Long Time, No Weblog

Blogs are kind of a weird thing, right? Alyssa Rosenberg recently talked about about the evolution of blogging, and how we're moving away from personality-driven blogs and more towards, I don't know, blogging collectives that are corporatized and sustainable. But are we? I mean, if you want to make money on it, sure enough, or if you need a place to do PR for your book project or your Etsy or your whatever, yeah. But if you're just somebody whistling in the dark, or wanting an audience that's just a tad more vast than a spiral-bound Lisa Frank notebook, then what?

The micro-blogging represented by Facebook and Twitter has been keeping my weird craving for feedback pretty well-fed, I'll be honest. If there's one thing I know about my writing, I'm a steady hand at punchy one-liners. But I also miss the opportunity to write long-form stuff, and I've just fallen away from the Livejournal community over the past couple of years. (Which makes me sad, in a lot of ways? I mean, we all make jokes about emo teens and their online journaling, but I can pretty confidently state that LJ--and its predecessors--provided a community of support that I couldn't find elsewhere for fifteen years, and that ain't nothing.) But a couple of things are spurring me back here, specifically:

1. My trip to the Philippines a month ago. While I did some Facebooking and some chatting online, I felt pretty disconnected from my life and my loved ones. To compensate, I wrote these long, rambling journal-type things that I sent to a handful of folks. They were long and without much form, and I had so much fun writing them. I might post excerpts later.
   
   
2. I should be am starting serious work on The Project, almost six full months after I completed my prospectus. I've gone through, like, three reframes, but now is the time to get moving on this thing...or drop out of grad school. AND DON'T THINK I'M NOT TEMPTED. In any case, my friend Grace suggested I blog about The Project, and I remembered that writing begets writing, or it does for me, anyway. When I write one thing--whether it's a movie review, or a response to an article, or a piece of fanfiction--I want to keep writing. I actually love writing; it's just terrified me lately.

So here I am. Let's see what happens.