Welcome to the Musings of Amir

I am starting a blog. In 2026. Really.

I have tried this before. More than once. At best I have managed three or four consecutive posts before quietly abandoning the whole thing and hoping no one noticed.

Once I tried a blog about my PhD research, the science behind it, the state of academia, publication pressure, that sort of thing. It even got some traction, somehow. National news reporters reached out wanting to talk to me about something I had written on publication pressure in academia. I ghosted them. I just wanted to vent a bit, not start a whole thing.

Then, I decided I would write about games, movies and TV shows. I am a very opinionated person, and I thought that would be enough. It turns out having opinions and having opinions that make for engaging reading are two very different things. That one didn’t last long.

So why am I back here, doing this again?

Well. I may have gotten it into my head that I want to be an author.

To be fair, this is not a new development. I have written a novel. It is finished. What I am doing now is trying to find a literary agent for it, which means I am currently in what people call the query trenches. You write so-called query letters agents, follow a myriad different formatting guidelines that vary from agent to agent, and send it away. Then you wait. You refresh your inbox. You wait some more. Then you get a standard rejection e-mail, using a template that makes you question if the agent even looked at your sample chapters. They might as well have sent an empty email. It is, so far, an absolutely miserable experience.

One thing I have noticed, however, is that a lot of us start blogs. There are hundreds of them out there, maybe thousands. Blogs with a single post about the query process, and then nothing. The blog just sits there, collecting dust. I am apparently not the first person to think that an online presence might help me out of the trenches. I am also apparently not the first person to discover how hard it is to maintain a blog.

The reason I am still going forward with this is that having some kind of online presence seems genuinely useful, whether I find an agent or eventually go a different route.

So this is the blog. It will be about whatever I happen to be thinking about. Games, movies, books, ideas, things I have read that annoyed me, things that changed my mind, the occasional opinion I am not entirely sure I should share. Somewhere between one and three posts a week, which is either a reasonable goal or a thing I will have completely abandoned by the time you read this.

No promises.

-- Amir