And, really, my writing outlets had been drying up - I did have a sweet gig with Prairie Public but ran out of stories; other places had dried up, and that's mostly due to how the internet works. I like to blame social media, my writing began to shrink around 2010 when that began to grow, and I've tried sharing things on social media, but the reach isn't very far, it hits maybe friends and family and a few fans, but that's about it. I'm not really a clickbait or listicle writer, so stringing words together for nobody to see in the shortest, easiest to ingest way, hasn't been feeding that creative furnace in me.

I feel that pilot light glowing, and it's been pointed out that when I'm doing creative things it shows up in my demeanor. I need creative outlets to feel good, just succeeding at my job - which doesn't really feed my creative bug even though it's programming, which should in theory meet the need - doesn't light that fire. I need the job to pay the bills, but I need to look around for ways to keep the pilot light burning.

A few months ago I enrolled in college: after dropping out once, and being unable to afford it the first time I returned to school, this time it should work out better. Today, I bring some maturity to the endeavor, plus stability, plus money, and I think I can make it happen, reassembling the courses I took for a BfA in Theatre Production in the 90s into a Film Production BfA in the 2020s.

Even my employer has dropped hinted at wondering if this means a career change; it's not so much to change careers, which I'll do without much thought if it continues the stability and money I currently enjoy, but mostly it's about a change in creativity.

Looking at a couple years of schooling in a creative field has really gotten the pilot light glowing, but nothing's burning yet.

So, leveraging what I've got, I'm restarting my old blog - now...24 years old? After a 11 year gap in posting. Hopefully this isn't hubris, resulting in this post sitting at the top of the page for another 11 years, but it's a start. I intend to return to the personal-diary format that it started out as waaaayyyy back when this site got my first media mention for my internet activities (boy, I was really hard on the Fargo Forum back then), without concern for who might be reading this still. In fact, I'm not even sure if this blogging software - which I wrote myself, decades ago - still even works. Well, let's see, here we go, light that pilot light and turn on the gas...