bloggy woggy draftie wafties

i've been wanting to start a blog for a while. a place to just dump thoughts, iterate short drafts, and hone my writing skills. but i tend to wait until things feel inevitable, so i have waited until now. 

recently i completed my first long-form writing project, a (pretty short) e-book about lurking less and living more by being yourself on the internet. untangling my nebulous thoughts on a wide-ranging topic, faffing about on a page until something started to take form for each chapter, ruthlessly editing my haphazard word salad into something that made sense, articulating something i care deeply about: the combination of these things made it feel like genuinely meaningful, challenging, and rewarding work. 

today i wrote a recommendation letter on behalf of my dad, for an award someone is nominating him for. this project hit all of the same beats above—albeit on a much smaller scale—with the added benefit of making me cry several more times (because i love my father even more than i love posting on the internet). in the letter i included a quote from an old blog post of his, one so poignant it still makes me cry every time i read it. so i then found myself rereading the entire post, and realizing once again what a kick-ass writer my dad is, and how much i'd love to be a kick-ass writer myself. 

i've always cared deeply about doing things well. after a while that began to paralyze me, so i had to go the other direction and try to not care at all, finding entirely new benchmarks. for the aforementioned e-book, i'd often stop and wonder, "is this is even good writing?" then tell myself, "i actually don't care if it's 'good.' i care that i have something to say and that i am saying it." unpolished and published is 1,000,000x better than polished and gathering dust somewhere on a mental shelf, right? 

but now i'd like to go all in, posting and publishing way more writing, so that i can become a kick-ass writer. i'm not sure exactly what it will look like, but i'd like to be exploratory in this space, challenge myself, and most of all, keep coming back to my goal whenever i fall away from it. i might do a mix of off-the-dome type posts (like this one), and more ambitious, think-about-it-all-day-or-week-or-month type posts. you're welcome to read these, but i won't be focusing on any audience, just experimenting for my own sake, in public. 

so welcome to my blog!