I'm ALIVE! And back from the Abyss...
It has been a long time since I updated this website. I vanished into the ether with extremely little warning or any belated notice and for that I sincerely apologize. Life is an extremely unpredictable river to ford and sometimes we just get swept away with the current.
I have spent the last few years trying to gain a footing in various avenues into the media industry and I am not too proud to say that I've been met with more failure than success. Between a disheartening lack of genuine career prospects, a critical change in the landscape of my priorities, and a health-crises in my Family that has caused both significant financial distress and emotional strife, I simply didn't have it in me to maintain a website of any sort.
Even when my personal life began to calm down, my professional life was... unpleasant. It had stabilized enough for me to suffer through in silence, but it wasn't a good situation. So while I had finally come to a sort of equilibrium, I still was in no shape to be working on any kind of unpaid passion project that required time and effort and research, no matter how professional the tone I created for it. To escape my woes, I began writing Fanfiction under the name PrettyMissKitty on Ao3. My work received tremendous praise, right from the start. The Fanfiction was almost effortless to write and easy to post with some regularity. It was enough industry and praise to keep the demons of depression at bay, and it motivated me in both my less than exhilarating retail work and my writing (ranging from my original fiction and fanfiction to factual dissertations on the state of media and culture as we know it today).
Things had begun to calm down and I was on the cusp of something great. I had a job offer from the Smithsonian and I was literally ~2 weeks away from giving my notice to my retail position when COVID struck. The offer from the Smithsonian evaporated with the department's budget. The retail position laid me off. The side-gig of tutoring I had scrounged for nearly dried up as well... It was not a good time.
At the suggestion of a reader who deeply enjoyed my work and knew of my financial struggle, I created a Patreon account. With this account's paid membership services, especially in wake of 2020's mass layoffs (of which, I was a victim for the better part of the year), I've been able to subsidize an effort to return to school in pursuit of a masters and hopefully a PhD and the endeavor has made an astounding difference in my outlook for the better.
So now, I'm back here and delighted to be so.
I am now able to return to the upkeep of this website as part of my coursework, or at least validate the effort I would like to put into the upkeep as being tangentially related to my coursework, so I will definitely be updating this site on a very regular basis. It will be maintained in combination with my Patreon and, as such, there will be a Members Only section with special updates and material from my original fiction projects (which I will hopefully be getting set up and open to Patrons within the next week).
That said, I would still like to work on this site as a passion project and allow the public to make use of the majority of material I create. Reviews will go up early for Patron-Only Access, as will new chapters of Fanfiction and new editorials, but 75% of what I produce will be openly available for anyone to peruse. This includes my Parental Aide commentaries and resources on how to understand what's happening inside your kids' brains as they grow and interact with media. It also includes commentaries on cultural engineering and how to make use of it to create a more equitable society with all members of a community developing a mutual investment to maintain it, be it on the scale of a single family, a neighborhood, an institution like an art museum or a university, or on the scale of states and nations and our new, globalizing world..
I have three main goals for this site:
- Create a professional online presence to support my developing writing career.
- Educate the public from my perspective as a PhD candidate to create an informed community.
- Facilitate a vehicle for creating a Consulting business in concert with my volunteer speaking.
My goals may change, but for now, I think they suit my ability to commit time and effort while still allowing for flexibility in following up on career opportunities.
I have spent the last few years trying to gain a footing in various avenues into the media industry and I am not too proud to say that I've been met with more failure than success. Between a disheartening lack of genuine career prospects, a critical change in the landscape of my priorities, and a health-crises in my Family that has caused both significant financial distress and emotional strife, I simply didn't have it in me to maintain a website of any sort.
Even when my personal life began to calm down, my professional life was... unpleasant. It had stabilized enough for me to suffer through in silence, but it wasn't a good situation. So while I had finally come to a sort of equilibrium, I still was in no shape to be working on any kind of unpaid passion project that required time and effort and research, no matter how professional the tone I created for it. To escape my woes, I began writing Fanfiction under the name PrettyMissKitty on Ao3. My work received tremendous praise, right from the start. The Fanfiction was almost effortless to write and easy to post with some regularity. It was enough industry and praise to keep the demons of depression at bay, and it motivated me in both my less than exhilarating retail work and my writing (ranging from my original fiction and fanfiction to factual dissertations on the state of media and culture as we know it today).
Things had begun to calm down and I was on the cusp of something great. I had a job offer from the Smithsonian and I was literally ~2 weeks away from giving my notice to my retail position when COVID struck. The offer from the Smithsonian evaporated with the department's budget. The retail position laid me off. The side-gig of tutoring I had scrounged for nearly dried up as well... It was not a good time.
At the suggestion of a reader who deeply enjoyed my work and knew of my financial struggle, I created a Patreon account. With this account's paid membership services, especially in wake of 2020's mass layoffs (of which, I was a victim for the better part of the year), I've been able to subsidize an effort to return to school in pursuit of a masters and hopefully a PhD and the endeavor has made an astounding difference in my outlook for the better.
So now, I'm back here and delighted to be so.
I am now able to return to the upkeep of this website as part of my coursework, or at least validate the effort I would like to put into the upkeep as being tangentially related to my coursework, so I will definitely be updating this site on a very regular basis. It will be maintained in combination with my Patreon and, as such, there will be a Members Only section with special updates and material from my original fiction projects (which I will hopefully be getting set up and open to Patrons within the next week).
That said, I would still like to work on this site as a passion project and allow the public to make use of the majority of material I create. Reviews will go up early for Patron-Only Access, as will new chapters of Fanfiction and new editorials, but 75% of what I produce will be openly available for anyone to peruse. This includes my Parental Aide commentaries and resources on how to understand what's happening inside your kids' brains as they grow and interact with media. It also includes commentaries on cultural engineering and how to make use of it to create a more equitable society with all members of a community developing a mutual investment to maintain it, be it on the scale of a single family, a neighborhood, an institution like an art museum or a university, or on the scale of states and nations and our new, globalizing world..
I have three main goals for this site:
- Create a professional online presence to support my developing writing career.
- Educate the public from my perspective as a PhD candidate to create an informed community.
- Facilitate a vehicle for creating a Consulting business in concert with my volunteer speaking.
My goals may change, but for now, I think they suit my ability to commit time and effort while still allowing for flexibility in following up on career opportunities.
Current Projects:
I have four categories of content-creations project relevant to discuss here, all of which I hope will be things that I can discuss in greater detail in the near future.
| Original Fiction: - Querying for publication - Drafting Book 4 - Creating an exclusive insider page for Patrons. | Media Reviews:
| Editorials: - Split efforts between comments on Writing Practice, Cultural Shift, & Society at large. - Posting monthly. |
These goals essentially mirror my goals as listed on Patreon with each new month. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up with these projects and ensure that my posting schedule remains in sync on both sites!
Wish me luck! And I look forward to building something new with you!
Wish me luck! And I look forward to building something new with you!
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