I miss blogging. I stopped when everyone else did – Google axed Reader, other social media were more fun and engaging, and all that.
But Twitter is a trashfire, AI has overrun Facebook, and neither Bluesky nor Mastodon have really taken off. The current internet landscape has made hosting my own content in a space I control seem more and more appealing.
I really do miss it: both short-form and long-form blogging, posting photos, all of it. I don’t know if anyone reads blogs any more, but I’m going to give it a whirl, even if it is me talking to myself. I don’t think we’re ever going to get back the halcyon days of Livejournal and everyone blogging and talking to ourselves and each other, but if there’s anything I know about people online, it’s that you can’t predict what the next big thing is going to be. The cool kids seem to be doing newsletters, but I can see talking to myself via blog, where talking to myself via newsletter seems depressing.
I have things to talk about! I’ve been teaching tablet weaving and such, online and in person. The growth of zoom has really expanded the ways in which teaching can happen, even for challenging techniques. The next Really Big Thing: I’m teaching a two-day tablet weaving workshop, “Digging into Diagonals,” at Braids, the international braiding conference next year (2025) in Cleveland. I attended last time, in Denmark in 2022. For me, Cleveland is a lot closer, if a lot less glamorous. Being able to drive makes teaching so much easier to wrangle.
Thinking about this workshop got me fired up again to work on the tablet weaving book I’ve been thinking about for a long time. If I could have it by Braids, that would be perfect. But writing a book requires, well, writing a book. It’s a substantial commitment, and just thinking about it is so much easier.
To mark and honor that commitment, I took myself on a writing retreat to the Poconos, to the Highlights Foundation retreat center. (Yes, that Highlights Foundation, the one with the magazine.) The foundation runs organized sessions at their retreat center, but also personal retreats
on their lovely campus, a former farm. It’s perfectly designed for writing and art, with tiny cabins and also more normal hotel-style rooms.
There are numerous cozy places to write, in company or alone. All meals are included, and 24-hour coffee and snacks.
At the end of April, I packed my car with over a decade of notes and files and a couple of looms, and headed off for four nights to work.
When I pulled everything together, I found an outline from 2012. The landscape of resources has changed so much since then. The world doesn’t need an intro tablet weaving book any more! Which is great, because it gives me scope to write the intermediate/advanced book I’d most enjoy. At the end of my stay, I had a solid outline, 25,000 words of text, and I’d written the tools to draw the diagrams I want. I’d even done some weaving of samples!
I have not been able to sustain that pace, of course, but haven’t really accomplished much at all. As much as anything, I want to use this space to maintain accountability to myself. I’m ever so enthusiastic about this book, but it’s competing with a lot of things in my life. The retreat gave me a solid start; now I need to continue.
