200th

(Well, 200-and-something, but I'm calling it!)

It's a good time to reflect, isn't it? I sit here hunched over my favorite laptop contemplating how I got here. It's nothing terribly profound; I just kept on keeping on. I have thoughts, experiences, inspirations... and write them down.

And share them.

Publicly.

How

"How do you do it?" she asked. "How do you put yourself out there like that?"

I

uh

i don't know, ask better writers!

But seriously.

I figure since I had BlogDrive, LiveJournal, and Fanfiction.Net in my teens, I was predisposed to it. Writing bits of myself was never an alien concept. There were times when things were shuttered or hidden behind a Friends Only banner, but still I wrote.

Meandering

I began this blog in Sept. 2019, officially. The six months before that I agonized over what to call it. I am pleased to see that it still fits, and I have really grown into it.

For a time or two I didn't think I'd return, but return I did. "It doesn't matter how slow you go as long as you don't stop," Tumblr said that one time.

Looking Back

Have I come a long way, though?

Not long, but I've come up. I went from free WordPress blog to my own space to another space, but fancier! I've allowed myself to get a little messy. I've let some of the seams show as I moved carefully, broke things, fixed them, changed the dressing and wallpaper in this space. I have changed.

I'm not as concerned as being (overly) polished. I'm slowly breaking out of that worry. This is not a news outlet or anything. I can be me, complete with the occasional typo (that I will catch and fix in post).

At this time of writing, it is still fun. I keep bringing this up, because there's this expectation that if you love something, you turn it into a hustle: It's all content TO BE SOLD. Nah, yo. Let me do it for fun. This a casual not-professional-by-any-means space, separate from the worksona and freelance grind.

I still say I write for myself, first and foremost. But I also write to get the word out, let someone know they're not alone... to share a story. And let people see how things're goin' with me. Keeping you updated on some bullshit. Stuff like that.

Now, more than ever, the voice of another Black Queer needs to be out there. And with LLMs (colloquially "AI") being mere echoes from stolen work, we need more humanity. And, yes, I still won't shut up about the smallweb stuff:

Curate your own spaces!

Create just for the hell of it!

Get the hell off Facebook!

#NaPoWriMo

Today, try your hand at writing your own poem in which something that normally unfolds in a set and well understood way  — like a baseball game or dance recital – goes haywire, but is described as if it is all very normal.

Today's prompt from NaPoWriMo's blog.

The Spillage of Letters

You have to be careful with coffee and laptops.
Never type too fast, lest everything
Spills over and becomes a mess
Of letters bleeding off your screen,
Words piling up into drippy sentences
Sticking together like overly-sweet pastries--
And the lively paragraphs
Knock everything over
For an even greater disaster,
To escape the confines of your working space.

...

Hey, I tried. And that's what counts.

Happy 200th Post!