I talked a bit on social media toward the beginning of the year about using this year to dig back into this blog on a more regular basis to help combat the worst elements of social media. And let’s be straight here, I love social media. After a few tries going away from it cold turkey, I finally found a set up that works for me and lets me experience the best of social media personally and professionally without experiencing the worst it has to offer. Even still, I’ve found myself deleting more and more tweets these days before I post them and sometimes even after I post them. I don’t regret the tweets themselves, usually, I usually regret how poorly the tweets convey what I’m thinking.

That’s what this site is perfect for. I like long-form writing and I like deeper dives into some of this things bouncing around in my head and helping me work through the issues of my life. Social media is terrible for that. I’ve messed around with journaling and with newsletters and I’ve thought about writing more essays (still something I’d like to do), but in almost all cases I come back to the conclusion that anything I could do in those spaces, I could do here.

It’s been four years since I’ve had a book out, so writing here has been a great way to keep my name out there and remind people who I am and what I do while the hard work behind the scenes to level up my writing and publishing game happens. Obviously there are some things I can’t talk about here and I hope to explore using a journal to work through that stuff, but this coming year is going to be a toxic one on social media and to keep myself sane and to make sure I do the best job of conveying my thoughts, I’ll use this stuff. We’ll also have some fun here.

I’m not the only one doing this. Personal blogs never really took off in the crime field the way they did across the science fiction/fantasy and the literary field, but I’ve been doing this since 2004. It all peaked around 2008 and that seems to be when the world really started turning to shit and we all had to work harder just to survive. But it’s time to go back on the offensive. And that means more blogging. A cool side effect of blogging more regularly is that I find my other writing outputs increase. And considering I have at least two books I need to write this year, anything that helps boost my productivity is a plus.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.