Draftwerk is alive and well

I am not a “very online” kind of person. I am frankly in awe of the people who regularly post funny takes from their personal lives on a casual daily basis on Twitter. I used to do more of that, but when Twitter became a trash fire around 2016 something broke in me and I couldn’t bring myself to share much of anything.

That said, I do like writing, and I grew up with a writing habit whose natural home was the internet. The first blog I remember writing on was hosted by some site called OpenDiary, long since gone. Weirdly I never had a LiveJournal; I went directly to Blogger early on.

There have been a lot of blogs. One was a chronicle of my visits to New York area sights and reflections on moving away from the East Coast. Another was a history project of sorts, which never quite got off the ground. Some, I’ve nuked into oblivion and they don’t exist anymore. (RIP, sallysqueaks.net.)

Personal blogging is a nice exercise for me because it’s a little like writing a letter. Hey what’s up, here’s a great book I read recently, weather has been hotter than usual and I’ve been making a lot of pesto, oh yeah I read about that record heat thing yikes, oh did I tell you I quit my job?

I’m struggling to remember the last book I finished, because the past couple months have been a blur. I used to log books on Goodreads, but very recently stopped because I’m trying to low-key boycott Amazon stuff these days. (I fail regularly but am trying to at least be more conscious of it.) I’m now reading Les Misérables, which promises to be as much of an endurance exercise as reading The Brothers Karamazov was around this time last year.

Many of the other books on my list right now are textbooks, a different kind of endurance exercise. I’m taking classes part-time at CCSF, fulfilling the prerequisites for the clinical psychology graduate programs I’ll be applying to for Fall 2020. There are a lot of conditions around all that, though, and next fall is still a year away.

I think the nature of transitions is that there’s a period during which nothing feels right; the old things don’t fit but the new stuff is all scratchy. Maybe there’s more I can write at some point about why I decided to make a career shift, but for now I’m playing a lot of it by ear.

I’m happy to have Draftwerk open for business again. I’ve had a placeholder up on draftwerk.com for a while and will soon swap it in for actual content. I’ve done freelance work before but I’m trying some new things this time around — namely, offering workshops in addition to regular editorial work. It’s something I enjoyed from my last job, and I’m excited to see where it goes.

This blog isn’t meant to be a professional portfolio. It’s just some practice for me, and if you’re someone who wonders what I’ve been up to lately, or who simply enjoys my writing, I’m happy to have you as a reader.

In closing, here’s a moment of zen I enjoyed from earlier this week.