Blogging and Slogging

I’ve had this blog forever. I mean, maybe not forever forever, geologically speaking, but close enough in the internet world.

This started a fat bunch of years ago. I’m not even sure of the timeline anymore. 2014? 2013? Maybe. I know I still worked as the anti-theft guy for a large cable company at the time, and dabbled in riding the still-popular wave of blogging to great success. I know I had the blog before I found Michael R. Fletcher’s amazing novel, (it was once called 88 and has been since rereleased) Ghosts of Tomorrow, which was around 2014. (Addendum, 2013 for sure. And, oh boy, amateur hour blog at that time for sure…)

That, obviously, isn’t quite how it panned out. You see, the web is chock full of blogs, and maybe half of them (those not written for purely marketing reasons anyway) are by writers of other things besides blog posts. Fiction, non-fiction, talking away and posting away about this or that very important thing.

For a while there, I posted regularly enough. Some reviews, some interviews, some opinions. You know, generally screaming into the void. But that all fell away over time. What, exactly, could I add to the tsunami of writing blogs out there? I’m just some sarcastic git with some writing skill lost in an ocean of blogs, a single bobbing plastic bottle thrown this way and that in the sea of words that is/was the bloggosphere.

And, of course, blogging isn’t the great force it once was. The internet is nothing if not easily corrupted by the whims and will of those who want to make money advertising you their dumb crap. Clickbait articles, nonsense sites with ads above, below, to the left, to the right, in the middle, and all over the content you came to read. Websites that take 30 seconds to load on a 30 megabit connection due to autoplaying videos and fifteen CSS stylesheets layered one over another.

Really, look at the blogs or news sources you even bother reading now. I bet it has shrunk precipitously over the last few years. If you follow the writing world, maybe you read some of Chuck Wendig online, take a gander at John Scalzi, pop on over to Kristine Kathryn Rusch, the occasional updates from George R. R. Martin, and possibly watch Neil Gaiman do his amazing and eloquent thing on Tumblr. And I do read all those, and a few more (may I recommend File 770 for constant updates on the world of publishing, awards, authors, and fandom).

But the days when one followed dozens of blogs, interacting with the authors of those spaces via comments, getting updates on everything that interests you, is mostly a thing of the past. Hell, half the sites out there disabled comments a long, long time ago, and for good reason.

And in the last few years, I’ve published a few small things here and there, bits and bobs of fiction, as well as done grant writing, journalism, marketing copy, been involved in a brewery, a newspaper, an art gallery, moved a handful of times… Well, you get the idea.

Also, in that time, I’ve written my own work far less than I should have, let this blog languish in some cold purgatory, hardly touched my Patreon, and been sidetracked by numerous dead-end projects and things that have taken more of my attention than they should have.

Not to mention just how…wearing…three years at a tourist hot-spot like the brewery I worked in from its opening week until a few months before this post can be on your creativity. Sure, all work is like that to an extent, but honestly some jobs are more damaging than others.

When your job is to entertain, have full-on conversations, and pay 100% attention to dozens of people at once for ten hours a day, well, you ain’t coming home refreshed and ready to roll your face on the keyboard, that’s for sure. Hell, you can’t even escape to a back room, stock area, or kitchen for a breather. It’s you, three foot of bar depth, and people right there with nothing else to do but stare at you and ask what kind of wood the walls are made of, or if you have gluten free free-range fair trade sustainably farmed ethically sourced “ales, because I hate lagers.”

Obviously, that’s also a fat lardy can of excuses (and this is the curse of being human, one can believe they are in the right to be stymied and tired while at the same time realize they could do better if they got off their stupid ass and just did it at the same time).

Writers did their work during World War II. The Great Depression. Through imprisonment, through drug addiction, alcoholism, with kids, with sick family members, while battling figments of their imagination manifesting as sloppy squid-creatures slapping tentacles on the kitchen floor…

And here I am, boo-hooing like a small child who scraped their knee on gravel about some average, everyday life bullshit.

But again, even that isn’t true. Every one of us has our own little monsters nipping at our brains, tiny creatures sapping our will to do more. And it’s simply not good enough to compare our problems with another’s problems and declare ourselves weaker or stronger based on some relative metric of how well we think we (or someone else) is doing. Some things work for our makeup, our particular configuration in this world of infinite configurations, that don’t work for others. And their ways don’t work for us.

We are a combination of our parts, both more and less than the sum of those parts. Chemicals in our brains regulate mood, function, physical reactions, how we see and hear and interact with the world.

And those chemicals are encased in a skull riding a meat-machine with who-knows what strengths and weaknesses, things formed by physical maladies, stresses, what we eat, what we do.

So here we are, I suppose. All of us trying to do whatever it is we are trying to do. And here I am, back at this blog, a blog long since cleared of many of the old posts, written long enough ago as to be not what I want representing me anymore.

For any human-shaped meat-popsicles that remain watching this space, I’ll be posting on a regular basis to rant or rave or talk about what I’m doing. In part to talk to the world. In part to vent the thoughts rattling around in my head. In part because screaming into the void is, contrary to what they might tell you, an honorable and important thing to do. Hell, maybe even healthy.

And finally, I’ll be doing what I should have been doing all this time. Writing stories, getting them into people’s eyeballs. Fixing up and kicking the dust off the Patreon account, brushing the rust off the writing skillset, and seeing where this goofy damn thing takes me.