Back to blogging?

I don't want the responsibility of a blog. Okay, I guess starting a blog with a statement like that might raise a few questions. Stick with me and I'll explain. 

I sometimes say that "having kids" and "being a parent" aren't always the same thing. Even if you didn't come from one of those households yourself, you've likely known someone who has kids but doesn't commit themself to doing the parenting. These days, you can "have a blog" without "being a blogger". I don't want to be a blogger.

It's not that I think I'm too old to learn new things. I'm not young. Trying to argue that I am would require comparing me to some specifically chosen non-human lifeforms. But I love learning new things! If you got here through a link I shared and have been following me for at least a couple of years, you've seen me learn and do new things over and over! Just this year, I started self-publishing written work. I intend to start making my own incense before the year is over. If the gods are kind, I will keep learning new things for decades.

I'm even older on the Internet than I am in physical space. What does that mean? It means I've been through LiveJournal,  MySpace when it was new and people didn't know how to explain it, Yahoo!Groups, Yahoo!Chat before they shut down starting your own room and everybody moved to Groups, AIM, ICQ, mailing lists... The list could go on for a while. 

I had a blog when it was just a webpage that got updated as a journal. I was on Blogger before Google bought it. I was on Twitter before celebrities and news outlets. The heart was a star, posting more than once a week meant you tweeted often, and there was no RT button. We used to just copy someone's post and paste it in as our own post, adding ReTweet @OriginalTweeter. The character limit was 140, so we started abbreviating it as RT in order to make some of them fit.

We also walked ten miles to school and fifteen miles home each day. Uphill both ways.

"Being a blogger" became a thing, along with having a blog for your online business. I've done that, too. That's how I know I don't want to do it again. I didn't enjoy it when I had the time and energy, but I accepted that it was necessary. These days... No, I'm not going to get into what it would take to make it possible for me again. Trust me when I say it's not happening. 

Substack seemed promising when I got in on it early. There have been things along the way, on multiple levels, that made it less promising. That's why I shut things down for myself over there. One thing that didn't change there from my past experience with blogging out of necessity was feeling the pressure to write on schedule. Even knowing that posts would go to subscribers by email, rather than having to post often to keep readers returning to a blog, I still felt like I had to keep people engaged so the emails wouldn't end up sitting unread.

I can write engaging content on schedule and manage other things that are part of being a blogger, or I can keep working on things that I'm passionate about. You know, like my writing and divination readings. Everybody has the same number of hours in a day. The thing is, we don't all have the same resources, abilities, and responsibilities. 

So, why am I here? I need a space for talking about what I'm creating in a more relaxed way. I don't do much better in social media crowds than I do in physical public space crowds. I'm good with talking to one or two people at a time, and a blog gives me the comfort of that while having the potential to reach a lot more people. I can take my time and say what I want to say without feeling the pressure of needing to hold someone's attention for just a few more seconds before they scroll to something else.

I'm keeping this casual. A recent tarot reading said I needed to break off from doing things the expected way. I'm not going to follow all the rules on drawing in traffic and keeping blog readers engaged. I'll make announcements about new releases and such, but this will mostly be a place where I can talk to myself about my work and I'm happy to let you watch and listen.