I used to write a lot, but it felt easier then… the web I grew up with was mainly text, so you either wrote on message boards, or blogs, or in comments to one of them. I spent hours in front of the family computer reading and typing, and all of that writing gave me avenues and bandwidth for types I hadn’t toyed with before.

I fiddled with fan fiction, picked up poetry, started some short stories, and began to blog everything. None of it was meant for the whole wide world to see, just a small audience of friends and acquaintances that I’d made online. While I struggled to make and maintain friends offline, the people I befriended online were there for years at a time; sharing in my life, commenting on my blogs, responding to my writing. We even started a poetry forum for some of us misfits that didn’t enjoy the bigger, more pretentious boards for poets. Customizing the skin for that board was one of the first times I dabbled in Photoshop… but that inkling of my future was an afterthought; we just needed the board to write on.

Somewhere along the way I got more serious about writing. I showed it only to classes for critique or professors for mentoring, and the general vibe was that I wasn’t as good as I thought. Instead of only reading the writers I knew online, I went venturing off into bookstores and libraries in search of the classics. Which only validated that painful feedback… I was far from the next big American writer. I was a snotty college kid with too much privilege and not enough experience.

After clashing with literature professors over their formalist theories, I left the program for Philosophy, and my writing slowed down, the web was already much more image-heavy by then, and all the boards and friends on them had vanished into the ether.

It’s been a decade and change since I graduated with that Philosophy degree, and the wounds from that failed creative writing path are sorta healed now. I’m dabbling here and there, filling notebooks slowly, typing pages on an actual typewriter now, and mainly just hoarding that creative work until I’m confident enough to publish it somewhere. Maybe in a zine. Maybe I’ll even try sending things off to get rejected by others.

But as part of that step forward, I’m coming back to blogging and gonna try to make it stick. So I’ll see you around quite a bit in 2020. Welcome back to the blogosphere.