*walks in, blows the dust off the cover of this journal, and looks sheeishly apologetic*
It’s been far too long since I kept this journal. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but most of them are boring, so I’m going to skip past them to the more interesting promise of actually starting again.
With the new year already well in full swing, there’s a lot of things I want to apply myself towards in 2017. In no particular order;
- Reading
In recent years, I haven’t been reading as much as I did in the past. Or rather, I haven’t been reading books, and particular fiction. Part of that was that for a long time, a large part of our library was still in storage in Georgia, but we got that fixed back in May. Mostly, it’s just a matter of allocating my time so that sitting with a book rather than staring at a screen is what I’m doing. So this year, I’m going to take myself up on one of those book challenges where I record the books I read and try to read at least 50 in the calendar year. If I can get myself back in the habit, I should easily exceed that number. (I once had to have my mother come with me to the public library to confirm that, yes, I had in fact read the entire stack of books I’d checked out just a few days earlier.)
- Creating
I want to spend more time making art in various forms. I want to write more songs. I want to improve my guitar skills, and finally learn to play the bass guitar I bought. I want to write more essays and fiction and film reviews. And, importantly, I want to start podcasting again. All of my previous podcasting projects went onto hiatus, and I’ve really been missing that outlet. I have some ideas bubbling up, and in the meantime, I’m always available to guest if anyone needs someone to come on and run their mouth. 🙂
- Blogging
One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging more is because a lot of the things that used to make up a blog post have turned into Facebook fodder. And I’m probably not going to stop writing on Facebook, but I want to make an effort to keep this forum engaged too, because the way I approach writing on this journal is substantially different to the way I approach writing on Facebook. And I’ve found it very useful at times to go back and re-read the things I write here, because they keep me in touch with where I was at the time.
So this is, by way of being the first real post in quite some time, a rededication of this blog. I will, as is my custom, continue to crosspost things from here onto other platforms (FB, Twitter, Tumblr, Dreamwidth), in order to make it easier for people to find what I’m writing wherever it is you happen to be hanging out these days.