This space

I may renew an effort to update this thing daily for a while, just to see if I can. In part because my father’s fight against cancer is so heavy on my mind (because I live 1000 miles from my parents so I’m obsessed with my inability to help them) I find I have a need to write more often. Not about cancer. Not necessarily about whatever is going on in my head regarding my father and my relationship with him and how that has formed me. Mostly just to write and make a record of whatever.

Perhaps this counts as one of my parodies of the blogger apology for not updating more often. Which is fine. Hey guys.

On Midnight in the Month of June, On Fiction

At some point I decided this was my main blogging space. This is recent. What happened was I found myself dissatisfied with a return to Tumblr and casting about for a space that would by name and content give me the most latitude to blog what I wanted–personal stuff, true crime, history, weirdness, you name it.

I realized that space was sitting here all along, I’d already established it, and I’d been ignoring it since September of last year because–no lie–I forgot the elaborately complicated password I made to sign in to WordPress.

I know how dumb this is, don’t give me shit about it.

Anyway, I feel like one feature of my decision to focus on this space as my only blog, the place where I’ll put everything (I plan to eventually get a standalone URL, too) should be me giving myself permission to just randomly blog my inner monologue. At least once in a while. Ello is a good space for that too (shut up, it is. I like Ello), but today I’ll say it here.

I’ve been writing poetry and fiction for longer than I’ve been writing nonfiction or journalism. As my paid work has entirely been in blogging/journalism/nonfiction, that’s easy for even me to forget.

And regarding fiction, I’ve developed a concern: what if I’m geared toward short fiction? WHAT IF I’M A SHORT STORY WRITER?

This may sound silly, but it’s a legit concern if you ever want to sell your fiction to anyone.

I mean, I don’t think the short story is dead (I swear I’ve read musings contemplating this very thing in the last few years) but I do think that unless you’re George Saunders (whom I love, and keep your contrary opinion to yourself), short fiction is not the thing that punches a writer’s ticket these days. Everyone wants to be–thinks they are–a novelist.

And hey, I am fairly sure I have a novel in me. But not yet. When I write fiction these days, it’s always short.

Is this a function of having a ferocious case of ADHD? A limited set of functional, fictional, interesting ideas? I don’t know. At least partly, re: ADHD. I don’t think so, re: limited ideas. But I do think this maybe true, for me.

What I also think is that in general, the short story isn’t appreciated these days for its fundamental power, its ability to grab even the most random reader and draw them into an imaginary world.

Many of the stories that hit me hard at an early age were short fiction. One example that always comes quickly to mind when I’m thinking about this stuff: Ray Bradbury’s amazing “At Midnight, in the Month of June.”

I first read the Bradbury story in a collection of horror fiction when I was 12, and it blew me the fuck away. Passages like this:

She stood against the door in the dark. If moonlight could have struck in upon her, she would have shimmered like a small pool of water on a windy night. He felt the fine sapphire jewels come out upon her face, and her face all glittering with brine.

Or this:

He remembered that sometimes when he played hide-and-seek they did not find him at all; he would not let them find him. He said not a word, he stayed so long in the apple tree that he was a white-fleshed apple; he lingered so long in the chestnut tree that he had the hardness and the brown brightness of the autumn nut. And God, how powerful to be undiscovered, how immense it made you, until your arms were branching, growing out in all directions, pulled by the stars and the tidal moon until your secretness enclosed the town and mothered it with your compassion and tolerance. You could do anything in the shadows, anything. If you chose to do it, you could do it. How powerful to sit above the sidewalk and see people pass under, never aware you were there and watching, and might put out an arm to brush their noses with the five-legged spider of your hand and brush their thinking minds with terror.

… Were to me the quintessence of great scene painting. Everything about this story sang of the blue-lit and silent watches of the night, of silence, of madness. I had been that secret boy high in the tree, hiding as the summer night blued then darkened to indigo, studded with stars. Bradbury was painting a portrait of wrath and murder, yet I was reading it and immersed in and sympathetic to the memories and mind of the killer. No matter how psycho crime blog readers once assumed I might be, that’s not me. Yet Bradbury put me there.

That’s magic. And the story is what, maybe 10 pages long?

God. Damn. To me, Bradbury becomes a wizard in those few pages. He invokes the scents, the taste, the light, and the howling vacuum in the soul of his essentially psychopathic protagonist.

So maybe I’m a short story writer, when we’re talking made-up stuff. Maybe that’s my general bent.

If so? If I can get even one story out there one day that in a mere 2000 words does what Ray Bradbury did for me reading his cold poetry of murder for another reader?

Well, fuck yeah. Good enough. Let’s go.

A funny thing that happened

Ha-ha, I lied, this wasn’t funny at all. After I wrote “Digging Ditches…” about my brother’s suicide (and received a great response, which felt good), I suddenly had a goddamned hard time writing again. I have another post in draft about Richard Parker (who pled guilty to murder earlier this summer) but it has been hard to finish. I think this is because it treads across similar territory. And way back in 2004, after I’d already been blogging for 4 years, I started a blog about crime stories in the news in part because I realized I fucking hated writing about myself and my life. I tend to save all that shit for solipsistic conversations with friends, my wife and one of 2-3 different pretentious-ass Moleskine notebooks I have laying about any given time.

I have refused to admit to writer’s block since I’ve had a Twitter account, because even when I couldn’t eke out a paragraph even for a paying gig, I could still tweet. But that’s a low bar, to be honest. My Twitter feed (from my @SteveHuff account) will always be kind of ragged and discursive, because I’m not angling for a comedy writing or social media editing job, I’m experimenting, which is easily done 140 characters at a time.

All of this is to say I feel self-conscious about not updating this blog more often, yet I’ve actually kept up with it better than any personal site I’ve created in the last 5 years or so. I think I will double down on that and pay WordPress whatever to add a unique URL. We’ll see if that’ll make me feel even more obligated to make a practice of this.

Because I do feel blogging, something many writers have mixed feelings about, is a valid form of writing or if nothing else, a valid way to stay in practice as a writer. So. Stay tuned, I guess.

The Unbearable Writeness of Blogging

I have, for a long time, hated blogging. What I hate about blogging is not the act of writing for public consumption. It’s the heavy load the words “blog” and “blogging” have carried for a few years now. In my mind, and I suspect the minds of others as well, the moment something you’ve researched, edited, and labored over moves from an “essay” or any other form of writing to a “blog post,” it feels somehow diminished. This is both a subjective attitude developed from peculiar, personal experience and something I’ve noticed in pop culture and the media. Tell someone you’re a journalist and they won’t blink–it’s a long accepted job, even if it’s one people sometimes reflexively dislike. Say you’re a blogger–even if it’s a paid gig–and watch many people try to put the brakes on a bit of a sneer.

So as other posts in this blog indicate, doing this is a frequent source of internal conflict for me. A lot of things figure into that, including the question of ‘why bother?’

After this post about my weight loss and many of the factors that led me to do it was highlighted by WordPress’s “Freshly Pressed,” I discovered something surprising: a ton of people are still happily blogging away, just because they want to. I found this out from the ongoing response to that post, and from reviewing the blogs of many who liked it and then chose to follow me.

If you listen to the nimrods who blog for popular sites (certain tech blogs, etc.) about social media, you might get the impression that tools like Twitter and Tumblr have killed old-fashioned blogging (a ridiculous term itself, since blogging isn’t even 20 years old, really) just for the heck of it.*

I think the response to my post featured on “Freshly Pressed” opened my eyes to the fact that blogging hasn’t really died out at all, and there are still plenty of people doing it because they feel compelled to. It may have begun to re-legitimize the act of blogging, in my eyes.

As a result, I’ve decided, after a silly amount of hemming and hawing, to focus much more of my writing in general in this space. A problem with the wealth of choices available to anyone wanting to publish much of anything online now is that very wealth…if you’re as ADD** as me, it’s often irresistible. I want to try that new Tumblr idea. I want to give that funny Twitter parody idea a shot. I want to check out this tool and see if it’s better than WordPress, or use that other one and see if it’s got better Google search penetration than Tumblr.

I want to, but I think rather than be distracted by the “oooohhh shiny,” I’m going to remain resolute and put it here, come hell or high water. I’m committing. It’s disturbing, and makes me uncomfortable.

That will mean a wide variety of weirdness, including pointless talking to myself posts like this. Something I try to not do, but continue doing. Thanks for following along, hope it’s worth your time. And mine.

*Backtracking: in 2005 I had been blogging for 5 years ‘just for the heck of it’ and someone invited me to write for their site for pay. That was news writing, not precisely blogging, but it led ultimately to, among other things, paid blogging, including launching and anchoring a blog about crime for Village Voice Media. After that blogging was officially a job, and that probably was the main reason I underwent a huge change in attitude about this endeavor.

**Medically diagnosed ADD, dammit, not self-diagnosed based on some online tests. The internet has provided innumerable tools for allowing people to glibly determine they are impaired or dying.

Goals

I have a lot of goals related to various things and I’ll never enumerate or detail all of them because:

A. No one cares;
B. They’re my business.

I felt like mentioning two in this post, though, because they’re relevant. Really, a better word is project, more than goals. Resolutions is a terrible word and should be shot. It implies imminent failure. Anyway.

One of my projects for this year involves updating this blog a lot. The other is exercise. I went on (and on and on) about that yesterday in this post. I also noted the “daily” workout may not be so daily. Yet.

The reason for this post is I realized in order to meet the easier of the two goals in question, which involves the act of writing, I’ll have to update this blog with stuff I hesitated to tackle upon making the first few posts over the last couple of days. Which is stupid, considering I gave this site the name HuffWire, therefore stating I intend to make newsy blog posts about stuff that interests me, sometimes.

So this is an announcement of sorts: these posts will be more mixed between personal stuff, sometimes (I consider the workouts under a personal post umbrella) and newsy things of interest.

Maybe that doesn’t even need explanation. I don’t know. I’ve been blogging both for the hell of it and for money since 2000 and I still haven’t figured this shit out.

Blogs are passé

I’ve read recently (honestly too lazy to look up the link, but I swear I’ve read stuff like this) that blogs are, in their way, passé. I halfway think that’s why I decided I’d start 2014 with a brand new one, clean, squeaky, shiny, dumb. I mean, I have a Tumblr, but at 46 I feel comfortable with being too old–or maybe too vain, perhaps both–for Tumblr, anymore. Not abandoning my Tumblr, of course–I have a few reasons not worth enumerating to keep it–but I doubt I’ll use it to post much beyond links or quotes after today.

So–why this site? I mean, caveat lector: I’ve started a shit-ton of blogs over the last 4 years in particular. They’ve rarely come to anything. This may be some weird and stubborn effort to re-capture some idea I once had that I’d seized a low-level form of lightning in a bottle when I started a blog geared toward crime in 2004 and almost overnight doubled my blog traffic, therefore sealing my fate of eventually going into professional journalism and blogging, writing for the likes of the Crime Library, Radar Magazine and the New York Observer, to name a few.

What I think I’m doing here, though, is starting from scratch. If there’s any intent in this blog, it’s in the name, HuffWire. In this context, “wire” still carries the journalistic flavor of that word. The fact that I’m a news junkie and at this point have been paid to commit acts of journalism is inescapable. I don’t really want to escape it. I’m too curious and too weird and maybe even too easily bored to shut down the part of me that reads this news blurb or that and says, “there has to be more to this.”

However, I also find the definition of “wire” so broad that perhaps HuffWire is the best possible name for the kind of blog I meant to keep all along–one that melded sheer stupidity, personal, diary-like entries and straight-up independent journalism, sometimes all on the same day.

Another reason for this blog, perhaps the most important–the practice of doing it. I was blogging professionally off and on for various outfits from 2005 onward. I quit at the beginning of 2013. I kept tweeting, sometimes tumbling something that just wouldn’t fit in a tweet. But I wasn’t really doing shit, in general. At some point, I concluded that I didn’t have writer’s block (all my tweeting would seem to disprove that alone) as I was making some kind of semi-conscious attempt to, for lack of a better phrase, reboot my shit.

You see, “pro” blogging practices are often (to me) horrible. They can be antithetical to decent writing. You’re having to worry about selling your shit to the casual reader. To the search engine. To the maniac who hates you based on the headline you didn’t even edit yourself alone. I sometimes think one reason I eventually accepted backing so far out of blogging/writing/whatever for a year was that I, at some point, concluded I needed some kind of change. A respite, to be precise.

Okay, I know I did.

The change was time away from that game. I had had enough.

Which is not to say I’m going to abandon everything I learned about blogging or my interest in certain news stories that also interest everyone else. I’m human. If there is a single purpose to this blog post it may be that–to evade predictions or expectations of what I’m going to post here for the rest of the year.

I’m just here to write about shit. This won’t even be the only writing I do on a daily basis.

Past that, I’m going to see if I can do what I want as a blogger without giving in to some of the grosser aspects of the “training” I’ve learned over the last few years, about search engine optimization, what’s viral-worthy, etc. You know, all that bullshit that kind of makes the internet intolerable today.

Mainly… this is part of a larger effort to do the one thing a writer is supposed to do. You know. Um, write.

So. Here goes.