Shannon tells me I have a tendency to try to make my writings too profound. To pore over the words I write with such intensity that I lose the spontaneity of them. To think through them so thoroughly that they lose their emotion. (These are my words, not hers. She said it much more gently!)
And while I’ve said before that I’m not generally a big fan of new years’ resolutions for myself, I have been in a bit of a writing slump for several months now, so I think this is a good time for me to try something new for myself.
If you’ve been following me on social media, you may have seen occasional notes about the novel I’m writing. I began drafting it as a part of National Novel Writers Month back in 2021 (really I’ve been working on the story since 2014, but that’s another topic for another day), wrapped up the first draft in March 2022, and then began a second draft over the summer. This second draft has been a real slog to get through, and my progress has been… tedious, to say the least. And because I feel like I ought to be working on that project, I have been neglecting other things I enjoy, such as reading and drawing, instead idling my time away on procrastination activities like scrolling TikTok, which in turn dilutes my creative capacity. It’s had a domino effect on many facets of my life, and I want to reclaim myself.
I was working on a draft of this post yesterday. Did you notice the featured image on this post today? I took it yesterday to use with what I was writing. But I overthought the post and hated it and anyways it didn’t really say what I wanted to say.
So here I am. It’s the second day of January. I’m starting something new.
I’ve got a new section of my website that I’m calling a “web log” or “blog” for short. (It’s okay to laugh, that was a joke.) And what I’m gonna put here are just my spur-of-the-moment thoughts, my mostly-unfiltered thoughts that I might have previously posted as a Twitter thread. I’m not going to overthink it, I’m not going to even really edit this content. It’s not going to be profound; it’ll just be me. I don’t know how often I’ll post. Probably once or twice a week, but we’ll see how it goes. Sometimes it may include pictures of whatever’s going on, like an old school blog before we all started using Facebook for that kind of thing.
What do I hope to gain out of this? The main thing I hope is that it primes my creativity so it flows through me more easily.
And I guess that’s all I have to say for now. Thanks for reading.