blog questions challenge - answers no one asked for
Absolutely no one invited me to this, but I'm doing it anyway. I grabbed the list from starbreaker.org.
1. Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Blogging was the natural intersection between two of my top interests: being online, and writing stuff down to get it out of my head. In other words, I started blogging because I could.
2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
If you're reading this, you've already figured out I'm on Bear Blog. I chose Bear (for now) for its simplicity - specifically its lack of comments or analytics functions. I wanted to get back to "writing to get the thoughts out of my brain," instead of writing for an audience or "engagement."
To avoid crossing the streams, I keep my thoughts on rereading the encyclopedia on Mataroa. I've also been experimenting with Zonelets on my website for archive purposes.
3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Yes. How are we defining "blogging"?
As a tween, I kept a faux-blog in, of all things, the Letter Writer on Microsoft Bob. I pretended that it posted to the Internet. (We did not have Internet; we didn't even have touch-tone phone service until 1998, and no options that weren't dial-up until 2007. My childhood home is still not served by a professional fire department and its "mailing address" is for a city 30 miles away.)
When I finally got reliable Internet access in college, I kept a blog on a Homestead site for a while. I spent a few months on uJournal, then got a LiveJournal invite from a friend. I was an early adopter at Wordpress.com - that became my professional/business website and blog until I deleted it earlier this year (not because of Matt Mullenweg's meltdown, though the meltdown was symptomatic of the reasons I left).
I used micro.blog for about a week before I found Bear. But I can't shake the feeling that micro.blog is about to become The Next Big Thing for "the cool kids" - the way they all migrated from Twitter to Bluesky and suddenly Bluesky was Cool, or from Medium to Substack. I have an eerily good track record of early-adopting things that become The Cool Kid Thing (like, since first grade), and I don't want to be right again. So I left.
4. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
I do a lot of them with pen and paper. Since I blog to get the words out of my head oh god get it out get it out, I write things down on whatever is handy.
Also, for me, "writing" has always meant the physical act of putting utensil to paper. What ends up online is more like "transcribing." Transcribing is also where I do my revising and editing (if at all).
5. When do you feel most inspired to write?
If we mean "to put utensil to paper," I feel most inspired when I'm breathing. I can't not write. I don't remember a time when I could just "not write." I actually wrote a short story in college about a woman who gets put in a mental institution because her psychiatrist brother thinks her writing habit is pathological, and then she actually does lose her mind because she can't write. (It was called "Tabula Rasa" and it wasn't a good short story, but they call that stuff "juvenilia" for a reason.)
If we mean "to blog," it depends. When I ran Big Professional Blog, the answer was "almost never." Updating that thing was work, not writing. Now, I get the urge to post something so often that I don't even respond to it unless the thought of writing a specific topic comes up at least three times.
6. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Since I draft so much by hand, I guess the answer is the second one by default. Once it's typed, though, that's it - I type and post.
7. What's your favorite post on your blog?
idk lol
...Seriously, I tend to forget what's on my blog as soon as I click "publish." The point was to get it out of my head. The stuff other people seem to like or that I want to revisit gets re-published on my site under molly tov /cocktails.
8. Any future plans for your blog?
I may or may not stay on Bear. I have dreams of self-hosting my entire website, blog included.
I looked into POSSE briefly when The Cool Kids started getting excited about it, only to learn it's what I'd been doing since 2009 already. I also recently quit doing it because Meta and Twitter both de-prioritize links to external sites, so it stopped being worth doing as a means to share my stuff. (This is what I mean by The Curse of the Early Adopter.)
9. Why do you write?
Because I get itchy if I don't. That's it.
I publish when I'm writing something down and I think "I bet at least one other human might be interested in this." That's maybe 5 percent of what I write.
I sell stuff I think will sell. That's less than 1 percent of the total volume of my "words put down outside my head" in any given year.
10. Other than your blog, do you write longform content elsewhere?
I write for a living. I've been published in several major magazines (under my legal name), four or five academic journals, and a couple (edit - I guess it's more like 20?) anthologies. I also published two sci-fi novels that were legitimately terrible and I am glad they are no longer in print. And I turn out about 10,000 words per week for clients who use them for various marketing purposes. (It's a living.)