Monday 23 September 2024
Last week after posting my Iceland itinerary, I realized that on 15 September 2023 I was in the process of constructing my website: www.danielpaliwoda.com. On that date, I had uploaded six blogs; however, the other pages on my site were still under construction.
I had no prior experience building a website. I learned by trial and error. I didn’t need to know how to code, which relieved most of my anxiety; nonetheless, I struggled navigating the web design protocols. I just needed to drop and add content. Simple, right? Not exactly.
I watched several YouTube how-to videos on setting up an account, domain name, and other aspects of website building. The videos seemed straightforward. Watching how smooth, easy, and quick the video instructor made building a webpage seemed to be, I assumed I would, too, have that same smooth, easy, and quick experience of building my webpage. Building my website took longer than the two-hour long tutorial. I finished six weeks later, not the afternoon the video makers promised. And although there may be still a bug or two on a page or two that I haven’t yet found solutions on how to correct them, I am happy with the results.
My initial ambition for my blog page was to upload two blogs a week. My thinking was: if I’m going to host a forum for written content, then I should publish often. What’s the point of having a blog page if I wasn’t going to be active? Hell, if Nicholas Kristof, my favorite The New York Times Opinion columnist, could publish two pieces a week, why couldn’t I? I quickly discovered that teaching college classes (grading papers and exams, prepping for lectures, traveling to campus, etc.) and managing my other life responsibilities (being a dog parent, father, and husband) prevented me from writing two essays a week. One blog a week was a more manageable goal to aspire to.
Another early goal for my blog page was to write no more than 500-word essays. I imagined offering concise, sharp commentaries on various topics. I even considered sharing my college classroom lectures; I have decided not to do that.
Once I officially went “on-line” with the site, I was writing and uploading on average 1,000-word blogs; sometimes, I even publish longer pieces. Perhaps if I were more disciplined, making sure I only released 500-word blogs, then I might have been able to publish twice-a week. Reflecting upon those embryonic moments in the development of my blog, I prefer the longer format now because I want to offer finished, thought-out pieces, not breaking a longer piece into multiple parts. Even the editorial/opinion writers I admire and read pen articles that average around 800-1,000 words.
Although I broke the self-imposed rule of not splitting up a lengthy blog with my Steve eulogy series (in total, I wrote over 5,000 words), I feel if I were to corral myself in a 500-word blog enclosure, I wouldn’t have written what I wanted/needed to express. From the inception of my blogsite, I knew I would write an eulogy for Steve. When I launched the site officially on 12 November 2023, I felt a deep obligation to write the eulogy immediately. Although Steve’s “official” date of death is listed as “14 November 2020,” that date commemorates when city authorities discovered him. He likely had passed days, even weeks before 14 November.
My Steve eulogy series is conceivably the only eulogy or “obituary” anyone will ever write for him; therefore, the writing needed to be perfect… as close to perfect as I could achieve. I wrote the piece in a span of two weeks in November 2023, but arriving at that moment last year, three years after the reality of his passing, I had to break all my rules for the blogsite. One of Steve’s lessons I will always remember is: write what you mean. If it takes you another paragraph, page, whatever, finish the idea or thought to its very end. I have stopped counting words, and, instead, I have insisted on counting ideas.
Two or three months into blogging on a weekly basis, I discovered another insight about my writing for the website: I should have started blogging sooner. I often tell friends and colleagues that “I’m at least fifteen years too late on the blogging scene.” That “fifteen years” quantifier also marks the period when I was writing the Katyn book manuscript and dealing with writer’s block, a creative barrier that felt and lasted nearly fifteen years. If I had started sooner blogging, I think I could have, may have avoided or buffered the worst of the writer’s block while drafting the Katyn book manuscript.
By starting years earlier to create content for a webpage, I would have been pushing the pen across the page… I would have been writing. I would have been active in my writing process for the Katyn book. Writing anything is a tactic to relieve the anxiety of not writing. And as some of my blog series indicate, many of my blog entries were about the Katyn book manuscript and its writing process. Having a blogsite would have made me feel more accountable, creating a certain kind of responsibility imposed not only on myself but also by my blog readers.
Writing and uploading content on a weekly basis definitely deepened my writerly confidence. Even when I’m unsure of what to blog about, by the weekend, the Muses will send me a gift… a fragment of an idea… and I write. Or I imagine a theme or question to write about, and midway in the drafting process for that initial premise, I stumble upon something more profound, more “important” to write about. And I write on that gift from the Muses. Again, the importance of pushing the pen across the page to mitigate writer’s block.
Part of that writerly confidence is coming to terms with exposure and vulnerability. “Am I revealing too much about myself here when I’m writing this or saying that?” is a question that torments and disturbs me while I blog and write. Very likely this fear is what stymied me for so long during the Katyn book writing process. Once I realized that my Katyn book was more about me than it was about the Katyn Massacres, I panicked, plunging myself into over a decade’s long creative neurosis. Writing eventually shocked me back to a creative life, but I was too insecure, too mistrustful of my intellectual and artistic self to realize sooner what I was doing to myself. I was a writing and advanced literature professor who didn’t abide by my own writing lessons and advice. Funny, huh?
Resolving that anxiety about my writing what essentially is an autobiography is probably my greatest intellectual and artistic victory. Steve’s ghost will scold me for saying this next line (a cursed cliché), but fuck it… I was sick and tired of being sick and tired of not finishing my Katyn book. Perhaps this revulsion with my creative inactivity was the necessary catalyst to finish the manuscript. And blogging directly and indirectly sometimes about it is a relief.
What haunted me for so long was the guilt of losing the twins during the Herman Melville dissertation writing process, and then the self-reproach of losing Steve during the Katyn manuscript writing process. If you, Reader, are going to psychoanalyze me and my book (when it is published sometime in the future by a publishing house), you will understand why I utilize ghosts, spirits, demons, and other supernatural entities in my writing.
Writing for the blogsite also taught me other aspects of my writing when I was revising the Katyn book manuscript. Before launching the blog, I tended to write long, complicated paragraphs. And my earlier, embryonic Katyn book drafts were written in that way. I wrote my Melville dissertation that way, too. And when King Arthur and I reviewed the first full manuscript draft, we discussed the challenges of long paragraphs, long sentences that I was creating for my future readers. Those long paragraphs weren’t always reader friendly. Although grammatically and technically correct, reading those long paragraphs at times felt clumsy and overbearing. For the most part, the paragraphs here in the blogs aren’t terribly too long. I think crafting “shorter” paragraphs here in the bogs inspired me to compose “shorter” paragraphs in the Katyn book manuscript. Constructing long paragraphs may have worked for Melville and Dostoevsky; however, I’m no way near their talents, and I’m not part of their generation or epoch. I needed to become me.
What will this time next year look like? Steve’s ghost again would scold me to stop assuming things, to stop speculating. Nonetheless, I know it will be something I never imagined or expected to happen. This second piece in my This Time Last Year series is a necessary, helpful, and healing self-reflection, a writing exercise I haven’t done since I was an undergraduate. I do believe this introspection serves as a confirmation that the writing process, when used properly, does work, an in-class activity I employ with my students when they turn-in major writing assignments. This professor, too, can benefit by evaluating his own writing.