The Monday Update - January 23rd, 2023

Sometimes it comes out on a Tuesday. That's arguably the most significant and memorable fact about the Monday Update

I consider there to be something like four ends to a year. The first is mid-December when every entertainment media outlet publishes their year-end specials, the second is December 31st, when the year actually ends, the third is the Monday of the college football national championship game, and the fourth and final is when Todd in the Shadows publishes his Top 10 Best Hit Songs of the Year list, sometime in mid to late January. That last one happened last week, thus, it’s time to turn the metaphorical page.

If you only judged by what I posted here on this Substack blog, you’d probably think that I fell into a non-writing depression similar to the non-writing depression of Fall 2021. This was not the case, it’s just that all of my writing efforts moved to the Football Hell project, which finished up last week as well. The not-very-ulterior-at-all motives of that project was to determine if I could keep myself on track and eventually finish a project of a decent length focused on one subject (or to plainly type the sentence I still feel reads too arrogantly to be true despite the recently finished project being 64,000 words in length and completed in a timely manner – Could I write a book?). The last essay of the project, on the Liberty Bowl game against Arkansas, took far too long to finish and is now absolutely not timely, but I put it up last Monday. 

As for what I expect to happen with Football Hell from here, I’m not sure. I’d like to write something of an epilogue within the month now that I have some distance from the whole season, and I might use it as a landing spot for other experiential KU Sports writing if I don’t just funnel that to the main site, though the thought of eschewing Wordpress’s post editor for Substack as often as possible is invigorating.

To let you in on a little secret – I really prefer writing on Substack to writing on the current Wordpress platform. Wordpress switched from the well-suited-for-writing editor I used and loved for years to their current thing, for which I struggle to determine any strength, as I have to wrestle with it for even photo-heavy posts, sometime around 2019, and I’d just had to bear it for years. I draft in Word and Google Docs anyway, then just copy/paste and try to format it in post in a way that only leaves some of the images unjustified and uncaptioned and some of the text indented without reason. I loved you, Wordpress, I really did, and you sold yourself out for whom? For what? For easy editing from a smartphone? You couldn’t keep that old editor around as an option? The “Classic” shell thing on the current editor only halfway functions and most of the time doesn’t do what it used to do so easily… Anyway, Substack, as it stands, is much better for me as a writer. If I didn’t have nearly a decade of archives on the Wordpress site, I’d switch fully to Substack by now, especially with the ease of premium integration here… But alas. I could do that, and might, it’d just be a matter of keeping an archive of the old stuff somewhere.

The rest of my writing priorities in the fall of 2022 were placed on writing fiction. I intend to make a full post about this experience. In fact, I intend for it to be the next full post on the site, which I’m publishing here so that I have a record of saying this that I can find embarrassing if it isn’t the next full post on the site – But I took a fiction writing workshop class last fall! I learned a lot and I got two full short stories out of it, both of which I’m going to keep working on, editing, and eventually I’ll put them out in full.

As of right now, I’ve been doing a lot of writing over on Tumblr, documenting an effort I’m making this year to write reflectively about books I’ve read and films I’ve watched. It takes the “BEAMLOAD” name, which I’m sure could be vulgar or sexual in some way I don’t know, because I wanted to read 3 books per months and see two movies per week this year, which I for some reason initially believed came out to 34 books and 104 movies in 2023. That lead to the alphanumeric string B34M104, which looks a little like “BEAMLOA” and then I added “Directive” so it’d make slightly more sense as a pseudo-acronym. Now, 3 times twelve is actually 36, but that would make the string B36M104D, and thus make the name “BEGMLOAD”, which is not two words, plus I’d already registered beamloaddirective.tumblr.com, so we’re sticking with that. Ideally we break both of those numbers, though I’m already behind on movies.

I’ve also been working on a soccer-centric YouTube channel. No idea where this goes, I’m just having fun with it as of right now.

My primary goal for 2023 in writing is consistency and directness. I want to get back to what I was doing before so much of my writing focus was consumed by having a single topic to write about every week and I want to quit tugging around and state what I mean with confidence. However that manifests, consult this Substack for updates!