I Never Write Anymore

Well, not exactly true. I should say I never write for pleasure anymore. I do plenty of writing: emails for work, emails for not-work, grocery lists, mind-blowing novelty tweets, lists that are inline enumerated like 1) this, 2) this, and 3) this, birthday wishes on Facebook… you name it. There’s not much joy in that type of writing, though, and it doesn’t help me become a more expansive writer.

In my late 20's and into my early 30's I would blog. The technology for sharing written content online wasn’t as evolved back then; blogging was technically challenging. Movable Type, created by Ben and Mena Trott, was tricky to set up and maintain, but once configured it was easier to focus on content and less on markup tags. Movable Type launched a self-publishing revolution by making it relatively simple for an average person to share their thoughts and feelings about their area of interest with a minimal amount of friction. For reasons unknown I registered the domain name rabidmonkey.com, stuck Movable Type behind it, and proceeded to write about my day-to-day minutiae. I even invited some friends to help contribute, in the spirit of communities like http://www.underachievers.com/. The Wayback Machine contains a representative example of my early blogging: http://web.archive.org/web/20030210131743/http://www.rabidmonkey.com/. As you can see, I wrote about discount grocery store cards, TV shows, or even the fact that I didn’t really have anything to talk about. Still, the muscle was exercised, and even the shortest entry ended up being many times longer than the average Andreessen-ian tweetstorm or anti-government Facebook rant from random person I went to high school with.