Thanks for your continued encouragement and support. Seriously. It's pretty rough right now.
Your reward is you get to hear me vent about my frustrations right now. (Lucky you! And Christmas is still two weeks away!)
I've been a "writer" my whole life, but almost entirely as a hobbyist. I started getting into editing, ghostwriting, and tutoring back in college, but always kept putting off formalizing and publishing my own stuff. Getting a Medium account this spring was to be my first step towards changing that.
Even though I get worked up about politics and take it seriously, that was never my endgame. I wanted to write about silly pop culture bullshit. I wanted to make fun of superhero movies and the last season of Dexter.
Ahmaud Arbery changed all that.
I DEFINITELY never meant to blog about race, and I never expected anything I said or did to matter. I just felt an abstract moral impulse to Say Something. Racism angers me on a very visceral level, probably due to its uniquely ugly mixture of cruelty, ignorance, and sheer pointlessness. I didn't feel as if I could live with myself if I looked back and had been totally silent.
By then, the logical next step was boarding the Trump Train, whether I liked it or not, and I made peace with this fact by telling myself it'd only be for a couple more months.
Which was a total lie, of course. I knew Trumpism would outlive Trump.
But I told myself that my big "Dear Trump Voters" piece would be my farewell address to Trumpism, itself another transparent lie. Of course they'd contest the results. Of course this would spill over.
Of course I'll have to pick up the torch again.
But at the same time, I'm also trying to
1) Start getting freelance, technical writing work so I can, you know, have money. (I'm good at this, but it's predictably joyless work.)
2) Keep posting on Medium to grow my readership, albeit now with an increased focus on breezy, blood-pressure-lowering pop culture stuff.
3) Work on longer-term creative projects to eventually sell. (Spec scripts etc)
That's a lot of work involving a lot of radically differing mentalities at a time of extreme stress.
I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm overwhelmed or spreading myself too thin per se, but I am having trouble organizing this sprawling pile of bullshit into a viable workflow.
I think I'm gonna return to my old strategy of "force myself to publish what I'm working on, regardless of its quality" just to establish a new, post-Trump normal.
So expect semi-regular updates to resume shortly. Whether I like it or not. And again: Thanks for the support.
