It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted in here, which seems par for the course for me lately. I’d feel more guilty about it if I weren’t writing my tail off behind the scenes. I’d also apologize for this post, but I like freeform. I appreciate it. You remember when the internet was new, and we were all blogging our innermost thoughts to strangers? And the strangers seemed to like it? Let’s sit, you and I, and have coffee or tea, and chat.
Anyway, I don’t actually have anything specific to talk about. No melancholic or hopeful poems, no snappy remarks about the power of short hair or lamentations of the evils of social media. But just in case anyone is wondering: hair is still short, social media is still kind of ehhhh, and I still love poems.
I’ve been researching the most delightful, gooey things, which now that I type it, sounds kind of weird. And it is. But, you know, a safe weird. I’m reading a lot. Painting. I’m being a good kid and checking my site health. I run my updates. Running a website still bewilders me; I miss the hell out of my old online journal, Gods rest its digital soul. That was a good time in my life, though I didn’t know it. Not the best time, but good.
I wish that website was still around. I can only imagine seeing the documentation of my life over the past twenty years, all in one place. Talk about putting yourself out there.
Marketing yourself isn’t a new thing. Artists have been doing it way before Instagram. It was just easier to romanticize because it wasn’t all largely via screen. Hiding away from the world and creating is all well and good when you’re trying to get words out or put paint to canvas, but unless you’re doing it purely for yourself (and power to you, magnificent, rebellious creature that you are), eventually you have to come back out of the mountains. You have to look at other people and grunt in some semblance of language and probably comb the moss from your hair. But does there have to be so many bells and whistles?
And what is this sidebar asking me if my vocabulary is suited for a larger audience? Get thee behind me, thou wretch! I do not want subheadings. Those are reserved for when I list my faults. Maybe I’ll put up a cute little Christmas wish list for December.
Here’s your subheading. Happy?
Apparently not. Oh well. Sidebar has been hidden. Out of sight, out of mind. Would you like some cream or sugar?
2 Comments
Frank V
This just spoke to my xanga, my teeth, my tumblr, my earlier WordPress days, and me now. Thank you. And for the laughs, thank you.
Carter Moody
Sara,
Did you truly document your life for 20-odd years? Start as a teen or even earlier?
Writing teachers, from high school through graduate school, insisted on students keeping journals. They even read them! I hated it. I usually have had a legal pad or ring binder going of Something, but only rarely, in my 20s, did it amount to a journal, for venting or dialog with myself. And I disliked those so much I never read them One time, after getting sacked from my second job after college and treated shabbily by the editor, I wrote several pages with a red felt marker.
A notebook is usually around in case ideas pop (rarely), or some statement, article or book needs some documentation. By not maintaining it, maybe that’s why my creative fiction writing was so happenstance. As I answered at a party once in the 90s, when a bookstore manager asked if I too was working on a book, I said, “Oh, sure, about ever six weeks.” Then I quit for 20 years until starting something in spring 2023. I quit again by September and this year have written about half a chapter… a page or a paragraph every six weeks.
Anyway, the more you do the easier it gets and whatever it is that I dislike about crawling forward in a manuscript, it’s still there. I’m glad the written word still appeals to you. Reading is also strange for me now. I’ll start a short story or novel, then another, then another, and rarely finish. And I’m not even attention-deficit.