I've been dormant for the better part of four years, if you didn't notice. For no real reason other than my own self-loathing, I shut off from pretty much everything - my relationship, school, writing, rowing, running, photography, anime, and most importantly, human contact - leaving me with watching baseball, substance abuse, and gacha. One Mickey Mouse World Series, a fucked up brain, and lots of credit debt later - with a whole pandemic shoved in the middle - I'm back.
Why? I don't know why. Don't ask me things like Why. All I know is, I wanted to make a post titled "it's time" and slap a picture of Bruce Buffer on it.
Despite running headlong into a three year writers' block, in 2021 I was able to vomit out some 9,000 words about fucking Domestic na Kanojo, of all things. Hammering that thing into something a sane human being could read definitely stoked my fire for writing again. I spent a couple years diving deep into my psyche so I could do a postmortem of my dead relationship in the form of a message board in the form of a letter. It came out okay. I wrote a couple thousand words in a different postmortem, this one of my Lakers fandom. It came out okay. Outside of my ranting, I do want to aim for more personal exploration, as well as more thematic analysis in general -- though I've been considering writing about KanOkari, so maybe I'm lying.
My big, abstract goals for this site have remained largely unchanged: become effective at conveying feelings and ideas - especially those concerning works of fiction - and try to build some kind of manifesto declaring my values, step by step. Even as everything I write turns into thousands of words, I hope to grow more concise in my expression and turn my ramblings into a form that most people can engage with. I feel only one or two things I've written here before now reach that standard, but that just means we have tons of room to grow, right?
I won't, however, make the same old mistake of pigeonholing my idea of growth. Growth, in the immediate future anyways, will mean whatever I want it to. Maybe I finally start making YouTube videos. Maybe I finally learn Japanese and start scanlating obscure old manga. Maybe this becomes an exclusive home for fiction writing. Maybe I stop writing publicly altogether.
Mostly though, I want to commit to writing more, and this blog is the best way to really hold myself to that. Maybe I'll grow the stones one day to post my own fiction, maybe I won't. But I want to start doing a lot more writing in the near future, and I hope to start putting out more long-form and involved content, things like series and regular review write-ups and whatever else I come up with. I'll try to keep the low-effort lists and thought vomit in its own corner. But other than those mostly abstract changes, the kind of content I want to make on here remains unchanged: whatever I feel like.
I've also probably started streaming by the time I've published this, so? go check it out if you're into that kind of thing? It's probably going to be mostly gacha for a while. You were warned.
At the end of the day though, I don't really have any grand plans for this. It would be cool if I pick up an organic, dedicated following and get support behind the content I make, but I also don't care to put in the effort to get my name out there. I'm entirely comfortable writing for myself and maybe a few friends, but I also don't want to let my turtle-ness prevent me from an opportunity to reach people. If you ever find yourself on this blog, and you don't know me personally, I would love it if you left a comment, even if the comment is "I hate you and your writing is bad". The more specific you can be about why you hate me, the better. Other people always look at me objectively better than I ever can, and god knows I have a lot to work on, in writing, and in life. At the very least, after four years of lying in bed, this is me committing to trying again. I have a long road ahead.
But who knows, maybe I'll come out okay.
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