Blog Questions Challenge
Hi. It’s been a while since my last post here. It’s not as if I haven’t been writing. I journal every day and go on rants and tangents in the privacy of my own .txt files. In not blogging, the threshold for it became higher. What’s worth sharing with the entire world? The answer has been “nothing at all”. But it feels like time to start asking “why the hell not?”
Through some awesome serendipity, Niq sent me an email with a challenge. A questions challenge. a blog questions challenge, even! Why the hell not? Here we go.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Why does anyone? Probably for a lot of valid reasons that I’m about to flatten into a deeply unsatisfying response: I like writing and I think other people might enjoy what I write.
It really can be as simple as that. The longer answer would mention how, when I started therapy over 8 years ago, I could barely open up to myself, much less the whole wide world. It would go on to detail how making and releasing music made me comfortable in my own voice, in sharing deeply and openly, trusting that there would be someone on the other side willing to listen.
Blogging is an act of surrendering my thoughts, messy and imperfect and incomplete, to the world. Because someone, somewhere might connect with them in ways I can’t even begin to imagine.
Another answer might be: I blog because I like blogs. If people only read but never wrote blogs, there would be no blogs to read. So why the hell not write my own?
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
Bear Blog. It’s lightweight, built to last. The right people are into it. It has just enough of a community feel to it without any of the baggage of being a Community, you know? you can only tinker with it so much—that’s a big plus, too.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
The year was 200X. The connection speed was 56kbps. My favorite band was Linkin Park. The platform? LiveJournal. The blog? Hell if I remember, but it was full of the kind of poetry written by a teenager who listens to too much Linkin Park. It might still be out there, but I’d rather keep it to the mists of time.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
Mostly iA Writer. A post may begin as a note (or, I guess, an Apple Note™️), which may be anything from a word, phrase, quote or nearly completed draft. Although, a couple of posts were written fully in Bear Blog’s interface. Sometimes the thing just presents itself fully formed and you hit “Publish” before you have a chance to second-guess yourself.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
This feels like a loaded question since I haven’t blogged in a while, but I have been writing a lot in the mornings. No timer, no agenda, no prompts, no purpose beyond getting words out of my brain and into the screen. It’s the most peaceful moment of the day. I dropped off the kid at daycare, the house is empty, the morning light is spilling through the windows, filtered by eucalyptus and fir trees. Work is a million years away. It’s just me and my thoughts.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Letting drafts simmer might be a great approach. I understand the advantages. When I make music, letting a song sit for a while is a wonderful technique. You come back to it with fresh ears and whole new directions might open themselves up, or, you might come to the beautiful realization that the song is done.
With writing, though? Once something becomes a draft, it’s dead. I either finish a piece and publish it, or it becomes another inert text file to be carried around it’s consumed in the fires of “cleaning up the backups”.
I think this speaks a lot to how I feel about blogging. It’s immediate in a way that music isn’t. Music deals in abstractions, feelings can take on shapes that are as recognizable or as oblique as the musician wishes. Words on a blog? They’re about as direct as it gets, even with all the ways in which you can infuse them with metaphor, subtext and other writerly words I can’t remember right now for “this says one thing and it means that thing but also another and it also is kind of a reference to something deeply personal that only I will ever understand”.
It’s publish or perish, then. No second guesses, barely enough time to spell-check the thing. And, besides, you can always edit the post. The first published version is the first draft, in a way.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
“Sleep”, without a doubt. It was banged out in a couple of minutes—in the blog’s form, if I remember correctly. It’s the writing I wish I could summon at will: to the point, opinionated, evergreen. The kind of writing you want to etch into the very core of your being. It doesn’t come often.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
My plan is to avoid making too many plans. It would be nice to get back to a consistent writing rhythm. Maybe this post is what sets that off? It does feel right in how free from expectations it is. It’s not trying to change anyone’s mind or wrestling with anything complex. Acknowledging the value in that kind of writing is liberating. There’s a path for this blog to be a place for all kinds of writing: loose, light, heady or heavy.
I moved a few pixels around recently, but made no fuss of it. If you walk in and it’s not your first visit, you might notice the furniture has been somewhat rearranged, the paint feels fresher than before. But there’s no redesigns or features coming. The site is way of getting words onto the Internet, and it does a great job at that.
Passing the torch
All the people I could think of seem to have answered already. I’m too late to the game. My complexion turns pale at this realization. Before I can understand what’s happening, I explode in a cloud of dust, bits and pieces of me flying everywhere. The air is filled with the certainty of my irrelevance, or maybe it’s just the particulates of what used to be me. You move on with your day, your mind hanging on what you read for just a moment. “Huh,” you might wonder, “that was a weird way to end the post.” Then you go read something more interesting.
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