absence makes the blog grow scarier
With only a couple of rather perfunctory exceptions, I’ve not written for this blog in more than six or seven synodic months.
During this time, I’ve observed a curious phenomenon: the longer I’ve been away the harder it’s been to come back.
In other words, I dropped the ball, lunged after it, tripped over my feet, scattered it farther, got winded, stopped for a rest, tried to chase after it again … and watched it tip off the side of a cliff.
So I’m making a new ball from scratch (and, yes, if this analogy just totally makes no sense to you, you’re not alone — I wrote it and I still can’t really figure out what the hell I’m saying).
One of the reasons why I started tapering off writing in the first place — and simultaneously became more and more averse to writing new entries — was that I was kind of disillusioned with this blog, and what I was saying in it, and how it really hadn’t come together to form any kind of cohesive … anything. I started to feel more and more as though my many interests were simply so much at odds with each other that discussing more than one or two of them would turn this blog into a kind of trip into the sanitarium, complete with free handout straitjacket. But I didn’t want this blog to simply be about one or two interests. So, in order to avoid having to answer my own question about what to do, I walked away from it. Maturity.
In the last few weeks I’ve been feeling the desire to begin writing again grow and grow, and this desire has forced me to reappraise why I started this whole blog in the first place. I started it to talk about all these weird and varied dorky interests I have, some of which are professional, some of which are not. So I decided a few things –
Instead of worrying about the fact that I want to write about a number of different topics which have nothing to do with one another and are mutually exclusive and likely individually alienating to each visitor, I’ll just toss up my hands and embrace the craziness of my hopelessly scattered mind and write about all of them all the time. Perhaps instead of trying to cram my blog into some kind of narrow field of interest like all the Top 10 Steps to Making Your Blog The Most Popular In The Universe how-to’s tell you, I’ll find my mark by not having a mark. Or something.
I have all sorts of posts already percolating up, ready to pop forth, and each one is in a totally different field of interest: there’s my post about what “semantic” really means in web design, my post about my big new writing project which I’m just days away from unveiling on a nonplussed world, my post on why podcasts are the best free form of entertainment, the post about the new piece of HD satellite equipment I’m getting which is totally revolutionizing my existence, the post about why the Amber novels rock, my final piece on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal that I kept rewriting and then abandoned, my post on German Heavy Metal that should never be forgotten but is, my post on why Battlelore kicks major ass, my post on War of the Ring, and … and …
Well, you get the point. If there are people out there who enjoy reading about some of these topics, or just one of these topics, or — heaven forfend — all of them, you are very welcome indeed.
And I will promise one thing to help navigate through the troubled waters that is my mind: I’ll do my best to make the post titles not just witty and sharp, but just maybe a bit descriptive as well. So if reading about classic heavy metal ain’t your thing, you can skip down to the post below it about using Javascript to change the DOM and bring CSS3 here before it’s here, or the following post about why Fuller’s Vintage Ale can body slam Arrogant Bastard any day, and so on.
I hope I’ll see you guys around.