So, before I come to a conclusion on this blog and answer the question in the title, I need to put forth some background.
I announced earlier a project I’ve been doing called “Lovely Lily Lives”, or just Lily for short. I’ve been writing her for around four months now, and to be quite honest, I don’t know if I could write any other character at the moment. She is exactly the right character for me to be writing at the moment. This is because she is giving me as much as I am giving her – a mirror to reflect something about me that I don’t quite understand. No, I don’t see myself as a sixteen year old girl, obviously. But she represents something to me, because if she didn’t, I don’t think I’d be writing her.
But I’ve come to understand something about her nature – and that took me a little while. She is many things. She is a virtual character. She is probably a very good role model to children younger than she is (and that was, quite honestly, an accident). But what she is, first and foremost, is art.
Art doesn’t always take the form of painting, sculpture, or music, though these are obviously some of the most common and well accepted forms. No, what art is is a way of using a specific medium that paints an emotion that can be received by those capable of receiving it. They are a way for an artist to express something – either about themselves, the world around them, or an emotion that simple prose is unable to express. And Lily seems to have that purpose.
This blog does not. It isn’t art.
Don’t mishear me. I’m a decent writer. Not the best in the world, I would never claim that, but I am capable of putting words together in a largely grammatically correct form that is able to communicate with some success things that I wish to communicate. But there’s nothing about this blog that moves people. I just say what I want to say, and sometimes people even listen, but that’s all I’m doing. I’m saying things. Good things, important things, thoughtful things, certainly, but just blathering into the void and hoping my prose lands somewhere.
But it doesn’t. It won’t. It is not capable, by itself, of expressing what I choose. It cannot grab onto emotions, and not let go. It cannot make someone cry, or even laugh.
And in that – in expressing the things about me that I wish to express in a form that might lead to a good outcome for me, this blog is an abject and total failure. It does express things. It is not an abject and total failure in that regard. But it will not be able to connect. Nothing I am writing here will ever truly land. And that is a significant problem. I want to make an impact – both for the reader and for myself, and currently, on this blog, that will never ever happen.
So it’s becoming clearer than ever that I need to wind it down in a controlled manner and replace it with something more useful to both myself and the reader. Lily is one of those things. Texihabara kind of is another, but it suffers from much the same problem, and I need to rethink it. It’s not beyond hope for that, but intellectual reviews are not going to land, are not going to connect, and it will ultimately end up an utter waste of resources and effort if I don’t course correct like now.
Posts will continue here for a while. I will think this through and announce some other projects once I understand what I want to accomplish with them. Those projects will ultimately supplant this blog entirely, at which point I will shut it down. At that point, it will not be good bye, but I think it will specifically for this blog. That will take me months as I have much thought and work to do, so don’t go away just yet. But at some point, I hope to have a product that will work better for both of us. For you. And for me.
But thanks for having been with me on this journey so far, anyway. That means more than I am really capable of expressing at the moment.