Midwinter musings

[claudeb]

We're halfway through January and I'm yet to post anything here in the way of greeting 2019. Funny how on my other blog, the one that has my real name on it, I burned through my self-imposed quota in less than two weeks. Not that it matters to anyone but myself. And you know what? After expecting to have little activity and making no less than 12 posts in my first month here, skipping this one entirely would barely start balancing things a little.

Still, that's not like me. It's just that over the holidays I've done little in the way of writing, which I aim to make my focus on DreamWidth. Switching tracks did me a lot of good, too. Getting my fill of a whole other hobby will keep my mind off it for a while, not to mention all the problems I pushed out of the way.

Oh, it turns out by now I follow a dozen blogs here. Of them, three or four post link collections with some regularity. This is an important thing to do on a vast, overwhelming internet that's mostly drowning in noise. Maybe I should post some of my own browser bookmarks, too; better than letting them link-rot. And there's a lot of stuff I'd rather keep pseudonymous. Not just for safety reasons.

Human identity is complicated. It grows and shifts; we collect new ones over the years. And nowadays they are increasingly distributed, what with all the memories we have to keep outboard in a world indescribably bigger and more complex than the one our brains evolved in. Some people are amazingly good at putting themselves into different mindsets entirely whenever they like. I can only seem to do it when writing fiction, and even then much of myself (whatever one may call "self") seeps into my characters. Still, having a variety of environments to hang out in helps with that. My blogging has grown considerably in both volume and quality since I started spreading out again more deliberately.

See you around soon, then, hopefully with something more substantial.

Comments

[wanderingnork]

You definitely should post some of your bookmarks, it would be interesting to see what you're up to on the internet!

It's funny on the identity note...last year (no, 2017?) I was dealing with some major crises of identity, dissociation from myself, restructuring myself and so on. I was even joking with people that I was more wanderingnork than I was [Physical World Name].

When I started putting myself back together and investing in my recovery, it turned out that I'd scattered much of my core identity across the internet as if for safekeeping. My values, my deeply-held beliefs, my sense of self had all been password-protected on the accounts belonging to "wanderingnork," waiting for me to come and download my personality back offline again. wanderingnork remains a facet of my identity, but I've reintegrated almost everything into one weird sense of Me.

Hence why I find it interesting that your spread out into more platforms has brought an increase in expression! It's such a cool phenomenon, why do you think it happens?

[claudeb]

Dunno, focus? Still thinking about it. But in my experience, focus helps creativity. Being all about something. Not necessarily the same thing you started with. Or the one you were planning. But a well-defined something. Turns out to help with non-fiction just as much as it does with fiction. Which is obvious in retrospect. Should have thought of it sooner. But hey, better late than never, as I love to say.

[nikon]

I am sorry, I don't really post here. Mostly I use this as an RSS feed. Which I'm sure you can see by looking at my profile.