Just to start

I really, really hate the cultural practice that has become nearly omnipresent today, reflected in so many forms of that awful batch of communicative refuse known as ‘social media,’ of everyone everywhere posting info about themselves doing everything they do, the whole day long, every day. I really hate it.

I’m going to try really hard not to do that.

I don’t know if it’ll be possible to avoid. Like all of us, I have thoughts about things that are happening in the world on a regular basis, and I like to say them, even when I know they are not very original or interesting. But I’m going to try to keep from talking about the sandwich I ate for lunch, unless it’s objectively very good or I get a visitation from a dead relative while I’m eating it.

Why have I done this to myself? The initial idea was ‘it’ll be a way to get things out to at least some readers that for whatever reason can’t get placed in other sites.’ I do some writing for print and online sites, but some of what I write on the relevant topics for those sites doesn’t fit right in any of them, and I would like to get it out anyway. (One of those is scheduled for the start of the coming week). ‘Get it out’ means ‘Not have the sinking feeling that I spent time working on something and polishing it just for it to sit on my computer.’

Then I also thought ‘It’ll be a trap to make me write more, at least if I can get a few people to subscribe to it.’ I am lazy. I admit it. I have sketches of a trillion things sitting around that I never finished, and I produce more of them all the time. The scraps problem is, I think, one every writer has to deal with. The notebooks. But a little more effort to get some of that from the notebooks and in front of at least a few sets of eyes.

And even if I don’t get as much polished, ‘finished’ stuff up here as I’m foolishly hoping right now, it can be studio, a workshop for dropping some of that in-progress writing, especially some of the genre-phobic stuff of which I write an increasing amount (is it fiction? is it autobiography? is it philosophical reflection? no, maybe, I don’t know).

I’m not going to censor much, other than in the sense of not saying some of the things sufficiently scandalous to destroy my career that are in my brain almost daily. But I’m going to try to just put something up here on a more or less daily basis, and I’m not going to be much concerned with polish or completeness, at least some of the time. It’s a form of exercise. I am old, and I need now, more than ever, to try to keep myself from falling completely apart by doing something regularly.

I hope it’s not boring. If it is, unsub and I won’t hold it against you, I promise.

Maybe I’ll get sick of this and burn out in short order. We shall see. A little experiment.