14 Years of Videos About the Creative Process
Exactly 14 years ago, I posted my first video online. I did it out of cowardice. I was getting my Masters at Antioch University and I needed to lead a 50-minute lecture. I was so terrified of public speaking that I recorded a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation to kill some time during the lecture. The video was about my obsessive short story submission process, navigating the slush piles (which were mostly physical piles of papers back then). While recording it, I was so worried it would be boring that I told a few jokes about my insecurities, through my recorded words and through visual gimmicks on the screen. The presentation went well, people liked the insights, laughed at the jokes, and I even had fun with the Q&A afterward. I graduated, but more importantly, I learned that I loved making these silly videos and I've been making videos ever since, always experimenting with different low-budget low-skill ways of adding humor to these videos. I've taken some detours to talk about health issues, chronic pain, gaming, and other weird things, but mostly I've circled around the creative process. 🎭🎭🎭 Anyway, to celebrate these 14 years, I thought I'd share with you 14 of my favorite videos about writing… 📽️📽️📽️ (This post was original published on Writer Unboxed.) 🎙️🎙️🎙️
miscellaneous thoughts about my insecurities with publishing things
A few months ago, I posted about how I missed blogging. I wrote it as if blogging was dead, as if I wasn't writing those words on MY OWN BLOG... It wasn't until I got some feedback (thank you, Betsy! 😜) along the lines of, "so... why not keep blogging!?" that I realized there's nothing stopping me from posting things in just the way I once loved to do.... Nothing stopping me, except for me. But ME is a pretty difficult force to overcome. I’m so nervous about saying something the wrong way, or someone reading it the wrong way, or regretting something I say… 😱 To the point where I freeze up at the keyboard when I’m writing something specifically meant for a blog or for social media. It all feels a lot scarier and more complicated these days…
the blog experience
I've been thinking about blogging. Not about blogging today, but just what it felt like to blog a bloggy blog post fifteen years ago. Until 2009, I had a blog on blogger.com and it was magical, just how easy it was to put words down in a post. Not quite a journal entry, and not quite journalism, but just this informal way to tell your story. Putting out these breadcrumbs for people to follow, to learn more about you, and whatever you were obsessed with that week. And then, the next week (or the next day, or the next month), you could continue along that trail with another post. You didn't have to think about any fancy website stuff or submitting your crazy consciousness for publication on some magazine's website. It felt so fresh and free.
Y'all know by now that I don't blog regularly anymore. I average about one post every two months, and typically I'm just using the post to point to some other video or project. I don't know when or why those chatty blog posts stopped for me. And in the meantime, blogging has become a less cool thing to do. Maybe because social media has filled that need. But I never got comfortable posting the same kind of content on social media. Social media feels so chaotic and noisy — and everybody's voices are all smashed together. The blog was my own stage to tell my own story in my own way. And then I could happily go visit your blog and listen to your unique voice on your unique stage.
I miss the blog experience.
the blog post that is boringly about this blog
If you're not reading this blog post right now then my migration from WordPress to Squarespace has failed. Oh, wait, I think I'm doing this backwards. I should've warned you earlier. Oh, wait, I actually shouldn't have warned you at all, because I know for a fact that you're reading this right now. What I should have done was warn the people who were left behind! …I'm clearly not doing this blog thing right.