Bryan Joiner

I don’t know what to write.

It’s been a long time since I considered writing an important part of my life. This was by design. After writing and editing full-time since before I graduated college, I needed a break. Plus, not writing about things gives you more stuff to write about once you start again.

But over the last few years I’ve worked from home and have subsequently not had as much human interaction as I did in the past, and I’ve found it has dampened my need to get my takes out into the wild. Something about being around people stokes my natural vanity and makes me want to impress them, and when that was taken away, my desire to impress those same people plummeted to near zero. I still wrote some sports stuff here and there but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t know where it was.

Now I feel the urge again, and I’ve been trying to write a long essay on fantasy sports and a novel with middling results. It turns out I like to think about them a lot, but I’m so out of practice as a writer that it’s hard to put down everything in my head. It’s almost like I need an outlet to get some words on paper just to prime the pump, so to speak, so I can really let myself jam.

That’s where you come in.

I don’t know who “you” are, but I can probably guess: you’re probably one of my friends in real life or on the internet, and if you read this or my other stuff I’m thankful for it. The fact is that I haven’t known for years for whom I was writing, and I think I fell into the “writering” trap that’s a easy target for amateurs and part-timers. It’s hard to write things you think sound good, and that’s the rub: it’s easy to write things that are actually good. You just have to do it.

I’m going to start writing for Baseball Prospectus Boston again, because I think occasionally having an assignment is good for my brainz. And I’m going to try to continue my other projects as well. But I’m done pretending that I don’t need help from the Internet, even if it’s just a place to dump some words so I can get to the good ones below. I think I have good ones below, and it would be a shame to see them go to waste.