The Unscripted: A New Hope

You keep standing in your own way.

I don’t know if I read that in my voice or somebody else’s, but it certainly rings true. I have thought of every imaginable excuse not to press the button on publishing this site, on dedicating more of my time to writing, on pursuing what interests me. I guess today that starts to change. I used to have blog on Wordpress. I held onto that blog with the purpose of starting to write when I was a freshman starting out in college. For a while I did. Most of the blog consisted of album reviews. Recently reviewing those I was impressed by some things, embarrassed by others, but never ashamed of the amount of work I put in each week. School started to get more stressful and work started to pile up, so for about a year I just let the blog sit there. I came back, posted a few times, then let another year pass. I did this a few more times until last year when I promised myself I would post more frequently. For a few months, I did. Guess what eventually happened?

I returned to the drawing board. I had to ask tough questions about what I wanted. Some of which I still don’t have answers. This all sounds quite melodramatic and perhaps it is, but it was not really about blogging. Okay, maybe it was, but for me it has been about what writing means to me. I grew up loving reading of all different types. That love ultimately gave way to picking up the pen myself. I used to write ludicrously silly short stories. It’s been quite a long time since I did something like that, but that zeal for writing and creating is special. It is something I wish I never lost. It is something I have recently discovered that I may still have, I just pushed it down. I let other things get in the way. Especially my own anxiety about publishing whatever work I accomplished.

Eventually, if you want to get serious about what you are passionate about, you have to put yourself out there. So here I am. In the midst of my last semester in graduate school, anxious about finding a full-time job, and simultaneously deciding to lean into one of the things I have been passionate about since I can remember. I’m not kidding either. I mean, I also always loved action figures, but I never considered making them. As soon as I could write, I started doing it. Now I am back. I do not plan on leaving.

I know I have said that before on my Wordpress site, but I mean it in a different way now. I always stated that I was coming back to the blog. Now I am not just coming back to the blog. This is an introduction to something entirely new. Well, for me anyway. I wanted to embrace something with more creative control than just a blog. I wanted a website. I wanted to explore what was possible if something was totally my own (okay, maybe I’m not that computer literate, but Wix is filling in that gap for me).

Obviously, this site is going to be mostly writing, but I promise to never deliver a dull moment. You’ll notice from those top tabs that the website will showcase writing about the different topics from movies, TV, music, and books. Sometimes those will be reviews and sometimes it will be more in-depth thematic explorations among various components of those respective mediums. The projects tab at the moment is a bit of a catch-all, so I wanted to take some time to dig into that and give you a sense of what it will entail.

Before this year started, I created a project map to chart a road precisely for this tab. It starts with my 2018 Rap Up (my top 100 rap albums of the year plus a few selected accolades) and my 2018 Albums of the Year (my top 50 non-rap albums of the year). In 2019, it will feature retrospectives on musicians (the first of which being Bill Withers in the next few weeks), retrospectives on directors, explorations of literary movements, deep dives into sport, social issues, various research projects, and more. I have started exploring photography, which will also likely be added soon to that tab. At some point – likely in the summer of the year – I will start to add even more varied projects, some of them related to cooking and some possibly related to gardening. As I add more projects to the website, I will start to parse out that tab for specific and descriptive projects. For now, just know that the projects tab is going to house all of the various pieces with moving parts. The first of which are the Rap Up and the Albums of the Year. Tomorrow we get all of this started. I hope you will take this journey with me. I welcome any constructive criticism and discussion about the pieces I write. I hope these next two big pieces inspire you to explore some music you haven’t heard before or engage with me or others about some of your favorite music this year. After that, I will start doing TV Episode Recaps of shows premiering in the next couple weeks, and put together a retrospective on one of my favorite artists of all time, Bill Withers. I am also starting up older projects such as the Music Genre project I started last year, so be on the lookout for that.

I am not sure what this will become, but either way, I am happy and proud to be doing it. Most of all, I am gracious to you – whomever you might be – for reading this and walking this road alongside me.

Don’t wait to get out of your own way. Pursue what you love (and then tell me about it, because I would love to support it). I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for the first part of the Rap Up.