I’ll have had DeathKitten.net for 12 years coming up on the 24th of May, and SaturnGirl.net (which is currently set to mirror DeathKitten.net) since December 31st 2000. Over the years I’ve had various projects hanging off subdirectories and subdomains, but the main page on the site has always been intended to be a portfolio. I’ve been horrible about maintaining my efforts on that front, often times going years between updates and leaving things languishing even when broken (the style switcher *cough*), leaving really crappy old pieces of writing that dated back to high school up for everyone to see, and having a bio page that was old as sin.

I’ve found lately that the only writing I do is half-cocked rants on diaspora*, little quips on Twitter that mean nothing and seem to only gather notice when I’ve at-mentioned someone, or my writing for my Star Trek role play game (USS Joshua Norton because shameless plug). Even though the quality was pretty bad, there was a time where I carried around multiple notebooks and an accordion folder full of various fiction writings and random musings. That all seemed to die off after I had my backpack stolen with all my rough drafts and works in progress in it, and I never really sprung back from it.

Recently I had an opportunity come up in my twitter feed that I would have liked to try for. An editor was looking for writers for her site and other projects, because a couple of her existing writers had moved onto bigger things. When I followed up, she asked for writing samples in addition to some personal information… and I absolutely dropped the ball because I didn’t have anything already written that I felt was usable, and the suggested prompts she offered when we’d talked about it failed to resonate with me. It particularly bothered me that none of the prompts got me anywhere, because one of the pieces of advice I kept seeing from various authors and writers I admired seemed to boil down to the same thing: Just write. Don’t wait for the muse, don’t second guess yourself, just get your thoughts down until they’re all out. Once they’re down, you can go back and edit, clean them up, turn them into the finished work you’ll eventually show to others, but you can’t do that until such time as you’ve gotten them written out to start.

I feel like I’ve lost something of myself in not doing this long form writing anymore. I constantly feel like I have things to say, and if someone gives me their attention for any length of time, I’ll start ranting about whatever has me fired up lately — usually politics and the downward spiral it feels like the USA is on right now. But in the end, I feel like this ranting gets me nowhere and it feels like it rings hollow. I’ve never been particularly good at speaking off the top of my head, I’m too crass and hot headed for many people to take me seriously, and I feel very disorganized when speaking aloud. Public speaking is a skill, and it’s an especially difficult one to master without preparation before hand, and since I’m usually stumbling into conversations when I find a willing partner for conversation, I don’t often find myself well prepared.

My goal here is to try to get myself in the habit of writing regularly again. I’m not particular about if I’m writing fiction or non-fiction, I just want to get in the habit of getting words out. I want to get better at sharing my thoughts, and I want to make sure that when I’m expressing myself I am doing so in an articulate manner. To that end, I am aiming to post something on a weekly basis. I suppose if any of you want to help out, if anyone is reading this thing, feel free to ether harass me if you don’t see me posting stuff, or offer me topic suggestions. I really need to figure out this self motivation thing though, so I really hope I can keep myself on task with this.