Transference is a fancy word. I have a vague idea of what it refers to. Something to do with psychology, I think. Maybe I’ll look it up later and write something about it.
But the psychological definition isn’t what I’m talking about right now. No, I’m talking about transferring some essays I wrote on Medium years ago here, to my own blog.
I’m not sure exactly what shape my writing career will take. I do plan to write more books, but now that the little one has come along, uninterrupted writing time has become difficult to carve out. So do I spend that time writing emails to my subscribers? Posts on this blog? Posts on this blog which I then email to my subscribers? Or, a second book?
My thought at this precise moment is to write here, in the blog, for two reasons: first, to generate and refine ideas that could go into my next book; and second, for posterity. I wrote a LOT of words over the last three or four years—hundreds of thousands of them. All of them were written to go into The Forest is the Tree, but none of them have seen the light of day. I wonder if they deserve to.
Well, for my next book, I can find out. I can start doing all that preparatory work here, in public, on my blog. In a way it seems like a crazy and terrible time to start a blog. Haven’t we moved on from all these words? To things like TikTok (is that even how you spell that?) and, uh… whatever the newest social media platform is. And maybe the answer is “yes.” Maybe it is a terrible time to start a blog. But, meh. Writing is what I do. It’s what I’m good at. It’s what I love. I’m not going to shoehorn myself into some other platform or category just because it’s the latest thing and all the cool kids are going there or whatever. Maybe eventually I’ll need to branch out, but for now?
For now, I think this is just the right fit.
Anyway, if you’re reading this blog from back to front, you’ll see a handful of articles, uh… transferenced… from Medium next. And if you’re reading it front to back, what are you, some kind of monster? I hope you enjoyed those older articles. We can think of them as the prototype for this instantiation of my blog.