My name is John Mulhern, and I want to write again.

Years ago, I was lucky enough to be a part of an emerging movie news site called Gordon and the Whale. It was a magical time. There had been sites like Ain’t It Cool News that paved the way for online film journalism many years earlier, but what we were doing still felt like trailblazing. Online film journalism at the time was such a vibrant community of truly brilliant creatives who were creating really compelling work. People not only read our work, but they liked it. During my time at the site, I wrote hundreds of news posts, conducted interviews with filmmakers, and wrote film and Blu-ray reviews. I also was a creator and host of the site’s podcast, in a time long before podcasts had become en vogue. After a few years, our founder decided to close the site. Many of our writers went on to bigger and better things, including some of the biggest publications out there. I made the decision not to pursue the career further because I was more interested in focusing on my creative writing efforts and on my day job, considering my career as a writer had been unpaid up to that point.

But I stopped writing.

Life kept ticking on, and I got further and further away from where I was. The only creative effort I had afterwards was my time as a co-founder, producer, and host of EpicPodQuest. EpicPodQuest was a humorous pop-culture and talk podcast that ran for an incredible 200 episodes. But after that was over, I stifled my creativity again. Last year, I decided to change course and began writing again. I’m still figuring out who I am as a writer at this stage of my life and trying to hone my skill and craft. But it’s been incredibly fulfilling so far, and I intend to explore it further.

That leads us to here.

I honestly don’t know what exactly I am going to do here or how frequently I will post, but it’s something I want to explore. I might be rusty, and this is my practice bed. I probably will focus on essays, movie reviews, and general musings on pop culture and my interests. I might also post some of my creative work, or my struggles with writing creatively. I’m a little more anxious about sharing creative work, but I feel like I’m at a point where I might need to. We’ll see. But either way, I hope I can put some interesting work on here, and I hope that someone cares to read it.

I also want to explain the previous work on here. I unearthed a .xml file with all my previous work from my time at Gordon and the Whale. I really felt it was important to put it on here to show this body of work I have built, even though it is 12-year-old news articles. Also, images, links, videos, etc. likely are missing from the posts. There’s not much I could do about that, as .xml files don’t store that sort of thing. I might go through and upload video interviews if I’m able to find them on an old hard drive or something. That is an adventure for another day, however.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I hope to have more soon. Thanks for reading.