It isn't that I've lost interest in Yesterday's News, I just haven't had a bunch of time to do more than scan the news. To be honest, I’m mostly floating a few days behind on the news as I catch podcasts. I will probably do a link dump sometime this week as my Pinboard account is getting pretty crowded. I like doing them—mostly as an excuse to try and find odd bits of news that I would typically plaster to Facebook and Twitter. I wanted to put them here so that I know that they're somewhere and not buried behind promoted posts or algorithm induced amnesia.

It isn't anything against the social networks, but my ideas as a writer and their loyalty to profit are sometimes at odds. Not to mention, it is an inherently disposable medium. Now that I am not really freelancing anywhere, I need something to keep the skills fresh. So it seems like a win/win.

I recently whiffed what should have been an easy pitch, mostly because I wasn't paying attention to the basics. I played around with structure and wording and had depended on Grammarly to catch the glaring mistakes. It turns out that while Grammarly can stop the easy stuff, you still need to read through everything.

I know, I know, the basics. I've beat myself up about it pretty harshly. I appreciate the hell out of the two or three of you sticking with reading this thing no matter what bullshit I manage to put up here. I was spurred on by a friend who mentioned that no one seems to write essays anymore. I've tried to make the editorials on here fit that style. Not just because I agree with him, but because outside of fiction essays were the writing I quite enjoyed. Reviews are fun, but I had wanted a column as space just to explore ideas.

So I guess this is a dedication to trying and become a better writer and push myself to make more words on the page and improve my craft. It was always important to me to be a professional writer. I lost the availability to do it even part-time, and it’s apparent that I wasn't dedicating the time to make my writing better. It was an identity crisis, one that continues to itch at the back of my brain.

This whole thing has become a bit of a digression. I do want to say that I want this space to be more than just a replacement for what I used to do on social media. That's a significant function, but I also want this to be a place for me to write about a subject for more than a paragraph. I’m going to play around with the way the link posts work, but I want to try and write these types of entries more often.

Photo Credit: evcabartakova Flickr via Compfight cc