Let’s get this out of the way: I don’t know what I’m doing with this website yet. I’ve wanted to start a blog for a while, but never seem to know how to begin.

In my past attempts, I would wrestle with some stiff introductory statement of purpose, staring at a few sparse sentence fragments on a Word doc, only to find myself prioritizing the perfect WordPress theme or falling down some rabbit hole of cultural ephemera in the name of research. A couple of days in this loop of distractions, and the inspiration to start a blog evaporates as quickly as it comes over me.

So, if starting a blog is such a pain in my ass, why am I once again sitting here struggling to find a few words to kick this site off?

Recently, I’ve taken some time to reflect on the direction my life thus far, and where I want to head moving forward. For as long as I can remember, my identity has been wrapped up in the idea of being a writer. Over the past few years I’ve accumulated a small number of pieces of varying quality and stages of completion, but when I lay the total of this work in front of me it’s clear that I’ve allowed creative expression to take a backseat.

This discrepancy between the value I hold for writing and actual role it plays in my life has led to a pervasive dissatisfaction that I need to address. My approach to writing has to change, and this means moving away from the passive and disorganized habits I’ve developed in the last few years towards a more intense, proactive work style.

The trouble is my primary focus is fiction and personal essays, which often take a great deal of time to gestate. This is where the blog will come in. The plan is to use this space as a home base for all my writing; whether that be a review, a reflection, or a long form piece of fiction.

There are still a lot of unknowns as to what shape this site will take. Probably the biggest shift from my previous efforts is that I’m going to give myself a lot of room to explore and embrace imperfection in the hope of strengthening my writing and build some confidence in publishing material for whatever audience might be interested. It also means an emphasis on content over format, so please forgive the inevitably awkward user experience as I cultivate this space.

So, there it is: my compulsory, inexplicably self-mandatory first post where I vaguely lay out my mission and pre-emptively apologize for whatever is to come. Let’s see how this goes.