Last summer, I made a website for my work that was—to me; it was nothing that any practicing web designer would be impressed with—very beautiful. Inspired by the reading I'd done about being an artist on the Internet, I thought this site would be an expansive container for my creative practice. And for a while, it was. I shared ten poems, seasonal reflections, a zine, some reading notes, about 30 posts in all. I enjoyed having a space that was mine, customized to every last detail, and while Webflow (the platform I used to make it) had a steep learning curve for someone like me (whose web design experience was making HTML templates for her Harry Potter roleplaying in the early 2010s), there was pleasure in learning how things worked behind the scenes. 

But ultimately, it wasn't the right container for my work:

  • I'd set it up as a home for my writing and designed the architecture of the site around writing. But my creative practice, I realized, is much bigger than the short stories I write. What about zines? What about baking and cooking? Reading? I approached these as a practice, too, but the architecture of the site I'd designed didn't support their inclusion, and I was overwhelmed by the work it would take to redo it.
  • Every time I wanted to create a post, I had to add all the metadata in the CMS myself. I had to find a suitable public domain image. I had to crop the image in Canva. I always forgot to write the alt text. It was a barrier between me and putting my work out in the world.
  • The site was so pretty (again, to me) that I felt bad putting unfinished work out there. 
  • Beacuse of the above 3 bullet points, I didn't add to the site as consistently as I'd first hoped. My writing slowed off. I was writing — working feverishly on my novel — but that work didn't seem to fit on my website. And apart from that, I didn't have much more to say. I wanted only to write and post when I had something to share, and for long stretches of time, I didn't have anything to share. Yet I felt somehow indebted that I needed to fill the site with work, when I had spent so much time making it. 

And finally:

  • Webflow is really expensive, and I wasn't using it enough for the price.

So I went back to my old standby, Carrd, which is dead simple. Maybe, I thought, I didn't really need a home on the Internet. I'd just have the Carrd site, and then put everything in my own private Notion. Wouldn't that work? But Kening Zhu, whose writing on creative practice has been so influential for me, argues that putting work out into the world—not just on a hard drive or a private Notion—is how artists learn to engage with their audience and learn to do art in public, not necessarily to be seen, but not to hide, either. She comments that it's also a form of creative release, that producing without sharing creates blockage and perfectionism. 

And so here we are. I am trying again to learn how to do my creative work in semi-public (mostly into the void) but also to do it in a way that fits my life, that fits into my process (as I keep learning what my process is) rather than my contorting myself to fit the demands of some publishing platform or even the demands of something that looks too formal or too polished and therefore has too much expectation.

What I know about my process so far, that I'm taking forward into this new iteration:

  • Plain things are fine. Writing posts in the blog editor is fine, if it means I write them. Too pretty and too polished and I'll get fussy and in my head. 
  • I wrote above: "I wanted only to write and post when I had something to share, and for long stretches of time, I didn't." Instead of fighting this tendency, I want to work with it. I think I prefer to work on projects; share notes and thinking relevant to those projects; and then complete and share the projects. Having a public diary is not my goal; having a public practice, related to the cyclical flows of my creative projects, is. (Obviously, the challenge here will be to lean into the flows of the projects rather than their outputs.)