Casual Science Returns

I started this blog back in grad school, and it has certainly morphed over time, partly because a lot of my idle ruminating moved to social media (Twitter and then Mastodon) and partly because life happened (kids, tenure track, pandemic, changing institutions). Another seemingly minor, but actually critical factor was that the logistics of blogging changed. I used to write my posts on a laptop or desktop computer, but as I got going with teaching, my computer time was either more focused (preparing slides, reviewing student work) or more time-sucking (eeeeeemails, so many emails). I tried blogging from my phone (I could write plenty of words on Twitter!), but the interface was unreliable. I finally decided I should just move the blog, but figuring out where and how overwhelmed me and I just didn't. For years. Every now and then I'd find enough motivation to overcome the blogging activation energy barrier, but mostly this space stayed quiet.

Last week I had the great joy of participating in a writing retreat hosted by my university and led by two lovely work friends. It was three days of focused writing time, skill sessions, good lunches and snacks, and SO much encouragement. I knew it would be good because I attended the first one last year, and in those three days I turned a classroom activity and a vague idea into an entire, nearly-ready-to-submit article. This year's retreat was even better. One of the things I came away with was a commitment to get back into a writing habit.

So here we are.

I've moved the blog to a new host. I've scheduled time to write. I've cleaned up some old cruft from the site (and probably left some broken links – sorry in advance!). And now I'm putting words on the page, a few keystrokes at a time.

One of the other things that became a barrier to my blogging was a desire to polish my posts before publishing them. This is me tossing that idea aside. These posts are not scholarly articles, though they may include citations. What I plan to write here is more like social media threads that I don't have to break into 250/500-character chunks. I'm thinking "out loud" and using the writing to organize those thoughts.

I have committed to writing something every week for the duration of the summer. That something might not be a blog post, though, so while I do expect my posts here to be come much more frequent than (checks notes) every two or three years, I don't really expect to be publishing something every Thursday. Hopefully by the time the academic year starts, I'll have established enough routine to keep it going.