I'm still Julesy from the block

Sometimes I write a little, sometimes I write a lot

Greetings, friends,

Writing has been tough lately. I haven’t written or even edited much, and the little I have produced has been kinda awful. I’m in a bit of a literary funk, struggling to figure out what to say here or how to write a paragraph I don’t immediately want to incinerate.

I was digging through scraps and drafts for some kind of evidence that I am not actually the world’s worst writer. I don’t truly think that about myself, but it’s hard not to catastrophize when I get stuck like this. After some excavation I did eventually find something, a half-baked essay from more than a year ago with a single standout paragraph that I still feel good about:

Cities are ephemeral beings. Their characters are constantly supplanted by new information, their plots bobbing and weaving to escape your grasp. The story of how you arrive and why you leave shifts in the void between more concrete elements: graduation dates, unemployment checks, signed leases, fatalities. In truth, the stories you …