The last time I had a blog, I was a college student studying abroad for a semester my senior year. I actually kept two: a school-affiliated page that was mostly a photo dump for my escapades around the Benelux area; and a Xanga (oh, Xanga), a monument to teenage angst and early-twenties anxiety done in shades of black, purple and blue. That blog had fewer pictures, and a lot more feelings splattered everywhere. It was a diary available at my fingertips, complete with an anonymous audience that could offer validation without the risk of a real-life encounter.
Because if there’s one thing I think most writers simultaneously crave and fear, it’s someone reading their words and then *having to talk to them in real life about it.* On the one hand: it’s exciting! Someone is reading what I have written! Someone has invested the energy and time into my work, and they have an opinion on it! On the other hand: Oh sweet jesus, I have to see this person every day at school/work/our kids’ soccer practice/etc. and they’re going to have their opinion in front of me! Where I can hear it and be reminded that everything I write is redundant garbage!
I don’t remember when or why I stopped blogging–at some point, daily life got too busy, or perhaps too routine. I was using social media more (Facebook was considered The Exciting New Thing when I started university, and in grad school I was required to have a Twitter account for several digital journalism classes) and the convenience, the speed–pithy statuses, or easy likes and shares–suited my shrinking free time and mental real estate.
(The shrinking mental real estate, I realize, was probably the point of social media all along.)
With Twitter’s recent change of ownership, and the convulsions, breakdowns, and general poisoning of the well by formerly banned toxins (and a veritable flood of spam, yikes) that followed, people were looking for new places to gather. Places where we could talk, get excited about our interests and passions, follow our friends and–in my case–artists and writers we admired. Places where we could grow our network, promote our work, reach our audience. Places where we could do that without worrying that the whims of one person would wipe out all our work, our words, our communities, our connections. I was looking, same as everyone else.
John Scalzi, one of those aforementioned writers I admire, said it best: “Everyone should start blogging again.” He’s spoken several times about the importance of having a web presence that you control, one that isn’t at the whims of someone else, least of all a thin-skinned narcissist who doesn’t understand how social media actually works. I had been putting off building a website for years–mostly because my website-building knowledge tapped out in the early Angelfire days of glitter cursors and clunky animated .gifs–but after watching whole communities scramble to download their archives and preserve their connections to each other, their history, Scalzi’s tweet (and subsequent blog post, ha) wore down the last of my performance anxiety. My own website may look like a mess, but it would be MY mess.
So, here I am, in 2023, with a blog again. Now if only I could remember how to write one!
The goal is to post weekly–some fiction stuff (favorite typos, reviews of whatever book I’m reading), some witchy stuff (tarot, favorite craft tools and ingredients) and hopefully plenty of pictures and not too much feelings-splatter. Most of those pictures, if I’m being honest, will be of cats. Like this one!
Freya welcomes you. No, really, this is her pleased face.
So! If you made it this far, many thanks for visiting my little corner of the Internet, and also apologies. I daresay I’ll get better at this blogging thing as time goes on. Maybe I’ll tap back into that teenager who was buzzing with feelings and words, and could perfectly match a song to mood. She was pretty cool.
-Kate
Kate Hall 