Well, here it is, the first day of 2011,  and I have registered a new domain and blog (both named after me, because creativity is so 2010) and now I am writing its inaugural entry.

Hearts are aflutter through the blogosphere, I am sure.

For those of you who do not know, my last crazy endeavor was a project in which I attempted to write one million words in a year, called (wait for it) The Million Word Year Project. Sadly, I totally failed to write a million words in a year.

I did it in eleven months instead. Oh yeah. Hear the strut.

In order to gain a little historical context for this slightly new thing, I decided to go all the way back to my very first entry, written one year ago today.

Despite the many little errors, it still stands up quite well, I think. Reading stuff I have written is often a dicey thing with me, being the high strung and sensitive artist type. I can never entirely be sure whether I will be filled with the warm glow of accomplishment for having written something so charming and interesting and fun, or whether instead I will be visited by the deep dark demon of self-loathing and artistic dissatisfaction and be thrown in a pit of despair and depression by the mere fact that I ever penned something so completely and utterly insipid, moronic, and talentless, let alone let the world see it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again : being sensitive is not for wimps.

But I like my first entry from way back when, a year ago today. It’s a good sample of my style. Roughly hewn in terms of structure and coherence, and a little too personal to be interesting to a wide market, but it has my wit and warmth and wordplay, so what the heck, it’s not bad for a start.

It’s a little sad to see how rip-roaring full of enthusiasm I was to change everything about my life back then, compared to how very little has actually changed as of right now. I completed the task, writing a million words (in only 11 months, strut), and that’s certainly something to be proud of, but I didn’t do much else in that time.

I didn’t learn to promote myself, for example. That whole crippling shyness thing continues to plague me. I know what excuses I used last year to keep putting it off, so that’s something, but still, I am disappointed that I did all that work and only a relatively small number of people know because I still have not developed the gumption to just go out there and spread my work around.

My plan, such as it is, for this year is to a) automate the process as much as possible via WordPress plugins, so that anything I post to here automatically gets crossposted to as many services as will let me autopost to them, and b) for the rest, developing a sort of “route”, a series of websites I visit and post my daily output to on a regular basis without stopping to think about it. That should take at least some of the tension and anxiety out of the process, and if I post regularly to the same spots every day (instead of posting once, getting no reply, and never posting there again) I might even develop a following, or at the very least, a list of persistent enemies who make it their business to flame everything I do.

Honestly, even negative attention looks good to me around now.

In the future of this site, I plan to nudge myself gently in the direction of writing more article-style entries and fewer “randomly blogging my thoughts” style entries. Things with a thesis presented in some sort of logically coherent package, with a beginning, middle, and end. But still with my signature style of warm witty bitter sarcasm. Or whatever.

Probably should cut back on the use of “or whatever” too. Whatever.

Plus, I plan to add some fancy stuff like forums and picture galleries and such in the future. I’m going to try to avoid the trap of thinking this website has to follow some strict and formal, restrictive definition of what it is supposed to be.

It’s my personal website, with my name on it and everything. So it’s whatever I want it to be at any moment, a place for me to experiment and play around and find out what works.

I figure, the important thing is to keep the site fun and full of good content and reasonably easy to navigate. As long as I stick to that, I should be OK.

One thing I definitely need to avoid is overloading myself with ambition (pressure) and so many ideas all at once that I collapse from option paralysis. There’s no blinding hurry, no need to do everything all at once and make it all perfect right from the get-go. That’s a recipe for instant failure.

So today, I write a chatty little opening entry in my usual blog style just to prime the pump, and if I feel like it later, I will poke around with the look of the site, some features, or whatever. Who knows what fun stuff I’ll add to this place eventually? There’s a lot of groovy fun stuff out there, both for WordPress and for any PHP enabled web host, and there’s nothing stopping me from giving some of it a try.

All that is required is that it works and it’s fun. That, I think, I can handle.

I just have to repeat to myself, “it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be fun”, like a mantra, until it is burned into my brain and I stop trying to take things so seriously and just do whatever strikes me as fun at the time, with just enough control to keep it from veering off into pointless self-indulgence.

Sounds doable to me.