...But What About Armadillo & Sands?

One of my favorite songwriters is Andrew McMahon. He started out as the primary songwriter, lead singer, and pianist for the alternative rock band Something Corporate in 1998. In 2004 he started Jack’s Mannequin when he felt the songs he was writing were too different from Something Corporate’s material. Jack’s Mannequin was really McMahon’s solo project, but he used the name to represent freedom and it also gave him a shield of sorts. In 2012 he announced that he was dissolving the name to release music under his own name since Jack’s Mannequin had accomplished what it needed.

That’s kind of what I’m doing here. Armadillo & Sands isn’t being dissolved, but I feel that the content has outgrown it and my need has kind of branched out. Having recently started my senior year at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee I have a better idea of who I am as a writer than I did when I started Armadillo & Sands. When I started it, Armadillo & Sands offered me the opportunity to throw everything at the wall to see what stuck. Now I’m ready to start posting under my own name.

Now that I know what I want, it’s time to move on and focus. This is now going to be my writer page. My stories, essays, poetry, plays, and other creative works will appear here. This means that a lot of my writing will appear over here from now on. This will also include my process, so multiple drafts of stories will appear here, as well as explanations behind how I came up with my stories, poems, and the other things I post here.

This doesn’t mean that I’m done with Armadillo & Sands though. That blog will mainly focus on my views of pop culture. Reviews of movies, music, TV shows, books, observations about different forms of media, and other miscellaneous items will still appear over there. In other words, this new blog is a showcase for my own art, while Armadillo & Sands will focus on how I perceive other people’s art. Each blog will serve a separate purpose for how I want to communicate with the world around me.

I do plan on beginning to separate the blogs immediately, so that means that I will start to remove posts from Armadillo & Sands that I don’t feel meet its purpose and I’ll be placing those posts here. So you will see some of posts here that you may have seen before, and if you haven’t seen them before this is a chance for you to find them for the first time. So I hope you enjoy the changes; now let the games begin!