{"id":11620,"date":"2017-07-07T23:42:31","date_gmt":"2017-07-07T15:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=11620"},"modified":"2017-07-07T23:42:31","modified_gmt":"2017-07-07T15:42:31","slug":"blogging-all-over-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2017\/07\/07\/blogging-all-over-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogging all over again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I happened to drop by a &#8220;classic&#8221; blog of a friend of a friend, and I was just floored. It has an archive that goes back all the way to August 2001.<\/p>\n<p>At this point, I find myself feeling a sense of loss. I wish that were me. It could&#8217;ve been. I know that I used to blog when I was 13 or 14 years old, on a service called Diary-X. 2000-2005. All of my content was wiped out in some sort of tragic server accident, which left me very demoralized. I then moved over to LiveJournal. It took me a while to get started again.<\/p>\n<p>I blogged there for several years, from 2005 to 2007 or so. And then eventually I got tired of that, and started a WordPress blog, visaisahero.wordpress.com. I wanted to be more public facing. I started writing essays about popular social issues.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s easy to look back on these now and cringe, but I think I should think about them fondly, as a part of my development as an writer. I remember being particularly active during the 2011 General Elections, which felt important and meaningful to me at the time. On retrospect I&#8217;m not so sure how much of a difference I made. But I practiced and got better at my craft.<\/p>\n<p>Around 2012-2013, I started to get tired of my sociopolitical writing. I found that I was pandering a lot \u2013 I felt that I was overly motivated by the responses of others. I was preemptively thinking about how other people would respond to something I wrote, and subconsciously wrote things in a provocative, sometimes condescending tone.<\/p>\n<p>I initially felt like I was doing a good job &#8220;speaking truth to power&#8221;, but on retrospect, we no longer have a shortage of people do that. So I thought that I wanted to &#8220;go upstream&#8221;. I wanted to spend less time rabble-rousing and more time thinking clearly and calmly. I wanted to have more nuanced perspectives. I wanted to better understand the positions of the people I was attacking. I remember posting a bit from a Captain America comic strip \u2013 &#8220;We&#8217;re not fighting for anything any more, we&#8217;re just fighting.&#8221; I felt lost and overwhelmed, and so I stopped.<\/p>\n<p>(I was also writing for Poached Magazine at the time. There were a couple of decent posts, but overall I felt like I was suffering from the same malaise \u2013 trying to be opportunistic rather than digging deeper about what I really cared about, what really mattered to me.)<\/p>\n<p>In the years since \u2013 2013 to 2017 \u2013 most of my writing has been private. I&#8217;ve written hundreds of thousands of words over at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/1000\">@1000wordvomits<\/a>, trying to get better with words. I think I&#8217;ve achieved that, mostly. I&#8217;ve still got 30% of the project to go, and I&#8217;d like to finish it.<\/p>\n<p>But in the meantime, I think I&#8217;d also like to begin a practice of writing &#8220;a blog&#8221;. What does that mean? I&#8217;d like to think of it as a sort of public correspondence \u2013 a little less public than the posturing of my teenage days, but a little less private than my personal journaling or my &#8220;not-for-public-consumption&#8221; word vomits.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s funny \u2013 prior to writing this, my blog was shaping up to be a set of notes and essays, rather than blogposts. But this is scratching some sort of itch as I write it, and so I&#8217;m going to hit publish. And I&#8217;ll try to do this regularly.<\/p>\n<p>\u2013<\/p>\n<p>At this point I&#8217;m wondering. I&#8217;ve written 500+ words. Should I try and expand it to 1,000 and turn it into a word vomit? I could. It would let me hit &#8220;+1&#8221; on my word vomit counter. Which would feel good. And this has been a fairly clear-headed post so far. Is there a way for me to do both? I think yes! I could tag these posts as &#8220;blogposts&#8221; within the context of my word vomit project. And maybe I could export them later on and put them on my &#8220;blog&#8221;, or my &#8220;archives&#8221;, whatever. The point is just to write it so that it&#8217;s been written.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and thinking without writing. I have some thoughts for a blogpost that I articulated in a group chat earlier \u2013 I should really copy that stuff out so that I can re-use it. A part of me is frustrated with myself for not keeping better track of anything, but another part of me thinks, &#8220;Hey, it&#8217;s better to have good thoughts and be a little sloppy in keeping tracking of them, than be perfectly organized and not have good thoughts&#8221;. Of course, those aren&#8217;t the only two options. One could imaginably be both organized and thinking good thoughts. That might lead to a compounding of good thoughts, since well-organized good thoughts have better opportunities to cross-pollinate.<\/p>\n<p>Well, there&#8217;s only one way to find out \u2013 by doing it. Let me pop over and&#8230; done. I&#8217;ve saved the snippets of a draft that I can later expand into an essay if I want to.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to get more organized, but I&#8217;d also like to be writing and publishing at a regular schedule. I think of the two, the bigger issue for me is that I&#8217;m not currently publishing regularly. I got a little fixated on the idea of taking time off \u2013 I can&#8217;t remember why exactly \u2013 but I think I&#8217;m ready to sit down again and crank out paragraph after paragraph. So I&#8217;ll begin again with a base of word vomits. I&#8217;d like to publish at least one every day.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve said this several times in the past, so realistically it&#8217;s probably not going to happen. But hey, the whole point of this sort of thing is to try over and over again until I get it. I&#8217;m 27 now. I&#8217;ve been working out \u2013 bench, squat, run, deadlifts, squats \u2013 5 times in the past couple of weeks. I am ready to kick things up into high gear again.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s do this, Visa. Let&#8217;s start over. Let&#8217;s go hard, go fast. Let&#8217;s do that for about 10 weeks. Let&#8217;s make these 10 great weeks. And then we can take a break. What do you say?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I happened to drop by a &#8220;classic&#8221; blog of a friend of a friend, and I was just floored. It has an archive that goes back all the way to August 2001. At this point, I find myself feeling a sense of loss. I wish that were me. It could&#8217;ve&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[594],"tags":[642],"class_list":["post-11620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-review","tag-meta-blogging"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-31q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}