... Why I have made the whole blogging thing so complicated for myself for so long. I mean, it's how I established myself as a writer. My blogging led to an actual writing career--the very first career I dreamed of as a kid.
It's probably that I established myself in a subject that is inherently controversial and, well, negative--crime. Worse, still, I was pretty good at writing about it, or I never would have gotten paid gigs. But the darkness got to me. It fused with an already deeply depressive streak in my personality and at what should have been the height of my career as a crime writer--an appearance on a popular TV news magazine, CBS's 48 Hours Mystery--I realized I really hated what I was doing. I didn't hate writing. That's what I'm most meant to do. I hated being a "true crime writer" of any stripe. I hated that I'd let the subject take me over, dominate so much of my thinking.
But because I'd established a strong online identity as a true crime writer/blogger, I developed a general love-hate thing with blogging. It was manifested by constant changes of blog address and difficulty producing content in general.
But ah, fuck it. Blogging is writing. I know that. I'm sure I've written ridiculously long blog posts about it, in the past.
Weirdly, my family's move to New England seems to have jiggered loose the massive block that was threatening not just personal writing pursuits like this blog and fiction I never share but even my paid work. I'm embracing that. It's my job. It's what I have to do, aside from staying alive and in good health so I can be around for my wife and kids.
So this blog will updated more often. Probably not with anything too serious, but with, uh, writing and stuff.
NOTE: Hardcore bloggers into blogging trends may wonder, by the way, "why blogspot?"
Well, Wordpress is more stylish and has nicer looking templates. Tumblr is super-trendy. Jux is beautiful, but pretty limited at the moment, from the creator's standpoint. Blogger, simply put, lets you do more shit. And in a way, I feel like I'm fucking with some sort of vague blogging standard by using Blogger. It's not, for lack of a better word, "cool" right now. Even though it's actually the most flexible content creation blogging platform by far, next to Wordpress's self-installed software. So that's why I've settled, finally, on using my Blogspot address, kids--I'm a rebel. A loner. An idiot.
You weren't just good at it, you were the best. We're all hacks compared to you.
ReplyDeleteThank you. Means a lot, coming from you. I'm prouder of the work I did than it may seem. What happened, though, was I realized it was really working for me and just went for it, without taking stock of my psychological vulnerabilities.
DeleteMainly that I think perhaps the very thing that might have made me pretty good at what I was doing was also the thing that fed into my tendency to grow very depressed and despondent.
Empathy, intuition, the ability to get into others' heads and understand where they were coming from. Also, I was always way more into the puzzle aspect of true crime--the mystery behind why people do the horrible shit they do--when a whole lot of people who are into it are really more about the adrenaline bump they get from the gruesomeness and tragedy. I never wanted to cater to that segment of the true crime audience.
It may be the lifting of my "block" is not just moving over a thousand miles but also a realization that enough time has passed that I can just bill myself as a "writer," not "that true crime dude."
That said, I've never ruled out covering crime stories again. Just covering them to the exclusion of anything else. And honestly, I prefer to be paid for it now, which I figure is how I might make up for the psychological toll.