Surely this is something I do not know, despite having done it for over 22 years now.

I began blogging in high school–or maybe right after? I actually don’t remember–with the long-defunct site Diaryland, which I misread as “Dairyland” at first and made an unhinged post in the POV of a cow with revolution on her bovine mind.

Through the years I’ve been on many different blogging sites–Livejournal, Deadjournal, Insanejournal, WordPress, Blogger, tumblr, Dreamwidth, Substack, and more that I’m forgetting in my dotage, surely–and have gone through many different communities of fellow bloggers. People who commented on each other’s posts with regularity, people I felt I knew, even if we only ever interacted online. (I still miss our regular SFFSat blogring. Those were good times.)

Some of them I’m still friends with, or at least we follow each other on social media. Others I lost track of. Some others died.

One long-time online friend, whose blog I have been REMISS in interacting with for some time now, still comments on my blog posts when I make them! She’s amazing (love you Crystal). And I’ve met her in person, too, so she’s a meatspace friend as well. Though if I remember correctly we didn’t meet through blogging, but through an early social media site for conscious thinkers…once called Zaadz, then Gaia? Gaiam?

I don’t recall. There is so much internet history and I am not a historian, though I have been longing to go back to school to take some proper history classes.

Where was I?

Right. Blogging. History. The long march of time and how we lose people without meaning to.

Social media has made loners of us all. The feed, the algorithm, all designed especially to keep us atomized, keep us scrolling, keep us from reading anything longer than two sentences.

I’ve already lost half of you. I lost a quarter after the first two paragraphs. Too long, too meaty for the attention spans we’ve created in this brave new world of socials and feeds and short form content.

This isn’t content, though; that’s the fucking point, and I am not content making myself smaller to fit into little boxes to share on socials so that people can read the headline and nothing else, misinterpret whatever I’ve said in the quick glance they deign to send my way.

It’s not content.

It’s writing. It’s blogging. It’s ranting about my life.

At some point my blogging became a chore because I was constantly thinking about how to write it. I was planning it out, figuring out SEO, optimizing what used to be personal, trying to think about what I should talk about to link my blog posts back to my books. How am I going to sell myself as a writer to readers?

I can’t talk about writing, the craft of it, because that will only attract other writers and I want to attract readers. But what do readers read?

Not blogs anymore, surely.

What started as honest dialogue about my life became a content farm to attract unsuspecting victims consumers to fall into my media empire.

Everything manufactured, performed for an audience that was swiftly dwindling as the feed stole attention spans away.

I restarted my blogging as a writer here at ????? because I wanted a fresh start, clean slate, a place to get back to blogging origins. But then I didn’t because I was still held captive by all that bullshit about what my blogging should do, shouldn’t do, should say, shouldn’t say–don’t offend, try to be approachable, nice, don’t swear, use SEO, you are your public face so don’t be honest.

I tried to be honest and then got scared and drew back. I tried to be raw and then hated it and wouldn’t post it.

The same problem I have with pretty notebooks, where they’re too pretty to put anything into, has happened with my blogging. I created a Substack and I barely post there, because I feel like whatever I blog there must be an article. Well thought out. Coherent. A valid point to be made.

Not just me wittering on about whatever it occurs to me to witter on about (the original purpose of my blogging!).

But maybe now–maybe I am finally ready to get back to real blogging. As it was, as it should be.

Even if no one ever reads a fucking word.

Funnily enough, we can thank tumblr for getting me here, probably, at least partially–the new moon solar eclipse in Leo today is the other part, no doubt (IYKYK, this is not an astrology blog so I won’t be going into detail)–because I went back to tumblr over a year ago and just felt free to shitpost.

Shitposting. The original blogging.

Tumblr’s format is uniquely suited to allow one to blog without caring too much about presentation, performance, content, SEO, and because of that it’s one of the most unhinged places on the internet.

I left years ago because it was destroying my mental health, mainly because I didn’t know how to curate a feed. Now I’m back and I’m ruthless in what I allow on my feed, blocking, unfollowing, muting, or reporting with extreme prejudice.

It’s so freeing to make a stupid little post drawing a line between my obsession with writing Ghia and Jules and how that was probably informed by my love of Mulder and Scully and just post it, putting a bunch of unhinged nonsense in the tags as additional commentary.

While tumblr absolutely is being invaded by AI slop shovellers, at least when you’re making a post the goddamn software itself isn’t chirping at you “Would you like to improve your SEO? Improve your writing with AI? Just click a button and we’ll suck all the humanity and realness out of your work!”

Glaring at you here, WordPress.

(Side note, no, you cannot improve my writing with AI. It’s actually impossible; I am much, much better than whatever AI can spit out these days. The only way to get better at something is to practice it and I have been practising writing for over three decades–and my pirated works were used to train the AI that is basically a glorified predictive text.

Something that’s designed to generate text that’s based on what it predicts is wanted will never be better than what a human artist can create, because when you dig deep into your writing and try to create something real, you don’t give a good goddamn about predicting what’s wanted. My work should make you uncomfortable, it should give you some friction, because that’s how you know it’s real.)

And here we come to the bit where I peter out. I started this post full of fire and verve and energy and now it’s gone, and maybe that really is the problem with blogging for me these days–it was always most successful when I could sit down and bang out a post and press “publish”. No agonizing over it for days, editing and revising. Just write, post–and sometimes those just “write and post” ones were CHONKERS, because I’m verbose.

But I don’t have the energy anymore for that sort of blogging. I run out of steam so quickly, and I don’t know if it’s age or if I’m just exhausted with online life.

Maybe a little of both.

And maybe it doesn’t matter, because the truth is–I miss blogging, so I’m going to do it some more. I don’t know what the fuck that looks like except I’ll probably sit down and make myself write some garbage here and throw it up, not letting myself care what it’s like.

If it’s optimized.

If it’s short enough for modern attention spans (it won’t be).

If the featured image is perfect (no more agonizing).

If I made a coherent point.

If there’s a satisfying ending.

Haha, almost got you there. No, I could never leave off on a note like that–but this post is done. I will be blogging more. It will be unhinged garbage so stick around if you like that.

Anyway, you read this far so here’s some shameless self-promo of my Patreon.

For the month of August, you can join my brand new tier (a reduced price that gives you perks of a higher tier) and get the first month free, or get 40% off any of the rest of my tiers for the first month. More details here.

My Patreon is currently getting chapters of Chosen of Kore as I rewrite it (free for all followers), and paid tiers get fun extras and more stories. (The new tier will give you access to Midwintertide, a cute little novella I wrote about how Ghia and Jules met!)