Feeding the Beast

By my count, I’ve managed to have double digit posts here every single month since the fall of 2022. For most of the last year, to year-and-a-half, I’ve averaged around seventeen or eighteen posts per month. I can’t overestimate how shocking this is to me. Before that, I always struggled to get even six or seven posts per month. I had plenty of months with one, maybe two posts, total. I think I even had months with zero posts. Then, almost two years ago I hit a rhythm and have kept it up ever since.

How did this happen? Well, I think the recurring weekly series I established during the last year or two—Bad Girls We Love, Random Images, Lost and Found, Hot Shots, Giallogy, Bombshells, and Michelle Mondays—really helped juice the output around here. It’s been fairly easy to slot posts into these various series, and I’ve been able to stockpile some and schedule them out weeks, or even months, in advance. Sometimes they take a while to put together—lots of images to futz with—but let’s be real, they’re not usually too onerous from a writing standpoint. And that’s what has me thinking lately that I’ve been taking the easy way out for the last (almost) two years.

On the one hand, I love that I’ve established a voice for the Starfire Lounge. When I say that “we” are happy to welcome Susie Diamond back to the stage, or that “our” Gal Friday Yvette is busy crawling around in the archives unearthing lost drafts, it’s helped craft a narrative around here. It’s fun to give this blog a personality all its own, but sometimes I realize I’m writing more in the Lounge’s voice than my own. It’s a fine line, obviously, because this blog’s voice is my voice, but over the first few years I was writing less like the proprietor of a fictional nightclub, and more like myself. Lately I’ve been missing that. I’ve also felt too busy, scattered, distracted, and tired to go back to that more personal place of writing, so I haven’t pushed myself much to even try. But I do miss it.

Even though I’m feeling creatively bankrupt lately, the fact I can’t stop thinking about being more creative and putting more of myself into my writing—by that I simply mean writing from the heart, as opposed to writing out of an obligation to keep the site stats up—seems to indicate I should give it a better shot than I’ve been giving it lately. Does that mean I pull back a bit from some of what I’m doing here and take time for myself outside of this place? Maybe. Instead of making sure I have seventeen or eighteen posts per month, many of which are very image-heavy and text-light, maybe I should focus on doing some actual writing. But actual writing is excruciating. Ask any writer. We write because we have to, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck sometimes when we’re in the thick of it. Life is hard enough without writing. Throw writing into the mix, and it’s positively exhausting. And, let’s be honest, smart phones and other devices that allow instant access to the internet have slowly eroded my already-tenuous ability to focus.

I do not want this post to sound like a declaration of intent to scale back on posting here. I’m not committing to posting less, just like I’m not committing to posting more. Maybe I’ll just start by easing back a bit on the various series. Future Hot Shots of the Week posts are already scheduled all the way out into November, so those will like take care of themselves for a good while. Otherwise, if I miss a Michelle (or Marilyn, or Monica, etc.) Monday post, the world won’t end. Keeping this monthly double digit streak alive has also begun to feel a bit like an obligation to feed the beast. I’m starting to lose my zest and my zeal for it all. I’m tired. I might need to step off the hamster wheel now and then, in hopes that it refreshes me and my writing processes. I have to learn to be okay with not doing things if I’m not feeling them at any given moment. Maybe gently easing back will free up some creative energy to help me do more writing. At the moment, I’m committed to two pieces, one for a print ‘zine and one for a website, both of which I’ve written for before. I need to spend some time writing those articles, but lately I’ve been too easily distracted by stockpiling ideas for Hot Shots, or Random Image Dumps. After all, posting pretty pictures is fun.

As someone who’s spent many years writing online, for various places, including two of my own sites, I’m really proud of the nearly two year streak of monthly double digit posting. That would’ve seemed unfathomable to me a few years ago. That’s a lot of “content,” as the kids would say (excuse me while I puke). That’s the thing, though: I’d like to produce a bit less content and a bit more writing. That’s the other thing, though: I don’t feel like I have it in me to do much longer-form writing these days.

So, it sure sounds like I’m saying I’ll be posting less here, but I am just as likely to continue in the same pattern of posting eighteen or so times a month because, well, at this point I’m on a roll, and it’s fairly easy. The easy path isn’t always the best path, though, or the one that leads to the most personal fulfillment. I guess what I’m saying is what Winona Ryder says in the opening scene of Reality Bites (1994). During her college graduation speech, after she asks her fellow graduates, “What do we do now,” she hesitates, before answering honestly: “I don’t know.” I was a college kid myself when that movie came out, and that moment was so liberating back then. It still is today, too. It’s okay not to know. Let’s just see where the ride takes us.