One thing I've realised I don't do enough of on here (or in its predecessor, my currently dormant newsletter) is talk about: narrative -- i.e. my whole dang professional craft.
I was reflecting on why that might be -- why my instincts are to write about other things. Part of that is positive: I have other interests, things that fascinate me that aren't, strictly, within the gift of my craft. Pragmatically, I have less of an outlet to think and talk about those things in my day-to-day, so that affects what I write about on here.
But I finally managed to zero in on another element of it. It's not that I don't have anything to say on the subject. I have a lot to say -- it consumes a huge amount of my thinking day in, day out. The main snag, I realised, is that I don't have a clear sense of audience for those sorts of posts. I vacillate on whether I'm writing for an audience of peers, of those from other disciplines, or of altogether outsiders.
(Not that I strictly write these for the audience, whoever that might be -- they are for me, more than anything else. But I generally have an 'imagined reader' in my head which is lacking, here.)
There's also the angle of 'showing my whole professional ass' a.k.a. the eternal fear of talking crap about something I'm meant to know about. (Or the more insidious 'saying something banal and obvious like it's a revelation'.)
So, consider this a statement of intent to explore more narrative-related topics here. They'll be half-formed, underbaked, or wrong, but they will hopefully still be irregularly interesting, and certainly useful for me. (This blog is called 'Shards' for a reason -- they're jagged fragments rather than perfected truths.) My goal will be an exploratory, curious approach; I'll have an idea of an audience in my head for each post, though that audience will not be consistent over time.