isomeme ◾ ◾ Brace for musing!

A few of my friends and family members have been drifting from Facebook to Dreamwidth over the last couple of years. I've had an account here for a while, but up until now I've only used it to leave comments on others' posts. However, I too am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Facebook -- and more to the point, with the way that modern interactive media is eroding my attention span. In the various chunks of spare time during my day -- on the bus, during lunch, late at night -- when I would have been reading books a decade ago, I'm instead reading and posting an endless stream of 30-second snippets of thought and emotion. I've gone from eating healthy intellectual meals to subsisting on cognitive junk food. And the effects of this are beginning to become apparent to me.

So, I have decided to begin posting more actively here, with longer-form material. I'll probably remain active on Facebook as well, as that quick fix of interpersonal connection does have some uses. But I plan to put more energy and thought into what I write here.

This is in part because one of my goals for 2018 is to begin working toward writing professionally. I don't expect to make writing a career, but I believe I am good enough at writing, and have enough interesting things to say, that it could become a rewarding hobby. If I am going to pull that off, I will need to do some limbering-up exercises first; it's been a long time since I last wrote long pieces about a subject other than software system design. As I plan to try my hand at both fiction and non-fiction, I imagine both will show up here. It's conventional to say at this point that I will welcome feedback, but please, take me seriously: I will welcome feedback. I didn't carefully create a life with a lot of smart, insightful friends and family in it so I could waste that opportunity!

So, here we go. As I write this, the northern winter solstice is less than twelve hours away. Before the next winter solstice rolls around, perhaps I'll have made some progress as a writer. At the very least, I'll have blown the dust off some long-idle tools which I wielded with great pleasure long ago.