Back to Basics

After the longest, indefinite-until-now hiatus: I’m back. And admittedly rusty.

I don’t have any excuses to offer. I can only tell you what happened, what I’ve learned and how I plan to move forward, with this blog (and other endeavors.)

Over the past couple of years, — (Christ, two years? Has it really been that long?) — I’ve let my writing slowly fall by the wayside because I no longer felt that it was making a difference. I felt that what I was producing was empty/boring/pointless and so slowly, I just stopped all together.

Or at least that what I was telling myself. But that wasn’t the whole story. Honestly, I think I just got frustrated that this part of my life, the part that I had so heavily invested in, wasn’t moving fast enough. The results of my work weren’t keeping pace with the efforts I was putting into it.

Plus, everything else in my life (at the time) was moving forward and progressing and I let myself believe that maybe those aspects of my life were more important/meaningful.

As these other parts of my life accelerated, I kept making more and more excuses to not write, telling myself that writing just wasn’t that important. And I kept feeding myself excuses like: You can’t write until you have an interesting life to write about.

(Which is bullshit, because you can. You can write about whatever, whenever, so long as it matters to you. If you want to write about your kinda-secret, dorky button collection  and how it changed your life, just do it. The Internet’s got room for it. )

And then I kept myself busy with all sorts of events, projects and social activities just so I could avoid the challenge of the blank screen and its blinking cursor. All that stuff isn’t research for story ideas. Mostly, they’re just distractions. For me, anyway, they were distractions from the one activity I was supposed to be doing the whole goddamn time for the past two years: writing.

So now you know what happened. Here’s what I’ve learned:

What matters most, at this point in my life, is that I keep writing. If you love something, you don’t quit on it. You nurture it. You make time for it. You grow with it. You learn from it. You keep going even when it’s hard.

And I still love writing. I’m happiest when I write. Even after two years of blank pages, even while writing about not-so-happy things, I still find joy and purpose in it.

That said, if you’re still reading this post, here’s the plan for the blog going forward:

1. I will be writing a blog post once a week. I figure since I normally have at least one day off a week, I should be able to produce something at least once a week. I need to get back in the habit of writing regularly and researching story ideas on a daily basis and I think a post per week is a manageable goal that will be conducive to developing that habit.
2. The blog will continue to feature a hodgepodge of subjects.  I have always considered myself to be a general assignment reporter/writer at heart and the blog will continue to reflect that. That said, there may be a lot of food and technology-related posts as my obsession with both topics has not waned.
3. I have a new goal for this blog: I don’t want all of my posts to be opinion pieces. I would like to include posts that are news articles, feature stories and/or interviews.  I still consider myself to be a journalist and I am still working towards making it my career. I want to keep my reporting skills sharp.

So that’s it. That’s the plan. We’re going back to basics, y’all. One post at a time.