Blaugust 2024 Week 2: Writing

Here we are, week 2 of Blaugust. I’m still lost in the busyness of daily life, but, I’m trying.

Week 2 is supposed to be about introductions. This place is only a couple of years old, and I’ve only managed a single introduction post in that time, and it wasn’t even for Blaugust.

Here are the basics: I’ve written pretty much as long as I could manage it, whether it was letters, in diaries or journals, or short stories, or social media; I write. Music is also a big part of my life; I wonder how much of that could be chalked up to a childhood diet of Disney Renaissance movies. I love animals, but have only ever lived with cats; we currently have two: Rudy and Kochanski. I’ve knit since I was in college, and picked up crochet in the last year; we make a lot of things out of yarn in our household. That’s pretty bare bones in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully this week I can flesh out some of this stuff and you can get to know me a little more.

The website comes from the second screen name I ever had. Peridot is my favorite color and I figured lines covered… a lot of things. Lines of music, lines of poetry, lines on a page… lots of lines. So, peridotlines has followed me around for almost twenty years now. It used to be a LiveJournal handle, and for a while, it existed on the various LJ clones that came into existence; then Twitter and Instagram. Now, it’s mostly this place and BlueSky. Sometimes, I wonder if I should just switch to a website based around my actual name instead of this other thing, but it’s also been my “name” online for so long that it would feel weird not to keep using it.

The only other thing this screen name has been attached to is fan fiction, which I wrote a not insignificant amount of, up until a few years ago. It feels odd to think back on it now, knowing some of it probably still exists in random corners of the internet besides Archive of Our Own. I’m more than a little relieved that some of my first forays into that particular art have been lost to obsolete technology. Someday, I might come across an ancient floppy disk and there will be no way to extract the fan fiction I had written when I was fully invested in NBC’s Passions forever ago.

While that stuff has been lost to time, I have a stack of journals sitting in a box in our closet haunting me with the cringe of naive adolescence. I’ve tried, quite a few times, to type up those journals so I could get rid of this stack of things that’s just taking up space. I started keeping those when I was 11, and I can usually get through typing up the first few years, but then 13 or 14 hit, and some of it is just raw and real and uncomfortable. I could consider just tossing them, letting them go, but it turns out I put a lot of stock in written word, even if it’s clumsily scrawled cursive documenting our family vacation or the awkwardness of a crush.

I try not to let this place become like those journals, but sometimes it does descend into the deeply personal, especially when it comes to grief and talking about individuals I miss. For some reason, I find it easier to go there with writing than I do the light, airy subjects I see others covering. I wish I could be funny, embrace the silliness at times, but while I can put together words about something sad or dark, every time I try to do something funny, its like I can see the framework of whatever I’ve written, and I can’t see past that, and it’s not good enough.

I’m hoping Blaugust can help me get back on track a little bit with just writing something and getting it posted. I have yet to figure out a good schedule to get something up here reliably though. I thought maybe themed days would work, but if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that if I’m not “feeling” it I don’t want to write about an arbitrary subject I’ve decided to shoehorn into this place. That’s the frustrating part, in the end.

So, this is me and writing. But tomorrow maybe it will be me and music, or me and fiber, or me and cats, or me and my bike. I guess, wait and see.