Time to Start Writing In Public Again

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening.
—ALLEN GINSBERG

This year has been a unique one for me and one of the things that has slipped was putting my writing out on the internet. Towards the end of 2022 I decided to significantly cut back on social media in order to focus more on some of my creative projects.

At the start of the year I had some travel and then the unexpected death of my mother this past March. The travel and the death helped me to better identify the type of messages I want to be putting out in the world.

I've been pretty good with a daily free writing practice this year and am currently about halfway done with my first full length play. I decided to retire my two attempts at Substack newsletters because I'm not in a position to commit to the effort needed to build and sustain a newsletter and hope for paid subscribers. Most of the posts that I would put there are things that I want to be free for anyone to read so didn't see the benefit in using a platform that's focused on moving toward a paid subscriber model. While I hope to monetize my content I prefer to do it with books and product offerings.

I've always enjoyed writing in Standard Notes and like how I've got backups that I can always access and that my data is secure and isn't being mined by AI so I decided this Listed blog should be the primary place for my writing.

I'm no longer very active on social media and I think that's been a positive thing. I'm actually working on a detailed article on my rules of engagement for social media that I hope to have out soon.

The main places I'm putting updates will be here at robwilliger.com and also on my site at rob.omg.lol . I also have a now page that can be found here where I'm putting the books I'm reading, music I'm listening to, quotes I'm thinking about and other things. It should be updated at least weekly. The only social media I'm really checking into daily is Mastodon and I'm @rob@social.lol on there.

I'm not committing at this point to a schedule but I'm going to try to share something here each day. On somedays it may be a quote and a few thoughts about it and other days will be more detailed posts. I'm going to try and see what works for me and those that read my writing.

I think that's really the key. Try things. See what does and doesn't work for you. You don't need to listen to so called experts and gurus unless you're trying to exactly replicate them. Me personally, I trying to be my own person and not a copy of someone. I would rather have a handful of intelligent readers than thousands of the mindless herd I see so often online.

So here's to trying it again and putting my words out into the world.