Hundred-Year Update, Magical Currents, and Directions for 2024
How a cynical web content creator plans to navigate the web3 frontier.
Note: This post was first published at Wordpress; hence the first paragraph about reviving a blog. @danicaswanson of A Digital Incubation Space suggested I import it to Paragraph thus hastening my crossing of the web3 bridge. I'll get the hang of this. I just know I will.
It hasn't been quite 100 years, but it's definitely been a long time. My name is Trish Deneen, and I started this blog in 2009 when I was still starry-eyed about actually earning cash with online writing instead of being a mark for content sites. I'm not sure yet how I'll revive this blog. I've archived the old posts as the info isn't current.
A little about me: I'm a GenX Pagan polytheist who's worked at home since 2005 in other fields besides writing. I started writing short-form articles as a hobby at the BellaOnline Pagan site and then branched out to sites like Squidoo, HubPages, Suite 101, and Demand Studios. I believe HubPages is the only one of those sites still standing. I earned a little cash but nothing to make a living on. I've come to terms with my extreme dislike of conforming to clickbait writing 100% of the time, but I'm not above the occasional "5 Ways to Make Floofyburgers Floofier" kind of article.
Currently, I'm inspired by sites like Paragraph, Substack, and Medium. I'm honored to have collaborated with essayist and fellow web3 enthusiast Danica Swanson here and here. I created the art at the top of those pieces. I'm very new to digital art, and I go back and forth between practicing that and working with colored pencils.
Truth be told, when I grow up I want to be a coloring book artist like the marvelous Amy Cesari, author/creator of the Coloring Book of Shadows planners. I'm working on a Pagan-themed coloring and activity book now, which I expect to publish through Amazon KDP later in the year.
I've been greatly inspired by artist Amy Cesari's magical planners and coloring courses. Pictured is a page from the Coloring Book of Shadows Planner for a Magical 2024 for January. The mediums I used are soluble coffee for staining the page, colored pencils (both regular and metallic), white gel pen, and gold marker.
Again, I'm not sure what I want to do as far as writing. Current inspirations at Paragraph, Substack, and Medium are:
I love what Danica is doing over at Paragraph. Her interview with the founder of the site, Colin Armstrong, makes a good argument for considering it as a platform. Although, I'm unsure if it's mostly web3 oriented or how well other topics do there.
Occult and fiction author Taylor Ellwood at Substack.
Activist and founder of StudentLoanJustice.org Alan Collinge at Medium.
What each of the three above have in common is having a consistent, though not rigid, theme. That's what I did in my BellaOnline days first with the Pagan site, then the Great Lakes and Sweepstakes sites. It looks like some of my old articles are still up on the Sweepstakes site along with my face. It was a great place to learn short-form article writing so popular at the time. Lisa Shea founded BellaOnline, I believe, after a bad experience with About.com (any oldster remember that one?). She's a superwoman who's parlayed her love of writing about practically everything, creating art, and web publishing into a career.
A peek at things to come as time allows in 2024. Graphic created by Trish Deneen. I'm having so much fun creating things like dot-to-dots and word finds for the activity book.
I have an idea for a theme possibly for Paragraph. I will peruse that site to see what others are using it for. My goal is to do what Danica did with our collaborations. She created the essays for Paragraph, placed my art as the header image, and then created an NFT on the Zora platform of the art which linked back to the essay, thus creating circular linking. If someone finds the essay first, they may hop over to Zora to see the NFT page and vice versa. If this materializes, my first contribution there would be a book review of sorts on a popular topic with my own art as the header with a related NFT on Zora.
Then there's YouTube content, which I've only touched on at my Northland Hearth channel. Current inspirations are:
Heathen actor and indie filmmaker Kyle Hester.
His wife Tracy Ray with her Gluten-Free Kitchen Cafe channel.
Also about 1000 ambience/ASMR and craft channels (only half joking).
I love creating video content, but it's so time consuming that it's on the backburner for now.
Welcome to the new incarnation of an old blog. Will I move it somewhere else? I don't know. I know there's an element of hustle, and I'm exhausted by hustle culture. My day job has turned into that over the years simply by trying to keep and/or find work. I've been precariously balancing between fighting the new technology from taking my jobs to jumping on the bandwagon in hopes of "investing in my future." That's in quotes because I've heard it all before.
But 2024 feels like a good year to ride the current I'm on. In occult circles, the term current refers to a set of traditions, practices, and beliefs associated with a system and the energy surrounding it. Wicca, Thelema, Asatru, various polytheisms, New Age, and many others are systems that all have their own currents with other currents stemming from them. Pagan author and blogger John Beckett discusses riding the strength of currents to our advantage here. Is it the same as zeitgeist, aka the "spirit" of an age? I think a current is more the spirit of a system.
One of my practice Zorbs. I created two for Danica to be used as NFTs linked to the essays previously mentioned. She describes them at length here. Zorbs are a current unto themselves. She's created a beautiful set here that combines quotes from the essay with one of the Zorbs.
The system I'm trying to catch a current on is creating income streams from web content in a way that's to my benefit instead of the soul sucking that has been my experience in the past. That system is intertwined with the zeitgeist of the emergence of web3. Would milieu be a better word? Or should I call it scenius? I feel like zeitgeist better describes how big it seems. However you describe it, feel free to come ride the current with me for a while. Maybe we can figure this thing out together.
Notes: I haven't explained much about NFTs and Zora. Those are big topics to cover later. One of my creative inspirations is essayist and senior editor Danica Swanson. I found her through an image search for a Pagan altar several years ago. Since then, I've been fangirling and followed her around different sites and landed at her profile on Farcaster (I'm @trishd over there). Fellow polytheists enthusiastic about web3 can be hard to find, so I recommend checking her out. She has a better handle on the "spirit of the age" and the lexicon than I do right now.
Disclosure: I may earn referral rewards from the links to HubPages and Paragraph. Also, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links in this post.
We chatted a bit about this on Farcaster, but I wanted to follow up here, too. First of all, thank you so much for all your kind words about my work. That made my day. Also, thanks for calling me an “essayist.” It feels distinguished. I like being a blogger too! But essays are a different kind of writing, and the recognition is appreciated. "...in 2009... I was still starry-eyed about actually earning cash with online writing instead of being a mark for content sites." A mark for content sites. Yes. And as I wrote elsewhere, not much has changed since then. But if it's ever going to, web3 is our best hope. Hustle culture exhausts me too, and I wouldn’t have recommended you migrate onto Paragraph if I thought of it in those terms. I mean, I’m sure some people do use it for side hustles. But I think there’s also a lot more going on underneath the hood on Paragraph. Finally there’s a platform that seems to have the capacity to shape the future of publishing to benefit the writers in positive-sum ways, instead of marginalizing us. I’ve been on Paragraph a year now, and I’m continually impressed with their progress. Can't say the same about Substack, Medium, or Patreon. Over the long term I’m hoping to contribute to building a literary minting culture on Paragraph in much the same way that Zora is building a minting culture around art. I think that kind of social context is a key piece of the puzzle that can offer better possibilities of making a real living as a writer through protocol mint rewards. Toward that end, I plan to use the Paragraph quote-highlight feature to collect quotes from your posts and respond to them in a way that can encourage further discussion. For now I’ll respond in the comments. Lastly: Zorbs absolutely ARE a magical current unto themselves. I’m with you: let’s catch and ride that current! I’ll be writing a series of Zorbsplaining pieces this year, so let’s continue the conversation on collaboration ideas. Looking forward to your future writings about NFTs and Zora.