inception
My blog. The Urban Outlaw blog. This Side of the City. What city? Well, not just where I am currently residing (New York), but where I've been, be it Buffalo, San Francisco, or even the non-city regions of upstate New York. This Side of the City - my side - can also be construed as a state of personal expression from my place in the world.
No, I have never done the "blog" thing. There are so many of 'em, and they're seemingly inescapable on the Internet. Adding my own to the glut seemed... insignificant or irrelevant. But the blog is not inconsequential to the writer, no matter who is (or who is not) reading it. And here on the Internet, anyone can be a writer, right? No - the ability to construct a sentence and convey an expression or thought does not necessarily make one a "writer."
If you have never been paid for anything you've ever written, be it ten dollars or ten thousand dollars, then writing is simply a hobby.
Fortunately, I've been paid over the years for my freelance work - reviewing theater, film and DVD, and writing feature articles. By my definition, this would make me a "real" writer, but I hold myself to such exacting standards that I won't truly feel like a full-fledged (or, "professional") writer until I have my first novel published. And that is a two-ton boulder of a project I've been chiseling at for a couple of years now...
So, why the blog? After all, I have two novels (the first completed and the second in rewrites) with a third at the outline stages, a television pilot and subsequent episodes going out to various contests and competitions, a website with multitudinous reviews and editorials, two Yahoo! Groups, a personal journal, and a handful of screenplays. Well, none of those sources express my voice on a personal, visceral level - I am constrained by the dictates of fiction writing, editor's guidelines, freelance professionalism, screenplay and scriptwriting paradigms, and my journal is rudimentary, basically detailing my activities and not always my thoughts and ideology (or, "weltanschauung" - my word of the day). Plus, that personal journal is, well... bromidic and even a little tedious.
Not to say that this blog - no matter how long it lasts or how often I post - won't become monotonous, repetitious, or trite.
But here it is - open to the public-at-large, for anyone anywhere at anytime to peruse. Basically, I'll post whatever is on my mind. I've had a surfeit of recent thoughts regarding the world and my life, reflecting on the past as I look toward the future. The past haunts, inspires, and assuages. It instills nostalgia and joy and bittersweet memory. The future is a hazy area, unseen around the sharp twists and bends in the pathway - a pathway I traverse with caution, optimism, and a dollop of self-deprecation, even as I glance back.
So, from the humorous, to the melancholy, to the incisive, to the acerbic, here we go with another blog paddling bravely into the sargasso sea of online opinion and revelation...
No, I have never done the "blog" thing. There are so many of 'em, and they're seemingly inescapable on the Internet. Adding my own to the glut seemed... insignificant or irrelevant. But the blog is not inconsequential to the writer, no matter who is (or who is not) reading it. And here on the Internet, anyone can be a writer, right? No - the ability to construct a sentence and convey an expression or thought does not necessarily make one a "writer."
If you have never been paid for anything you've ever written, be it ten dollars or ten thousand dollars, then writing is simply a hobby.
Fortunately, I've been paid over the years for my freelance work - reviewing theater, film and DVD, and writing feature articles. By my definition, this would make me a "real" writer, but I hold myself to such exacting standards that I won't truly feel like a full-fledged (or, "professional") writer until I have my first novel published. And that is a two-ton boulder of a project I've been chiseling at for a couple of years now...
So, why the blog? After all, I have two novels (the first completed and the second in rewrites) with a third at the outline stages, a television pilot and subsequent episodes going out to various contests and competitions, a website with multitudinous reviews and editorials, two Yahoo! Groups, a personal journal, and a handful of screenplays. Well, none of those sources express my voice on a personal, visceral level - I am constrained by the dictates of fiction writing, editor's guidelines, freelance professionalism, screenplay and scriptwriting paradigms, and my journal is rudimentary, basically detailing my activities and not always my thoughts and ideology (or, "weltanschauung" - my word of the day). Plus, that personal journal is, well... bromidic and even a little tedious.
Not to say that this blog - no matter how long it lasts or how often I post - won't become monotonous, repetitious, or trite.
But here it is - open to the public-at-large, for anyone anywhere at anytime to peruse. Basically, I'll post whatever is on my mind. I've had a surfeit of recent thoughts regarding the world and my life, reflecting on the past as I look toward the future. The past haunts, inspires, and assuages. It instills nostalgia and joy and bittersweet memory. The future is a hazy area, unseen around the sharp twists and bends in the pathway - a pathway I traverse with caution, optimism, and a dollop of self-deprecation, even as I glance back.
So, from the humorous, to the melancholy, to the incisive, to the acerbic, here we go with another blog paddling bravely into the sargasso sea of online opinion and revelation...
posted by Walls Falling at 1:53 PM
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