A New Cass Blog?!

(Some stuff I touch on in this article can be read about in greater detail at Casseopedia International, my more “professionally-oriented” blog, most specifically my simultaneously-posted article, “On Death“.  These two articles, written across my two blogs, are companions; this is something I’m looking to experiment with in the near future, with matched articles, though it’s not going to be something I do EVERY time now.)

I hear it already, “But you don’t put that much on your main blog, why start another one?!”  Yeah, that’s right, I’ve kinda slacked on Casseopedia International.  But to understand why I’m writing on this thing and not Casseopedia, you have to look back to why I started Casseopedia International to begin with and what I’m planning to do here at “Casa de Cass”.

I started Casseopedia International because I basically wanted to create a blog that I could use for job applications.  I wanted it to be on mostly Academic and Intellectual-type things, with a little discussion on the projects I would be working on, like the paper I presented at the University System of Georgia’s Middle East Symposium this past April — which reminds me that I should put a post on Casseopedia that covers the topic of that paper.

Casseopedia was supposed to be, in both tone and content, a professional blog for only professional things– the kind of stuff I wanted to be able to prove that I could produce if I needed to do a job interview related to online media.  I was spurred to this after looking over a number of jobs related to my current occupation (Sports Editor of The West Georgian Newspaper), my current course of study (Criminology and Women’s Studies with some Middle Eastern  and Religious Studies), my previous occupational history (Security work, Health and Public Safety Reporter for The West Georgian, and Disability Services at University of West Georgia), and my interest in getting a job that involved a great deal of writing.  Obviously, when you look at a history of and interest in writing, an interest and background of academic presentation in Sociology, studies in Criminology, experience working with Law Enforcement Officers, and put it all together– the odds are I’d either be working with some kind of Law Enforcement agency, or in some kind of media job.

I wasn’t too worried about trying for Law Enforcement work someday– if I decide to continue pursuing a career in that direction, I’ve plenty of contacts and helpful mentors who will be able to ensure I get the experience and internship opportunities I need to land a respectable job in that field.  But looking at media was another story; I had plenty of experience writing for print media, but (quite honestly) print media is dying– or at least, the kind of print media I’ve done.  Books will likely be around for even the longest foreseeable future, if only because of the huge amount of matter that they constitute.  Newspapers, though, are going down in flames and having to adapt to changing times; it is no surprise that new hires, especially young ones, are expected to prove their ability to publish online– which is where the “New Media” is at.

However, it’s not enough to just publish online, but you have to show you can create intelligent, readable and engaging material.  You have to prove that you know how to put that material up on an attractive website, and that you’ve managed to get a certain amount of readership.  As a result, minimum standards for application to most entry-level jobs in many media organizations now include a requirement that one have a blog and/or Twitter account that contains at least a certain number of posts each, and with some kind of documentable “hit” count for blogs.  At the time I started noticing this, I did have a blog on LiveJournal, but… well, it was all very personal stuff and not the kind of thing I’d want to use to give a potential employer a first impression of who I am and what I can do.  Personal posts written in a personal tone are not suitable to judge one’s professional writing capacity.  So, I created Casseopedia International to write on subjects that were professionally and intellectually engaging to me, and discuss the pressing issues involved with those subjects.

I’d hoped, with a little publicity to friends and family, who would share it with others, and so on, that I’d get a modest readership that would both gain something from the experience of reading my thoughts on certain subjects and would benefit my ability to find a job that would allow me to continue doing what I love most– writing.  And, in that respect, it was a smashing success.  Though it may not seem like much when compared to the more popular blogs out there, Casseopedia International received over 3,400 hits last year– that’s an average of just under 10 hits a day.  For someone who felt lucky when a friend would check my LiveJournal once a week, that’s HUGE!

I do plan to continue writing on Casseopedia in the near future, but I’ve been suffering from a problem based on the restrictions I placed on myself in establishing that blog.  You see, by making it my “professional” blog– the one I’d show to employers interested in hiring me– I put myself in the unfortunate position of having a blog that people read regularly, but on which I could only write on certain things.  I tried to expand a bit by doing the “More Movie” thing, and I’m not calling it a failure, but it didn’t fit the format.  It was kind of like writing about a football game in the “Living” section instead of the “Sports” section of a newspaper– sure, you could find a way to shoehorn it in by relating it to some kind of “Living” topic (like how to host a high-class football tailgate party for friends and family), but at the end of the day it just stuck out a bit to me.  Yeah, I forced it into fitting the format by doing it as an “Overthinking It“-style (go visit them, they’re awesome) intellectual exercise while I critiqued it, but… Casseopedia is the kind of place I talk Policy and Social Commentary (as well as talk about how I double-ultra pinky-swear to write more blog posts and pages of Valkyrie In Progress, but that’s a whole other affair).

A recent event kind of shook me hard.  Simply put, a friend of mine was lured to the home of a former friend of hers, who brutally murdered her on my birthday (July 23rd) this year.  Her name was Marcelle Elliott, and she was a fellow writer; she shared the same passion for writing that I have.  She loved writing, she loved to help others write well, and she encouraged me in my own writing.  We discussed literature outside the Humanities building here at The University of West Georgia, we hung out at the University Campus Center for lunch or dinner, we went to Wal-Mart at weird hours and she helped me confront a homophobic guy who harassed me on Facebook.  She was a dear friend.

In a new post on Casseopedia (which you can read here)I’m putting up simultaneous to this one, I discuss in detail how this has affected my ability to write.  To sum it up:  I’d planned to use the 21 days I had off from classesbetween the summer and fall semesters, to get some work done on the blog and novel… to “write my heart out,” as I’d told one friend.  Unfortunately, my heart got TORN out by this nightmarish turn of events.  And when I say nightmarish, I mean that for a good couple days I didn’t sleep– in one interview I did with local news reporters, it showed on camera pretty clearly– and kept expecting to “wake up” from the horrible reality that my friend had suffered such a fate.  I’d wander campus without a purpose or reason, and I kept looking off at the Humanities building, hoping I’d see her sitting there waiting.  It sounds so cliché, but the cliché comes about from the reality of how grief can hit– this is one of those tropes that comes from something that’s pretty common in the real world, so it’s common in the literary world as well.

If I was too mentally incapable of pushing myself to sleep, then I definitely couldn’t force myself to write!  So, I absorbed myself in watching TV, playing video games, and finding diversions from reality that prevented me from confronting the cold hard reality.  I’d talk about it with friends and counselors and even with the Residence Life staff, but I was too scared to have an inner dialog about it.  It was a couple days ago, though, while chatting with a friend, that I got a brainstorm that allowed me to confront the reality of what had happened– and I’d done it by writing!  And of course, once I started writing, I knew I couldn’t just let it be– I had to write more!  And then more!

And that led me to make Casa de Cass.

What’s Casa de Cass for?  Well, to put it simply, it’s a less formal place for me to write about anything I feel like.  Now, by that, I don’t mean I’m going to bombard readers with constant LiveJournal-esque, “Today I ate a bacon sandwich and read a few chapters of this book on Japan and now I’m listening to My Chemical Romance,” stuff.  Instead, I’m going to use Casa de Cass to house all the stuff I know I want to write and discuss in detail but the subjects don’t fit the Casseopedia “format”.  One of the first things I’m going to do, after I give this message a few days to get read by friends and old Casseopedia readers, is transfer my “More Movie” article over here, and publish another brand-new one at the same time!

What kinds of things have I been holding back on?  Well, mostly entertainment and sports-type stuff.  Things like trends in Video Gaming that bother me, or movies that I liked or didn’t like.  I’m going to not just review stuff, but ponder them.  And one of the first targets of my film pondering will be the Disney Canon– or at least, the ones made during their “golden age” of drawn animation.  Stuff like Beauty and the Beast, or The Little Mermaid.  Yeah, that’s right: Cass, the supposedly ‘high-brow’, academic paper-presenting, newspaper editing, policy analyzing, and Criminology-studying blogger is going to watch (several times, likely) all those cutesy kids animation films.  Especially the really girly ones.  Why?

First, because the kinds of things we show kids shape their world view.  Second, because despite their sometimes less-than-enlightened messages and imagery, I love them.  I really do, even the crappier ones have a little something to like.  Finally, they’re a GOLD MINE of things to explore; the historical backgrounds of the stories they’re based off, the history behind the making of the films, the genesis of the art style, the design of characters in both an artistic and literary sense, as well as the overall narrative content and how it relates to a greater concept or view of society and humanity.

Another long rambling post about what I’m going to write someday, yeah.  But if you held out to the end, thank you.  Likewise, if you’re willing to stick with me while I try to split off my writing worlds, thank you so much.  You might notice a marked difference in tone between this and Casseopedia International– that’s intentional.  Since this is “Cass’s Home” (Casa de Cass), I kind of plan to treat this as the place I kick my feet up on the ottoman with a little tobacco pipe and talk about slightly less serious matters.  Hope you enjoy!

Advertisement