I've been meaning to restart blogging as a means of getting back into writing. Well tbh I never really stopped writing, just sharing my writing online. But I did notice that this has definitely had an effect on my writing. Where previously the sense of publishing added a kind of creative constraint that focused me to streamline my thoughts, since abandoning that in my workflow, I kind of write without any real end goal.
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While this works fine by itself, as in the format of journaling, it's never really what my writing was intended to be. The feeling of having something to say is what sparks the motivation to write. I've never really been much of a journal-er in the purest sense of the term. So having abandoned this clear end goal, there as a kind of atrophy that set in. More rambling, less coherence, and just a general sense that there was no real reason to finish a piece. Just degrees of abandonment. 🤷
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So when I decided to re-incorporate the end goal (ie: somewhere to publish), I naturally tended towards the last place I was still actively posting to; my old blog: https://wherethedevilworks.wordpress.com/
But, like I've mentioned before, wordpress just feels like a ghost town now. And, sure, my posts rarely ever racked up a lot of engagement. But still, there's something to be said about contributing to what _feels_ like a living community versus just yelling into the void.
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I'd had an old medium publication that's been gathering dust for a while now. But for some reason, while I was setting up its revival, medium had a wave of technical bugs. Just out of the blue. It probably wasn't anything as such: but I take it as a sign.
Not so much that I was abandoning it again (I did spend a while setting it up 😅 ). More so that it wasn't going to be my primary domain; more of a sort of parallel or backup.
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By now it should be clear that I exist in the flux between perpetual cycles. What I feel now, and what I act on, are merely ripples of what I've felt and acted on before.
In other words, medium wasn't the only renaissance that went nowhere. I had, at some point, registered a blog on https://bearblog.dev/
For the uninitiated, #BearBlog is a really cool blogging platform that prioritizes a minimal approach. AND, the best part, it allowed me to invest my rudimentary CSS/styling knowledge!
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As you might have guessed by now, all this is to say: I'm writing on #bearblog now and I intend to post regularly on there (at least until the spirit of consistency graces my mind-cavern with the persistence of her visits).
And even if I end up breaking off again, when I return to #blogging I will return on there. One way or another, it will be where my words find home on the #interwebz
Specifically, here: https://smirklord.bearblog.dev/
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smirklord
