight.

There’s a cartoon I can’t find at the moment (at least not via Google Image Search) that shows Sisyphus of myth doing the thing, and at the top of his hill is a guy at a small desk with a typewriter. The boulder slips away, as of course it does, but there’s a conversation,
“Still pushing that rock?” the writer asks.
“Yep,” Sisyphus replies, “Still writing that novel?”
Which concisely sums it up, neatly encapsulating the feeling that writing is an endless, thankless, hellish task.

If you’re a journalist, this is the job: push it up the hill, and then start over. The assignment is open-ended; you can win a Pulitzer and that’s nice and all but doesn’t change the fact that you have to fill 50-odd pages of newsprint (or feed the starving web algorithms) every day. If you don’t, someone else will. If you don’t like it, go write a book or something.

Bloggers aren’t journalists, and we’re typically not paid [?] [I don’t think this has changed since 2014; if you have an update hmu] so the deadlines are different and the stakes are smaller. But it’s built into the etymology of the word: “web logs” are—or were—Logs: diaries & journals. They could just as easily be weekly or monthly or fortnightly or some other regular schedule but if there isn’t a regular schedule, readers sort of… wander. It’s not that they don’t like you, or that they’ve forgotten you, but you key into something fundamental when you can give your readers that consistent daily hit. Preferably at the same time every day, and they will never say so (ok some will) but they mean every day unless you’re dead and even so, some will lament you weren’t keeping a buffer. Or didn’t have the ending pre-written.

This bleeds over to twitch streamers now, and to YouTube channels, who have the same expectations that they’ll be on every day no breaks no vacations. And occasionally to specific hosts on YouTube; it’s fine that the channel chugs along and produces content But Where’s Tom’s Wacky Thursday WTF-Fest! Did you fire Tom? BOYCOTT. “I mean, Tom’s back now but his show just doesn’t seem the same since he took two weeks off last June for his brother’s wedding and father’s funeral”

Even if you personally have a passion for the material, reader expectations can become a weight.

10 years ago, when the previous version of my personal blog launched [now at archive.rocketbomber.com] I was publishing “bestseller charts” for manga on a weekly basis. When I started I loved the challenge of it – of figuring out how to get the data out of the barest scraps of info off of public-facing sales sites and attempting to find the underlying numbers, even if the best I could manage was comparative and not, you know, actual hard sales data. I stopped when Borders went out of business and other online retailers basically conceded the game to Amazon. But before the whole thing fell apart I was spending about 4 hours a week (and $99 a month for a host to run my web scrapers on VMs) to produce… drumroll please… basically a top 10 list. More often than not, a top 10 list not much different from what you’d find in the NYT books section on Sundays, or with a click on Amazon.

It was a weight. I carried it for a couple of years because I like the subject matter (manga and comics) and because I liked the mental puzzle part of it. But unless something changed, it wasn’t a weight I could carry without help—and when the change hit, it wasn’t to help me but to make it all seem kind of useless. I’d pushed that rock up Sisyphus’s hill and discovered why it always slips away from him.

Even when I had *loads* of time, I couldn’t always manage daily updates. When I was unemployed, the job of finding a new job typically took up about 4 hours of my day. There was time to write. (I did write, doing some link-blogging and writing a few music essays.) But even with time, I couldn’t always pick up that weight. When you’re feeling down and worthless, you can’t always put on the Happy Face to write about something you love, or even muster the energy for the srs bzns posts that don’t need your enthusiasm but still need you to, ah, write.

Even when you are employed and relatively happy and there’s food in the pantry and the rent is paid and all outstanding bills are 3 to 4 weeks out: it can be hard to pick up that weight. Here’s a new game, here’s a funny video, here’s Twitter. Distractions abound. Go for a walk. Do a little more research on that one thing. Lunch with a friend. Hell, clean the house.

When you’re avoiding the tyranny of the empty page, you can get so much cleaning done. I’ve cleaned a bathroom and recaulked a shower enclosure rather than re-open the working-document-slash-gaping-wound of a draft.

##

Why now?

I’m not sure, entirely.

I mean, the blog has always been here, I pay the hosting to keep it going. I even tidied up a bit, moved things around, installed a newer version of the CMS, and made everything ready to blog again…

And left it to sit for a year.

Midlife crisis, maybe? Attempting to reclaim my youth with a brand new red corvette convertible or harley, except I’m an online nerd so instead of rustling my thinning hair on the open road, I pop the top on a new blog platform and take it for a spin?

Whatever the motivation, I feel a little better and pretty much rested and so, I’m looking at the top of that hill. I intimately know this weight, and yet, I take up the weight. I start pushing that rock.

As has been the case since 2015, I’m having a little difficulty writing, mostly because of current events. It takes me longer to read the news, and longer to process it.

But there were also things going on in my personal life that made everything more difficult.

On top of real-life-outside escalating and dialing it up to 11, I was unemployed for a stretch leading into a much longer period of being severely underemployed, and I had to move twice in 10 months. I used to live in an intown neighborhood where I could walk to grocery stores & restaurants with easy access to transit when I needed it. Now I live out in the suburbs where I can actually afford* rent.

(*sort of) (I still feel like I’m being gouged by a cartel of local landlords)

So. I have felt a bit lost, “at sea”, and that’s even before you add on the successive annual burning of ever larger dumpsters as the splinter timeline we’re all stuck in attempts to single-handedly prove a multiverse by presenting a reality so ridiculous that this can’t be the ‘real’ real.

I can’t disengage from the world and just live in my bubble (even if it’s a comfortable little bubble with books and tea and beer, occasionally I have to go outside to resupply all three). Politics seems to have taken over my poor Twitter account, but I don’t want politics and activism to take over my life. I certainly don’t want to spend (additional) hours every day soaking up just how terrible the world is to then distill and bottle it all up in blog posts. So this likely won’t end up as a political blog, even if my interests—like urbanism, affordable housing, and best uses for public spaces—occasionally intersect.

So what do I write about?

A blog about entertainments and fan-stuff seems a bit… Well, what’s the analogy to use here? Whistling past graveyards? Fiddling while Rome burns? A frog just trying to enjoy his hot tub? But even if some people find it ‘inappropriate’, we have to hold onto the things that make us happy, the ‘normal’ things. We can celebrate works that are creative. We can have a little fun. So maybe my thoughts on comics and games and movies are still relevant, and still worth sharing.

What can I give the rest of you, at this moment, that will help? And is that ‘thing’ or topic or thesis (whatever it ends up being) within my means and my skills?

All questions rhetorical. Or more accurately, they’re questions I need to find the answer to myself

For the time being I’ll be continuing the stream-of-consciousness self-examination style for a bit as I get back into the habit of daily writing for public consumption. I’ll probably also start something longer (longer than 500 words anyway) and if that takes a shape I like I might even share. And I suppose if I can’t overcome either the writer’s block or the doubt, if nothing else maybe I’ll have more to say about that.

So I could probably start this post with a conjunction like ‘So’, an attempt to imply an ongoing dialogue and to evoke the hoary old trick of in medias res, to rather capably demonstrate (in one sentence) why I need an editor. And I could compound that sin (if it is a sin) with a sentence packed with even more parenthetical asides—which don’t always need parentheses, mind you, I know several ways to ramble—and it is this tendency to ramble and to try to commit to screen my thoughts more or less exactly as they form, multi-threaded, throwing off tangents, phrases spliced into a glue-laminated beam of a sentence with not just too many adjectives and adverbs but whole modifying clauses in a style that starts out with me thinking I’m clarifying my points and making a better argument but which ends up being muddied and exceptionally difficult to parse. ¹

##

I have other doubts about my writing, but this matter of ‘voice’ cuts across a lot of the rest.

Having a distinctive voice to your writing is a good thing, mostly. If you have a knack for comedy, or for making complex ideas clearer through simple folksy analogies, or for eviscerating a target with insults without the crutch of profanity, that distinctive voice will help you build an audience and might also shape the topics you write about.

Depending on your chosen topics, though, writing in a ‘voice’ might be a drawback. If your writing is meant to introduce an unfamiliar issue or to persuade, an overly conversational tone either makes you easier to ignore, or puts ‘cracks’ in your writing that gives trolls in the comment section obvious places to begin attacks.

I found my voice in writing blog posts, 500 to 1500 words at a time. I refined my style on Twitter, where my projected persona is jaded and snarky and brilliant (your perception might be different from my intent) but only when I can restrict myself to a single tweet. As soon as I try to use that platform to “write“ [“Hey let me expand on this, might take more than a couple tweets. Thread, 1/x”] I will recommit all the crimes I’m guilty of when writing blog posts. This makes sense; one of the original descriptions of Twitter was a ‘microblogging’ service, so if you take the ‘micro-’ out, you’re just left with a hard-to-read piecemeal blog. ²

I’m a bad writer. ³

It’s not that I’m a bad writer, in as much as my syntax is technically correct and my diction is usually on-point. My preference for a ‘spoken-word’ style, though, for words as they might be delivered live, in a performance, can make my written words harder to read. And while my word choices are… fine, I also lean heavily towards the pretty, sparkly, & infrequent when a plainer word would do, and do more work.

If these blog posts were scripts, meant to be read—by me—then all the commas and asides and emdashes and the incorrectly-used ellipsis⁴ in the line above (and most of my writing) can be read as mark-up, code for the performance, letting me know where and how long to pause. I used to think of this as excusable, normal even, me speaking directly to my audience, but that’s an after-the-fact justification: I touch type, not super fast but fast enough, and I am in fact speaking these lines as I write – to myself in my head, not out loud, but until I wrote this sentence it wasn’t something I was conscious of. Now I’m never going to be able to forget it. In fact, after 20 (25?) years of doing it this way, I don’t know that I could do it any differently without specifically learning “writing” as a new skill. ⁵

A conversational style or written voice is best when employed in one of two ways:
First, where we agree (or I assume we agree) and a quick recap of the subject is all we need
& Second, if I am relating a humorous anecdote where the exact phrasing and the pauses and the rhythm of the joke are important to the eventual delivery of the punch line.

I don’t want every blog post to read like a joke⁶ and for the most part, I’m not going to assume my audience agrees with me. What kind of makes me sad is that this ‘conversational’ style (not pioneered by bloggers but widely adopted) is now used by some fairly toxic political writers—online, on social media, by niche publishers who call themselves ‘news’—who use it as both a knife and a shield. “Of course we all can agree” is the sneaky-snake-oil-slick way to introduce some poison and “well you’re taking me out of context” follows as the obvious defense, even though no context was given. Just the assumption that “we” (for however they didn’t define ‘we’) all “agree” allows them to talk to the in-group while coasting under radar: a nod to the people who have the unspoken context and a dodge for the rest.

Blogs are personal, even now. ⁷

Well after the blog-as-business-model has both failed, and evolved; well after the endgames for Gigaom and Gawker; well after Verizon basically bought up every not-quite-failing content farm and rolled them into Oath; and now, where you don’t necessarily think of outlets like Engadget, HuffPo, Vox, Polygon, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, or The Onion as blogs [yeah, they’re blogs] or even necessarily bookmark-and-visit any of these sites daily, since you get your links from social media or aggregators.⁸ Blogs are personal, and more present than you realize.

Social media is built on the old Live Journals and Web Logs: a post is something you write to Facebook or a picture you upload to Instagram. Twitter, as noted, was a ‘blogging’ platform; Medium tried to be Twitter but longer (and a lot of other things) but Medium is perhaps most notable as a blogging platform for people who really only need to write the one, long blogpost.

The bones and the idiolect of ‘blogging’ are all over the web and have largely overtaken traditional media, at least in online translation. A ‘post’ is an article; news articles have comments; and news articles are dated, tagged, archived, & linked to. Online newspapers and newsweeklies are blogs now, despite themselves.

We’re surrounded by blogs and yet it feels blogs are dead. If I might be allowed poetic license for a bit: corporate ghosts are animating the corpses of what used to be individual, personal blogs, stealing the topics and mission statements but lacking any warmth or life.

But, call me a romantic or a nostalgist, the old blog format is still good for something more than just its building blocks, taken by other media. So long as it is still sort of affordable for one person to buy a domain name & web hosting, with easy CMS tools like WordPress, or combined platforms like Squarespace (and future competitors for both), there will still be blogs and bloggers. If you have something to say, you should still be able to find your voice.⁹

Just don’t plan on getting rich. A blog, by itself, can’t support you. Same as it ever was, you’ll need something else (merchandise, historically and most commonly, and with Patreon as a new-ish source but not significantly different from PayPal aside from the agreed-upon monthly billing aspect of it) – Despite how corporate-and-business blogging can seem to be these days, for a lot of us—who still do this casually because we want an outlet for words—it’s a hobby paid for by the day job. It’s not a wide open frontier anymore, there’s no get-rich-quick or getting-in-on-the-ground-floor left.

Just words and people to read them. Just the outlet, and a voice.

.:.

##¹⁰ ¹¹

¹ If I had an editor, the advice would probably be to cut this intro. or tone it down. or streamline, clarify & move it, if it had a point to make.
² another paragraph that could be cut, no loss. additional sin count: two parentheticals, reliance again on italics and on single- and double-quotation marks to enforce a voicing of the line that probably only works when I’m reading it in my own head, a ‘quote’ dropped in without context with the assumption the reader will understand this is supposed to be a typical ‘thread’ tweet intro, a [*shudder*] semicolon, and a point that does not necessarily follow the paragraph above. not that it has to, but again, a paragraph that could be cut
³ “see, this would be the better line to lead this article with”
⁴ originally just intended to mark where words were intentionally omitted (elided) from a quote, the dot-dot-dot of the ellipsis are now read by most as a long pause, and is used as such in most scripted/novel dialogue and in transcriptions of spoken word. an intentional pause. but unless this entire post is meant to be a transcription of a speech as delivered the ellipsis is technically incorrect in this particular written context.
⁵ editing. I think they call that skill editing.
⁶ at least not yet. I may get there.
⁷ ooof. bad transition. honestly this should be a separate article, not an add-on to a essay on personal written ‘voice’. Give me three paragraphs, I’ll try to ham-handedly tie it back to the blog title.
⁸ this isn’t actually a sentence, just 3 similarly formatted sentence fragments and a 4th fragment that is different enough it seems like a conclusion but there’s still no SVO to start diagramming this sentence on, just 4 adverbial clauses. It only works because it’s anchored by the short sentences immediately before and after
⁹ told ya. took five paragraphs, but booyah
¹⁰ the double-hash is a proofreaders mark to signal a page or section break. I’ve been using it for that purpose in my personal drafts for decades and at some point I don’t quite recall exactly when I began using it in blog posts on the regular as well
¹¹ endnotes aren’t going to be a thing. it’s a one off that worked in this particular post, I don’t plan to make a habit of this.