Hello! I’ve decided to start blogging. This is a new-ish venture for me—despite having written plenty of prose and a writing blog for Patreon, I’ve never really just sat down and blogged about whatever. However, my mind’s been feeling a bit stuck lately, and this is one of the ways I’m going to attempt a good un-sticking. The blog will be rough, mostly-unedited, and very stream of consciousness. In other words, exactly like all my other writing!

(no that’s not true, i do edit all my novels, i wouldn’t inflict that on you 💙)

I was encouraged to start this blog at the behest of my best friend in the universe. She probably just wants me to stop leaving her giant notes in Discord, can’t blame her for that. Beyond that, I’ve also been advised to have a newsletter or some other way to notify my fanbase of what I’m working on and what’s happening, in a more subscribery way than Discord messages. I do want to have something news-centric, especially with some of the developments coming down the pipe in the Butterverse (yeah, it’s growing on me). If you want to subscribe to this, use the Discord buttons, the email subscriptions on the Blog page, or—if you must—the RSS feed. Any and all news about current or upcoming Etzy stories will be on this blog!

Anyway, that’s how we got here, to my website, where I’ll be pinging the seven or so people who ever signed up for email notifications on this site. Hello, all of you! I’m writing, I promise. I spent a good hour and a half trying to find a good way to both make things easy for new subscribers and keep the existing subscription system for chapters. There’s nothing good. Mostly due to my own laziness when first setting up this site. I’m very sorry :(

But hey, there’s our perfect segue into today’s topic: actually getting something started. I sat down to write this blog at 2150 (9:50pm for those among you not in a 24h job). I didn’t actually start until 2304, over an hour later. Instead, during that time, I

1. Fixed a bug with the website’s display of the TLS book titles
2. Changed the opacity of the sidebar so it’s more faded and less distracting from the content
3. Looked again to see if there was another way to do subscriptions
4. Realized I could setup another RSS feed on Discord
5. Went to configure my Discord RSS bot and found out I was at the max feed count again
6. Subscribed to the bot’s Patreon because they deserve it and I use it all the time
7. Came back to the configuration panel, found there was a delay on getting my increased feed count, decided to remove an old feed that wouldn’t get posts anymore (cough Epilogue cough)
8. Added the new Blog RSS feed
9. Went to Discord, realized I’d have to pick a new icon for the blog feed
10. Picked a silly blob hitting its head on the keyboard
11. Remembered I was supposed to be writing a blog, then promptly forgot again
12. Configured a new click-to-add-role button in Discord
13. Started to setup a new ?command for #bot-things, then decided I was too lazy and nobody uses it anyway
14. Went downstairs to eat real quick and take my evening pills
15. Came back and decided the silly blob wasn’t good enough for my all-important blog
16. Opened Paint.NET and decided to use my star icon, created an appropriately-sized version for Discord emojis
17. Made a rainbow version of the star because why not?
18. Uploaded both to Discord, found out the rainbow one looked terrible scaled down
19. Went back to paint.net and inverted the colors on the inner lines, rainbow one looked good enough now
20. Configured the RSS feed to pick up incoming blogposts and ping the @blog role
21. Tested a feed post, found out the RSS Feed wasn’t getting the emoji correctly
22. Scrolled up in my test channel to see the last time I did this, realized I didn’t document it, cursed my hubris
23. Did some quick finagling with the Discord client to figure out how to get the emoji ID and used that to make a new RSS message
24. Tested again successfully
25. Remembered again I needed to write a blogpost, went to WordPress and started writing it
26. Stopped three words in because WordPress’ editor is in lightmode and it hurts my eyes, especially at this time of night
27. Looked for a nightmode function in WordPress, none found
28. Googled for options, found a plugin and installed it
29. The plugin did nothing, spent a good few minutes trying to figure it out, then uninstalled it
30. Fired up Dark Reader and enabled it on my site
31. Realized it made my actual site look bad, spent a bit trying to determine if darkreader can ignore certain URL paths
32. Remembered I’m still supposed to be writing a blog, I can just toggle it on and off with a hotkey, get back to work.

This is very normal for me. This is also why I don’t ever write novels on my computer, despite being a much nicer screen and environment in general to write. If my system has the power to do stuff, I will get distracted. The list above doesn’t even include the quick messages with my coworker between steps, that’s just stuff strictly related to writing the blog. It never ends.

I’ve never been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, or any other attention-related disorder. Personally, I don’t think I have one, but sometimes I do wonder if it would be worth investigating. My infinitely distracted nature is a boon in some ways—I find my constant multitasking and scanning across every screen and every app to be hugely productive in my job, habits that I built and maintained from a childhood playing competitive Starcraft. When you have a tiny limited view on the battlefield and have to move around constantly to keep up, not to mention stop everything when you want to chat (no voice chat in those days, kids!), you learn to switch tasks very, very quickly.

Anyway, I’d call this a long tangent, but this is my personal blog! There are no tangents! Everything’s on topic! It’s a mad mad buttery world here. I’m sitting here listening to the That Thing You Do soundtrack because I’m feeling nostalgic (it’s a childhood movie for me) and typing away at whatever comes to mind. I think this is helping. I hope it is. In future blogs, I plan to explore more writing-centric topics, but for tonight, I just wanted to get something on paper and see where it took us. No schedule, as usual. These will post whenever I feel like posting.

I do worry sometimes that my readers think I’m not writing and will look for brighter, more active horizons. Wouldn’t hate you if you did. I personally can’t stand to read unfinished work (bit of a hypocrite there, I know). I hope you can trust me, and know that while I might be slower than most, and my work may suffer sometimes due to life or other drama, I’m still writing. I’ll always be writing, thick or thin, success or failure, deep depression or overwhelming joy. It’s who I am, and I wouldn’t ever change that about myself.

Unlike a lot of other things, but that’s a topic for another day. It’s late and I need to sleep, work in the morning. Thanks for reading 💙

—etzy