Michael Flynn

Writing Intent

Date: []

I will begin here writing for myself, and sharing private thoughts publicly, in this blog format.

Objective

At this time of writing, I'm 35 years old, and I rarely if ever allowed the possibility of my personality or works being seen. A more practiced person would surely come along and sarcastically or critically put me to shame, right? I am an amateur in all things. So I stopped short of approaching anything resembling a published work. This is a low stakes way for me to put my words and conviction into the world.

Motivations

Personal, private journals for me have been helpful for brief periods, but the audience for my journals was the void; Written once, never revisited, and always thrown away or deleted years later upon an embarrassing revisit. Writing with public visibility gives me more caution and care, and a feeling of permanence to the words.

Often I feel the urge to share ideas to nobody in particular. Just a proud discovery, work, collection of ideas, or whatever it might be. I don't currently have an outlet for that. Writing might help me solidify these thoughts.

Fears

What if someone I don't want reading this, reads this?

A fear I've held onto for a long time. The fear of being "found out". It's a great fear to hold onto for someone with fragile ego or when there's something to hide. I'm striving to not protect that fear anymore.

What if nobody reads this? Would I not be a failure?

Too often in life, I did things because I expected a return on investment, and gave up early when that return did not come. I've found that doing things which are good without expecting a positive result (outcome independence) is always preferable to not doing said good thing.

What if my writing is dumb, derivative, not rich in content, etc.?

This has stopped me from pursuing many personal interests. I prefer to know for a fact that I am not that clever, and do my best to avoid pride when I'm assured it's the contrary.

"Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." G. K. Chesterton

Inspirations

Here are some writings about writing that made me want to write:

Tech

This site uses Grav as its CMS, and Hypertext as the base of its theme. There is minimal CSS added by me for color and spacing. Despite experience in creating modern websites, I will always prefer "early internet" intentions and text-first design.