This goes here. That goes there.
- Post By: Jason Santo
- Date:
- Category: life
This is kind of a turgid brainspill, so I apologize if you’re here reading it as I believe most entries here going forward are going to be more about me sorting through my thoughts and less about me sharing creativity.
It’s been a couple weeks since I swung by and did a little organizing. My days at work learning WordPress are much more about working on the back end, php, HTML, CSS, etc. It’s fun, but in time that work will lead to categorization, tagging and site taxonomy. That means getting back to working with posts and maybe in turn it’ll lead to me coming around these parts to write something new.
But there’s a bigger issue to tackle when it comes to posting material on this site and it’s a simple one: what belongs here? Many of the older posts are poems and short fiction that passed through my Blogger and Tumblr accounts, neither of which I use much, if at all, anymore. In fact, I need to redirect jasonsanto.com to here, a domain switch that gives me a little bit of agita as I’ve struggled with redirects in the past – an admittedly ridiculous fact because there should be nothing more simple. But I don’t want a simple redirect, so much as a mirror of iamsanto.com to appear with the same directory structure, etc. as this site. I seem to recall that being a SEO no-no, so then it becomes obvious that I need jasonsanto.com to occupy the WordPress hosting instance, reversing the original set-up and… well, that’s all tangential and too much bother on this sunny, September Tuesday.
Back to the original thought and the question of “what belongs here?”, I find myself puzzled with what this venue will represent. The goal in 2016 was to publish a book or three, but so far I’m slower than a snail crawling through tar when it comes to organizing manuscripts. As a result, I could just keep popping new creative writing into here, as my recent attempts at broadening my readership by using Facebook posts has been a punched A-Class ticket to Fail Town. What did I expect, though? Facebook loves silly, cute, incendiary, and – most of all – anything easily digestible. While my stories and poems are bite size, they’re not bite-sized enough. Instagram was never the right platform for me in this regard. Facebook even less so.
Medium has piqued my interest as an online spot where people with attention spans may congregate, but there’s something about it that’s left me a little hesitant. It’s almost as though my work isn’t right for any of these platforms, leading me again to this bloggy approach until I publish something.
But will I publish something?
That’s the real question, and it’s a chicken-and-the-egg scenario. If I don’t publish, no one can read it. But without any demand, I am hesitant to put in the effort to supply. Either way I look at it, there doesn’t appear to be a clear-cut, simple answer so I just continue doing what I’ve been doing; writing on Instagram for the dozen or so seemingly dedicated readers that exist out a following of over 1,200 accounts.
Why? Because it’s easy and it’s an (albeit minuscule) audience. Plus I have a rhythm with which I’m comfortable when I create for there – that 2,200 character limit has been a fun challenge to write to episodically. Of course, I could just re-post the stuff here – kind of like I did with my other sites. But that seems pretty pointless. If anyone is interested in my writing, they likely already read my Instagram so what’s the benefit of a site with the same material? Perhaps the fact that it’s organized? Is that enough of a benefit?
The categorization of a site like this pretty much allows everything to be here. The bonus for the creative stuff is that, if someone likes my work, they have a whole Hell of a lot of it to sort through and read in a variety of ways pretty easily. There are tags. There’s a search feature. There are distinct types of writing broken out in the navigation. No one is likely to care, but for me it at least feels moderately clean – almost as though my mind has some order to it. Instagram cannot offer that.
There is one thing that will not be here, however, and that’s anything that’s ultra-personal. This may be a blog, but it’s not a journal. That’s perhaps too bad because I certainly could use the outlet as I always have a lot with which I’m trying to come to grips and I’ve grown downright lazy with attending to my thoughts in the written journals I maintained most of my life. I think the last time I wrote in my journal was six months ago. Sad. I really want to get back to that kind of writing, but I need to do it there, not here.
Oddly, my last journal had stories within it – one of which, Grave, had several installments typed up and included on Blogger and is now here! It was both personal rumination and creative expression, and I think that’s exactly what a journal should be. So this… this place just becomes a sortable dumping ground; a place to drop off thoughts and creativity without much hope of attracting any significant audience. And yet it feels good to have it all here: it feels tidy.
Anyhow, I guess there will be quite a few entries like this one, rambles that find me wondering about the whys when the wondering is the why.