A while ago, I was chatting with a mentor and a surprising sentence fell out of my mouth: “If I could just write all day for a living, I might be happy.”
Leave aside the internal psychological drama wrapped up in “might be happy” – that’s for another time and probably a therapist.
My mentor replied, “Well, Ernest Hemingway did it.” We chuckled and continued walking. I’m no Hemingway. When I write at work, it’s purchase agreements or operating agreements, and they’re not even original. Precedent based on precedent based on precedent. It’s turtles all the way down.
No, if I were to write, I would be less Hemingway and more Moses at the burning bush: “What shall I say?” Hot takes, straight from the oven? Enough people do that already. Sober analysis? That doesn’t tickle the ears. How often do I post? I might not have time to do daily, but is weekly too infrequent? All of this is part and parcel of one overriding question: who’s the audience? How many of my 408 Twitter followers would be willing to read long-form, or short-form, or whatever it is that I end up publishing? Am I starting a Substack?
As Twitter continues its long and slow descent into madness and/or bankruptcy, many of us have been looking for alternate means to get our thoughts out into the world. Some have gone to Mastodon. Others have gone to something called Post, which I haven’t checked out yet. Frankly, it only came into my consciousness yesterday, when Mark Joseph Stern announced that he would be putting content there. The more I’ve thought of it, the more I think that perhaps we ought to go back to where it all began – the humble blog.
There are many virtues to blogging. For starters, the author isn’t constrained by character limits like Twitter, so he can say exactly what he wants in precisely the way he means it. The blog doesn’t have to be scheduled like a Substack; the author can post when he wants. Facebook’s out there, but … that’s just not intended for writing, at least not anymore.[1] So we’re back to the blog. Also, I met my husband through a blog, so clearly that’s the best form of communication ever invented.
I’m not going to set up a Patreon or anything similar to that, at least not yet, because I don’t want to be beholden to post anything. But I might in the future! Wouldn’t it be great if I could just write all day for a living, and y’all paid me to do it?
So here’s the deal, Jack: it’s going to be based on my interests, which are multifaceted and varied. There will be church posts. There will be sports posts. There will be politics posts. There could indeed be other genres of post. I will try to remember to tag the posts appropriately.
Additionally, I will begin each post, other than this one, by identifying the day via the liturgical calendar, because I am a pious homosexual and I hope to encourage piety in others. One thing I won't be doing is posting pictures of my daughter (or any future offspring); there are too many weirdos out here on Al Gore’s internet.
So here goes: back to the future.
With love,
Samuel
P.S.: I apologize for not finishing the North Carolina Emergency Powers/Council of State article that you will see below this post. I had to study for the bar and then I started work and then the General Assembly changed the law via the budget bill, so it kinda got superseded by events. I hate when legislators do policy in the budget bill, unless it's policy that I like, in which case it is simply expeditious. I still think the Council of State is unconstitutional, and we might explore that together later, but that is not for today.
[1] I’m old enough to remember when
you had to have a .edu email address to get a Facebook. I’m also old enough to
remember when people did use Facebook similarly to a micro-blogging site. You
would “update your status” so that your friends could see what you were doing. It
would say “Samuel is: [fill in the blank].” But Samuel “is” leads you toward
starting your status with a present participle: “writing this blog post,” for
example, and it would display as “Samuel is writing this blog post.” At some
point, however, they did away with the “Samuel is” – during one of the big UX
revamps, I suppose – so if you scrolled back through old statuses, it would
just be uncapitalized sentence fragments. O tempora, o mores, and the beat goes
on.
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