Blog

April 2, 2023

I spent this evening wrestling with neocities and the sadgrl template, trying to create a halfway-functioning website. Seeing as I know literally nothing about html it took a bit of improvising. I’m quite pleased with the results, despite my home page being a jumble of filler text at the moment. Blogging is something new to me, but the goal of making this page was to turn over a new leaf in terms of the regularity of my writing, and low stakes personal blogging seems like a good means to start doing that. If nothing else, I can at least try to get a short blog entry done every day.

Like I said, this page was intended as a means to start writing more regularly. One of my friends mentioned in passing that once she had more writing to publish she’d like to make a neocities, but by contrast, that gave me the idea of making a neocities to encourage myself to write more. There are two types of people, ones who want bookshelves for the sake of holding their books, and ones who want books for the sake of filling their bookshelves. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I’m the latter. That’s not to say I appreciate aesthetics above content, just that I’m more liable to create when it’s in service of a finished product that I can take a step back and look at. I definitely see the semi-organized clutter of my bookshelf as greater than the sum of its parts, and I’m hoping this website can be something similar.

Another reason for creating the site was to keep track of my own thoughts. It seems so many fly in and out of my head at any given moment that I lose a novel’s worth each day. While I certainly won’t be able to record them all, I think keeping some manner of permanent record of the sorts of trains of thought that plague me so constantly might help me develop a more consistent sense of self as well as honing my writing skills. Countless times I’ve yearned to have a concrete record of what I was thinking at various points in my past, both momentous events far enough back in my memory that they’re shrouded in a dissociative fog and more recent memories that I just can’t recall my exact conceptualization of.

One skill both developing my writing skills and solidifying my sense of self should help with is bridging the gap from mind to reality. It’s a dilemma that has occupied my mind for quite a while now. Will it ever be possible to communicate an idea, an emotion, a story, a concept, really anything at all, EXACTLY how it exists in my mind? I doubt it, but attempting to do so, and eventually observing what sort of impact this losslessly communicated idea might have on others, is the main goal that pushes my writing forward. I want to explore this dilemma further in my writing, and hopefully will have more personal and fiction writing on the topic soon. The most recent gap I’ve struggled to bridge is this very website. I know that without any coding knowledge whatsoever, there will inevitably be considerable loss between my imagined ideal place to store my writing and whatever I’m liable to end up with. It can be frustrating, but I’ll try not to let that disconnect discourage me from making a decent enough container to store my ideas.

One thing I haven’t really mentioned at all is whether I’m seeking any sort of audience for this page. As of yet, the answer is a simple no, but eventually, who knows? If I can actually turn this website into a cluttered bookshelf full of my writing, I’d love to be able to share that with people. Regardless of whether I can bridge the gap, I love sharing the imperfect ramblings of my mind with those I care for, along with anyone else who’s willing to listen.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper. – Isaac Bashevis Singer