“Honestest”
I thought I was making up a preposterous new word but apparently it’s recognized by the WordPress spellcheck gods as real. “Spellcheck” on the other hand is decidedly not a word as the squiggly red lightning bolt of blog-Zeus reveals.
Doesn’t matter. The honestest thing I can say here is that I’m in a blogging slump. I have no idea where to go from here.
My personal life and family life is quite the storm at present and perhaps this is the main contributing factor.
Or maybe I burned out from the whole 9/11 Truth topic which is evidently pretty common among those of us who tackle the subject.
Or maybe I just stopped feeling like I was able to continue offering up advice online when my own life was really not the healthiest example of wellness.
Whatever the case may be, I’m stumped as to where to take Sacred Sheath from this point.
What I’ve Learned From Blogging So Far
I’ve reread all my content from start to finish (more or less) and I must say I came up with some surprisingly good stuff if I do say so myself. And I do.
The articles, “Could This Be Grace” and “3 Keys to Professionalism” is what is prompting me to write this very post right now. Sometimes we just need to take a stab and not worry too much about the outcome. Because “Fail Your Way to Success” and “Mother Ship Landing” taught me that there are no skills to learn that could ever bail you out of your present-tense situation. You kinda just have to leap. You sorta just need to pay attention to your environment. You maybe just have to Tao your way through life.
I was really surprised by the articles “Better Know Your Hacker“, “Well-Designed Kids“, and “How Cool Are You?” These three articles lay out my personal design philosophy (heavily influenced by Paul Graham, of course). I totally taught myself some parameters for design; I’m pleasantly shocked by this.
I was impressed with “You Are a Meaning Machine” and “Magic“: they’re sort of like a how-to-find-meaning and authentic human connection in the modern technological epoch commentary.
I’m very happy and honored to have contributed two guest posts to Mindful Construct, “What Emotional Intelligence Really Means” and “3 Things Your Self-Help Guru Won’t Tell You“. I think they’re funny and useful. Maybe a bit speculative at points, but still some of my best writing. (Melissa was a superb editor, by the way.)
I sort of threw a curve-ball with the three-article series on healthy diet (starting with Be Cro-Magnon About Your Health). These were spurred on by my father’s brain cancer. It actually turned out that what I wrote about diet were some of the very things that cancer survivors and cancer researchers have recommended–namely, a ketogenic diet low in sugar.
And then I really threw a monkey-wrench in the blog with 9/11 Truth, our culture’s most unutterable topic. I wound up writing a total of 12 articles on 9/11. That’s about a fourth of all my articles. The only problem was that once I started, I couldn’t stop. The topic is truly a bottomless pit, and I was falling down, down, down into it. I finally wrote a hasty article “Choosing Love In The Face of 9/11” to close Pandora’s Box and try to reclaim my life. I still have a video planned to launch for September 11th 2011, but other than that, I feel like I’m done writing about the subject, though I will never cease some form of activism.
Why I Started Sacred Sheath
Ever since I was a child I knew I wanted to be a writer. I wrote my first story when I was five. It was about a police detective searching for a murder suspect. It ended with a car chase and a bullet through the heart of the suspect. (In retrospect, the cop was a bit of a loose cannon, but I guess it was personal.)
I continued to write short stories throughout elementary, middle and high school. I even majored in Film Studies at UC Irvine with dreams of being the next Billy Wilder. After graduation I moved to L.A. and promptly threw my hands up in the air. L.A. is a harsh environment; traffic, smog, and plastic people make up the trifecta of disgust that have repelled many a hopeful artist. But it’s easy to blame external factors when in reality I just wasn’t ready to make steep personal sacrifices at the time. Plus, my writing was thematically, shall we say, immature.
So I moved back to San Francisco and ever since then my writing has taken a backseat to about a thousand other endeavors. I never stopped journaling and scrapping and doodling and outlining, but nothing cohesive ever took shape. Sacred Sheath has been the first writing project that I can say I actually published. I can say this because there’s a little blue button on my dashboard that says “Publish.”
Regardless of the loose definition of “publishing” in the information age, I still retain pride in the work I’ve produced for this site. I never did get a hold on the technical aspects of web design (CSS and PHP remain a baffling mystery), but I believe that the content of the writing stands on its own sans the bells and whistles. Sacred Sheath forced me to do work and it did its job. I’m not giving up on writing by any means, I’m just moving on to a different chapter.
I’ve been refocusing on fiction of late. It’s true that pain leads to creativity and art. And I think I need to get some narrative fiction out of my system, because it has always been my first love. Blogging has allowed me to flesh out narrative themes that I would have never been able to discover any other way.
Thank You To All Who Have Read Sacred Sheath!!!
I don’t know how many of you are out there, but I feel nothing but gratitude for this experience and I thank you for your comments, feedback and precious time. I hope I have done something to help some of you out there. I wish you well in all your endeavors. Do work. There is much to be done.
If you want to continue to follow my trains of thought, I’m starting a new tumblr blog here. I find the tumblr format to be much better suited to my level of technical ability and online commitment.
I love you guys and God Bless!
Your Friend in the Blogosphere,
Cory CK
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