Welcome to yet another “first post” on my blog.

That’s right, folks, I’ve restarted the entire blog, and that’s ok. Wiped it clean, dusted things off, shoveled away all the refuse and the little piles of junk which collected over the years on this mostly-ignored corner of the internet.

A complete reinstall, a kick in the pants, plucking at cobwebs.

Why, you ask? Or, more likely, you didn’t ask, but I’ll tell in a moment either way.

I know blogs aren’t what they once were even a few years ago. Micro-blogging, social media, arguing with troglodytes online in 280 character bursts, these things quickly made long-form blogs almost as trite as a typewriter in a coffee house—and in record time. In only a few short years, blogging went from the Next Big Thing to Oh That Old Thing, except for a few great ones still in existence and a whole lot of tinfoil-hat, lizard people type crank blogs.

The fact is, I never followed the “best practices” of the fiction-writer-with-a-blog. Post every day, talk about this or that, engage with your audience. Start a podcast. Report on the newest publishing news. SEO. Forget about it. If I was on the first twenty pages of a Google search it would be surprising.

To be frank (which would be odd, as I am not, to the best of my knowledge, Frank, but feel free to call me whatever you want), I always found many blogs to be very shallow waters. Ankle deep at best, full of little posts with tiny paragraphs and a sort of machine-gun cadence. “Badda badda bop bop. Badda bop badda badda! Badda bop bop bop. THE END.”

Not that this is some terrible thing on its own. Tight, short posts that deliver information quickly are wonderful. But when all the posts on all the blogs are like that, well, it gets boring, like reading a novel made up of one-word paragraphs or flipping through a calendar full of aphorisms.

Pith and snark.

I never wanted to follow that pattern.

But I also never wanted to become the politicized blog, the wall-of-text clearing house where I vent into the void while paddling the ass of my hobby horse and shooting a toy cap gun into the air. Do I want to scream into the internet’s ear? Sure I do. If I had the super-power to jump through time and space, pop into being in any place in the world, have no doubt I’d flit here and there grabbing lapels and shaking chowderheads until pennies fell out of their ears, shouting “What the hell is wrong with you God damn it!”

I, however, cannot do such a thing, which leaves me one real recourse, which is to put all my politics, thoughts, and opinions out on Twitter, or Facebook, or here on a random blog.

But we all know there are more than enough places to read rants and screeds, some with real weight and heft and meaning and others…well, not so much.

However, allow me to present to you Exhibit A, labeled “The internet today and the recent history of 2020,” which I think should be sufficient proof that venting online does absolutely nothing for anyone at all. Not even for the person venting, which they think will make them feel better. Instead they get sucked into some kind of online fight-club where cheap shots are encouraged and the nearest hospital is on the other side of a field of dirty diapers and broken glass.

How many of us really have the energy to spare?

Anyway, why I am starting this blog fresh:

When I started this thing almost a decade ago, things were different. I was different, the world was different, the internet was different. So much of what I said here, while fine enough I suppose, was also very out of date.

This was old stuff, folks. I had bits and bobs installed from almost a decade ago, subfolders in subfolders, plugins which hadn’t been updated since Twitter was a force for good instead of evil—eons ago in internet time.

Sure, some blogs like that of John Scalzi have been around way longer than most and have not needed to start over. Mr. Scalzi, however, was a professional for years before starting his, while I was mostly winging it and the difference in quality showed.

On top of that, I just creaked my aging bones over the forty year old marker. A lot of things have become clear to me in the last ten years.

Oh, and sometimes it seems like the world is ending.

Stuff like that.

I’m a writer, yet I don’t write nearly enough. I never have, honestly. I’m not one of those “I bleed words” folks, nor am I a “if the world ended I’d still write using burned wood to scratch black marks onto the bomb-shelter walls” guy. I’m the “I enjoy creating things and telling stories” guy, and there are a lot of ways to do both those things.

If the world ended, I’d be surviving, not writing. If aliens came down, kidnapped me as a specimen for study, I’d be busy biting my captor’s long gangly gray digits and flailing on the gurney, not looking for a pen and paper.

It’s likely that these experiences would—at some later time when I’m alive and well, having escaped my alien captors or found enough food to get by after some great apocalypse—be used in some way to create, tell a story, to entertain or inform. But not until after it was over.

In the end, I’m a person who wants to create. I’m the guy who looked for the level-editors for my favorite games, back when those things were held together by duct-tape and spit and shared over modems screeching through telephone lines. I’m the kind of person who always looks for a way to turn one thing into another (often using things in ways they were never meant to be used). I’m the guy who voids warrenties, cobbles together tools out of whatever is laying around, dreams big dreams even as my body tells me I just don’t have the energy to follow through.

And I think the best way to scratch that creative itch is by writing, for sure. The budget for that is whatever it takes to buy a word processor, laptop, or even a pen and paper. No vast crew of folks to run cameras and edit a movie, no licensing fees to develop games using Unity, no paint to dry on the palette while you zone out.

Writing is accessible, wonderful, and portable.

It’s also a real pain in the ass.

Want instant gratification? Nope. You are knee deep in the muck and light is but a myth, each step in the sucking mud a reminder that there is a destination, but not one you can really see, or even know if it’s worth getting to, until you are nearly there.

Like to see the results of your work in one viewing? Nah.

Have to take a “big picture” look at the novel to see if you are heading in the right direction? Better be ready to read a hundred pages to do so. No whacking the F5 key to quickly run your creation, or holding your canvas up to the light to take in your progress and see where you are at. It’s just pages and pages of dense ideas, concepts, words, all of it needing to entertain on their own while also coming together in some greater arc at a distance you just can’t see while you are nose-to-the-screen.

Are you doing it right? No idea.

What even is the right way to do it? Um, well, take your pick from the gamut of options ranging from just write it will suck but that’s ok to plan every detail to use this framework and beat sheet to frameworks are the devil’s work and you should just feel the story, man and more and more.

If you write, I bet you’ve delt with this very thing: A good idea, an exciting idea, all sorts of concepts, bits of theme growing in your mind, this is going to be great, oh my god…then you sit down, and with the long, mourning brrrriiiiiiiiippppppppp of a deflating balloon it all just leaks out of your ears and onto the floor, leaving you staring at an empty screen and berating yourself for yet another failure.

But I’m not a fearful person, you think. I do crazy stuff all the time, no planning, just off the cuff! I mean, I managed a retail store with no training, nearly got into a dozen physical fights with folks who thought they could push me around or threaten those I love, volunteered for important jobs with no prior experience and managed to pull it off, hell I’d skydive right now if I was magically teleported onto a crashing plane and I’d not even think twice about it…

And yet, somehow the transition between thinking about a project and actually writing the damned thing scares the crap out of you, like plucking the magic ideas out of the ether and stapling them to the page was akin to slaying a dragon.

It’s not a problem you used to have. Hell, it’s almost like reading and listening to things about the craft has filled your head with so many opposing concepts and things you should or shouldn’t do, you need to be an expert at doublethink to make any sense of it all.

It’s almost like you’ve paralyzed your creativity.

And since it’s always like that, you don’t do the hard part. There is always a reason. Something else needs to be done. You’re tired. Stressed. Just can’t get around to it.

If this is you, then I’d like to invite you to join me here, because this is also me. I may even be the poster-child for exactly this problem. I’ve been in that state for years now. At this rate I may be writing a novel in a bomb shelter, given how the last year went.

But I don’t want it to be like that any longer. I’ve written here and there since a young age. No, I’m not one of those folks who wrote their first novel at 12 years old. I’m not someone who “bleeds words.” It’s always been an on-again-off-again thing for me. Part of just one of the many things that excite me, that interest me, that get my brain going and thoughts bouncing around in my head.

Honestly, I’m tired of that cycle. I’d like to break it. No more off-again, just on. I can’t really tell you why that is when there are easier things to do in life, things that would make more money, take less time, not require one to actually get good at in order to succeed. Yet, for some reason, here I am, forty years old, sitting in the middle of the Great Dumpster-Fire of 2020–2021, wanting to write. Trying to write.

So that’s why I’ve rebooted this blog. I’m letting all the gathered cruft, all the lessons, all the dos and don’ts I’ve learned over the years, just slide on out of my head and down the drain. They aren’t helping, and so they have to go.

And I hope to document that as I do it. What works, what doesn’t, in real time. Because, if you think about it, that’s the best use of a blog at this point.