Why I stopped blogging (a paradox)
Okay, yeah, I know that is a strange title for a blog post, but it is what I want to blog about. I thought about making this an episode of my podcast, Project: Shadow, but I was afraid it would come across as self serving and serious. So, here we go-
I am a writer.
I don’t like writing. I don’t love writing. I am a writer. My earliest memories involve not just play, but drawing comics and short stories. I started journaling when I was really young. Writing is how I process information. When I want to learn something, I write and rewrite the information until it sticks in my head.
18… wow… 18 years ago, when I posted my journals online, I had never heard the word blog. It was just a way for me to share the various thoughts I had with anyone interested in them.
After I installed Wordpress, everything changed. People commented on what I wrote, and a small community developed. It was fun. We talked about everything, and it was a lot of fun. Between the blogging and podcasting, I thought I found an outlet for weird way my mind works, and a community who wanted to discuss those and many other things.
And then money happened…
See, this is why I was so hesitant to talk about this.
Occasionally, I would like to a product on Amazon or iTunes, and people would buy them, and I would make money. I joined a podcasting network and got sponsors, then I put ads on the blog. I wasn’t make heaps of gold, but I was making money. This was the beginning of the end.
I focused on content I knew would get clicks and make revenue… I lost the ability to use the tool that had always been about working through a thought or an issue, and trolled through metadata for topics to write about.
Eventually, I lost the ability to do anything else. It was boring, time consuming, and stressful.
Right now, I still wonder whether anyone will ever read this or care about what I have to say. <sigh> It’s frustrating.
Everything falls apart
I will not go into detail about everything that happened because I have written and talked about it before. Short version: the network broke up, we bought a restaurant and my husband left the podcast to focus on that, I fell into the deepest depression I have ever experienced and it lasted for years.
After a lot of healing, I wrote fiction again, and even restarted the podcast, but still I couldn’t blog. All of crap and hangups I developed over that time have been hard to shake.
So why am I writing this?
Obviously, I want to blog again. Not in the way that broke me, but in the fun way I used to find helpful whether or not anyone ever read it. You are reading me talking to you so I can talk myself into trying it again.
X number of reasons to start blogging now in 2018
- I don’t really care what other people think about me or my work anymore.
- I have selfishly decided to write things I am interested in and to entertain myself. (Entertaining others is welcome bonus).
- There is a lot of things weighing on my mind, and I need an outlet to expose them to the disinfecting light of day.
- Many of the topics boiling in me aren’t structured enough for the extemporaneous podcast recording style I rather enjoy doing now, and writing them out will allow their emergent structure to become more clear.
- Maybe someone else is thinking about this stuff too, and my ramblings might help me.
That’s about it. I want to blog again, and so I am going to and I wanted to give you, dear reader, a warning about the type of posts I will be doing.
Don’t be fooled for a minute into thinking I will be writing nothing but navel gazing think pieces. There is a lot of aspects of my fandoms and interests I want to delve into.
TL;DR
I’m blogging again, and I invite you to submit your posts too. Let’s have fun with this.
