Updates on some forthcoming changes for this blog

 

For anyone who still occasionally checks on this blog, you will realize irregular the updates had been. Things had been hectic since the last update back in May 2023 (and that was merely a cut-and-paste from an existing text), which was also around the time when I was engage in some next-steps activities. Due to both life and professional changes, I have decided to make some changes to what this blog's purpose will be going forward, while also giving context to the why of these changes.

1. This blog will be used more for making announcements and updates relating to all aspects of my professional and creative activities.

2. To catch up on my non-academic writings and quasi-academic writings not published elsewhere, please check out my Medium page, which has been active since August 2023, although I am not writing at the same frequency or purpose as someone who wants to make big bucks through writing (though of course I appreciate making some money for the effort expended). My primary goal with starting to write for Medium was to break out of the shackles I have placed on my own writing, and also to write better non-fiction, therefore learning to write what I want in a way that a public audience can identify with or would be interested to read. It is also a part of my journey toward writing and creating multi-modal fiction again. I was on Medium for many years prior to this (thanks mainly to Twitter but also to some articles I actually enjoyed reading), but never really contributed any content beyond a now-removed republished piece. 

3. For the past 8 years, I had been in a writing rut, despite having been prolific and active in my younger years. Maybe this had to do with the stress of being in academia. I was still writing and even publishing rather actively but I felt that I was making no breakthrough in how I wrote.  When some writing projects failed to move forward in the way I wanted, I left them in despair, thinking that maybe I needed to develop further as a scholar before I could return to them. It never occurred to me then to rework some of these pieces for a different audience (even if I did extract some of the ideas for other unrelated writing projects). Now that I have broken out of my self-imposed bottleneck (there is a story to how this happened but that would be for a Medium article later), I find that revising and reworking some of these pieces for an audience that are not my professional peers had given me a new perspective when it comes to considering the value and purpose of that work. Along the way, it made me less hung-up on academic writing and its value system.

4. I will also use this site to showcase work in development as I will be embarking on new projects come 2024. A new domain name is in order and I am still figuring whether I want to maintain the same domain name as the present one or create an entirely new one, as I do not want to be changing domain names every now and then. Once I found the domain name I would use professionally for the long term, a website redesign will be the next step.

4. I am deviating from a straight-and-narrow academic path (although I will still have connections to academia), and had explored the paths of alt-acs, industry, and the creative. I have to plan for the short-term, mid-term and longer term to get to my main (even if not final) destination. Some things are in the offing starting from January 2024, and will be announced once confirmed. I am quite excited by the prospect as each represents different facets of expertise, networks, and skills I need to develop further to achieve the long-term goal.

5. There were certain projects I had left hanging back in the final quarter of 2022 while I went on to Aachen to complete a fellowship. However, the reason has less to do with the fellowship than with my not being entirely sure about which direction I wanted to go with them at the time. That time away had given me new insights and new knowledge that I am now excited to bring to these projects, with some new strategies and redirection. Moreover, certain projects, such as my book project that was in a standstill and which I had avoided dealing with, is now moving forward smoothly. No longer being able to hide behind excuses of having to deal with the requirements of a full-time job (which I felt had been more than fulltime, even life-consuming), I have to reprogramme my state of mind to face up to my dilemmas and difficulties.

6. The past year, I have spent more time reading fiction than I ever had in many years. It might seem strange for someone who had studied literature in graduate school to say that she has not really read much fiction since graduation (outside of work requirements, and even then, my work requirements did not necessitate much fiction reading), but that truly was the case. Although I started reading more fiction during the lockdown period of 2020 and when I joined a creative arts programme as a lecturer  in 2021 (I started reading plays and webnovels, in addition to print novels and short stories), I would say the period between 2022 and 2023 was the watershed period as I started reading all kinds of fiction, including (abridged) German fiction (quite unprecedented) and even some Chinese webnovel stories (not just in translation but in the original language, though I am still not too good at that). This habit is not only good for my mental health, but in changing the way I write and think. Even when writing staid academic papers, I started thinking about my story arc as well as narrative and word choices. That, itself, has also changed the way I am currently approaching my monograph. And now, I have regained the confidence to embark on fiction writing. The ideas for them are crystalizing nicely from the time I embarked on mapping out directions and content), so watch this site for updates on that too.

 Let's look forward to another year of change!