Writing About Writing: A Decade Of Procrastination, A Season Of Platform Paralysis

Cross-posted from here (Öffnet in neuem Fenster):

This one is a stream of consciousness, something for all of the writers who, like myself until relatively recently, think they spend more time thinking about writing than actually, well… writing.

I’m sure more than half of you reading this (hey, you clicked on it!) can relate to the following statement: Part of me always knew, at various points in my life, that I wanted to make my living writing. 

When I was a child, it was writing fantasy novels. When I was in undergrad, I thought I wanted to be a journalist–NO! A music journalist! Then I wanted to write short stories as I took a job as an English teacher in Korea. However, as I settled more and more into “adulthood”, the “time to write” never seemed to present itself as often as I’d have liked.

Me writing about and chilling with the band, Arsis, circa 2013. I had a brief stint as a music journalist, which brought me some joy, but I quickly got tired of it. Talking to musicians was always the best part.

For a time-frame of reference: this was the late aughts to late twenty-teens, roughly a decade of my life where I spent a lot of time with a dream of writing, but doing very little of it. The one outlet I wrote for shuttered, and I was only able to get small samples from the Wayback Machine.

Silver Linings & Sidequests

Part of me is grateful that I held off, as I think I have a more interesting set of life experiences worth sharing, and I’m grateful that I didn’t publish much that encapsulates the right-libertarian politics of my teenage years and early twenties. I spent most of my middle twenties abroad after gaming the study abroad program at my alma mater; working the sorts of jobs one can get as an “expat”. And almost none of that time was spent writing.

Bopping around Seoul, circa 2014.

“But I’m a great writer,” I’d tell myself to soothe my ego, “I just need more time!” I’d think this every weekend that went without a single piece even outlined, as some of my high school peers would start publishing their first longer works, interning with major animation and film studios, or beginning careers at some legacy institutions back home in New York.

Now, I have no illusions about it, I was extremely fortunate with the a life I’d had up to this point. But it all lacked direction. Lacked any consistency. And I certainly never thought I’d be able to pick up a writing career now, after my one platform shuttered.

At some point, after briefly coming home from my foray overseas, I decided to “get serious” and joined the Army. I don’t think I wrote a word in that year.

Fast-forward to the end of my six year contract. Just a few weeks ago. I made it to the other side of my enlistment with a completely different set of skills that I’ll honestly probably never use again, some hot new chronic conditions that I’ll have to take in stride, a stack of benefits I’m not going to be ashamed of taking, and also a sense of politics and belonging that I would broadly describe as “somewhere to the left of ‘lost’”.

Writing about some of my experiences in the Army will come another day, but it’s worth mentioning that in this narrative of losing a bit of myself to the Army, I found myself again in writing. It’s been my experience that nothing helps you more quickly identify what you know you want to do, after having no choice but to do what you absolutely do not want to for six years.

In that time, I felt that boyish dream of writing coming back to me.

It would come in the form of cringe-worthy poems that came to me in the field, as I attempted to describe the embrace of isolation that I experienced in the Polish and Romanian wilderness. It would come in failed attempts to describe the sorts of mad, surreal dreams that invade countless hypervigilance-poisoned naps.

Photo somewhere in eastern Europe, around this time last year.

Freedom Of Speech Is Cool. I Missed It.

Nothing stuck with me more than the desire to document all of the things that I wasn’t allowed to, under threat of serious repercussions. Or perhaps that’s what I told myself at the time, fully aware of how to remain relatively anonymous on the internet.

I wanted to write about the nuanced political views that grow within the ranks, as young adults become fully formed within a military context—their beliefs a reaction to relevant geopolitical happenings, in real time, as it immediately impacted them.

I wanted to write about the uneasy gender politics taking place as women fully integrated into combat arms, and trans soldiers were brought back into the fold after being threatened into silence under the country’s previous leadership.

I wanted to write about the horrible salience of conspiracy theories among a class of people fed a mythology of their own heroism, only to spend their twenties doing largely mundane work that is difficult to rectify with such a vision.

I saw events that betrayed the ever-present threat of radicalization from elements both within and without the formation. On a brighter note: I saw how the military brought some of the best qualities out in some of the most wonderful young people I’ve ever met.

But COVID-19, and the Army’s handling of it, cracked open a very brittle shell that laid all of these competing impulses bare. And I wanted a piece. I wanted to write about it, as it seemed like the world back home was speed-running collapse in 2020.

Those are all stories for another day.

But something that kills me is that I spent so much of that time abdicating my voice, a position I never want to find myself in again. As my time to return to civilian life drew nearer, I started my other, slightly safer project(s) (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), and now I’m going all-in on them.

However, I’m at another interesting impasse. I’ve come back to civilian life in a world that’s more interconnected than ever, but somehow the internet got tremendously worse (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) while I wasn’t paying attention.

Old Man Yells At (the?) Cloud

In a recent conversation with a friend, I talked about how part of me was jealous: that most of the other millennial writers, journalists, and online creators that I looked up to—in every field—all got their start during the golden era of massive platforms (Vice, Cracked, Huffington Post, etc.) that are now mostly fallen giants. Or, they were able to go viral on social media in an era that, while at the time seemed awful, was still marginally more capable of gaming for success in an honest way. Don’t get me wrong, they absolutely deserve all of the success and attention that they get, and more!

Search engines don’t really help you find anything anymore. The internet is seemingly filled with LLM-generated trash articles designed to game Search Engine Optimization. I don’t mean to publish the billionth article on “Twitter bad now,” but social media is the same—riddled with AI-generated content and nothing-burger responses coughed out by ChatGPT in desperate attempts to drive engagement. And it’s not just Twitter. I actually find the slush content just as egregious on Facebook and Instagram.

Social Media: a cornerstone of my Communication bachelor’s degree, and the primary driver of my social life prior to my enlistment, now brings me no joy. I am completely at a loss as to how I promote myself, as an amateur writer who finally has the time, money, support, and most importantly: discipline, to progress for the first time in my life.

This doesn’t even touch on the fact that I am slowly working on the manuscript for my first long-fiction piece. Amazon is flooded with generative bullshit imitations (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)or whole-cloth fake books (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

Oops, All Nazis

8 US Dollars. I have been told by my peers at a similar starting point to myself, or a little further along in their writing and journalism careers that I should consider just paying the 8 US Dollars to promote my blog and myself on Twitter. “I know Elon sucks, but it’s worth it for the reach.”

But shit, I don’t know. I have a sockpuppet account on Twitter for my day job (cyber threat intelligence). I literally don’t interact with anything on it, it just has my demographic information, so it’s not loaded with any of my interactions (which are mostly infosec-related).

CW: HATE SPEECH AND GENERAL SHIT-EATING

This is what I see within ten seconds of turning on that stupid fucking app:

Man. Fashwave colors. Roman statue icon. A fucking caricature.

And he has a Substack.

Let’s see what some of these enlightening articles this asshole has are.

That’s another thing that kind of blew me away. I had just dusted off my old Substack that I never really gotten around to using as a potential platform for monetization. I thought, after the fall of Twitter, it seemed like a solid bet. Some of my favorite creators are (were) on there. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I love the features that they’re implementing. But then I find out, after recording the first episode of my podcast (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and uploading it there, that this is what I have to look forward to supporting (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) if I monetize with Substack.

It’s Rough, Man

I have since decided that the most appropriate outlets for my work are going to be my personal website (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) that I seriously need to renovate, my main blog’s website (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), and two project pages here (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and here (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) on Steady (where this was originally written) with the hope of using the platform to monetize as I pick up steam.

The only two social media platforms that give me any pleasure to scroll at the moment areBluesky (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) where I go unhinged on main, and Mastodon (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), where I hold back for slightly more brand-friendly interactions. Everything else is going to have to be touch and go. Or forfeit.

How do people do this without selling their souls? I barely finish a piece every ten days, and I feel like I’m drowning, only a few months in.