Hello Worlds!

Over the last few years it’s become something of a Christmas tradition for me to rebuild my website. Not for any practical reason. Anyone (of which there has been none) who visited my website would never notice a difference. From the outside it’s always looked just the same, but under the hood I always replaced everything, including the code the builds the whole thing (I’m DevOps. I don’t do things manually if I can get a robot to automate it). I've partaken in this little ritual because I have inevitably gotten bored around the holidays and futzing with computers is something I could do by myself that I enjoy. (I never thought my bliss would be computer programing but I guess it’s time to admit that it is.)

And that, dear friends, is a problem. Do you see it?

I build my own website, a thing which, by its very definition, is a thing for sharing with others, just for myself. It’s a very weird thing to do, in that build a sailboat in one's basement kind of way. That guy is never going to get that boat up the stairs and near any body of water but he builds it anyway because he likes working with his hands. That’s ok and all but if he doesn’t put the boat in the water and catch the wind in its sails and go scudding across the lake he's missing out on the coolest part of building one.

So this year, while futzing, I added a blog to the site. Now, back when blogs were the new hotness I convinced myself that I didn’t want one because I didn’t have anything to say. That, of course, was a lie. For such a shy person I am very much a ham and an attention whore and have plenty to say. I am just very particular about the craft and skill of saying things and very critical of myself when I don’t say them properly (whatever that means).

So over the years I just kept my mouth shut and built websites that were never meant to be seen. Then a few years later I discovered NaNoWriMo. I got excited by writing a novel in a month because it was a practice in committing to getting something out of my head and into a computer that was all about not caring about the propriety of what flowed out of my fingers and onto the page. That practice freed those trapped thoughts in my head from those inner demons that hoard them to keep their ugly little forms warm. But NaNoWriMo really didn’t set me free. So every November while I would make a big deal about the progressive word count of my latest novel on my Facebook page, inevitably, someone would say, “Oooh! When you’re done I’d love to read it!” and my whole body and soul would go “Gaaah!” and I’d hide the awfulness away with every intention of never, ever sharing what I wrote.

So I’m that guy who builds sailboats in his basement and keeps them trapped there.

That ends now. I’ve decided that the next step is to practice sharing my words with people. I am terrified that people are going to hate what those words I have to share are and that they are going to judge me as an awful person for having shared them but I know that doesn’t have to be the case because I know that there is a skill and a craft to sharing words well and here is where I am going to practice that skill until I know how to do it well.

Now I'm not the sort of person to make New Year’s resolutions but since it’s the season to do so I hereby (hereby is the sort of word one uses when resolving isn’t it?). I hereby resolve to post something of interest to this blog with the goal of posting as much as I can, as often as I can, as soon as I can until I get really good at doing it.

I have no idea what that's going to be but I guess figuring that out is part of the practice of having a blog...