Blogging Paralysis

Blogging Paralysis

In the summer of 2016 I was working on my second novel, and let my blog lapse, for what I thought would be short break. Weeks turned into months, with an occasional post bobbing in the vast sea of my failure to blog. I have thought about just letting the blog go, but I like having a writing goal – though I’ll like it better when I start achieving it again

Then the Event Which Shall Not be Named happened in November 2016, and I along with a lot of other Americans was thrown into a spiral of anxiety, hopelessness, attempts at activism, spurts of optimism, and eventually, acceptance that this is the reality for now. For myself, after a period of flailing, I’ve decided to focus my activist energy on the 2018 elections, since that seems like the best hope for swinging our country back in my preferred direction.

So, the election threw me off, my own life also got me down. As regular readers know, I helped a family member last summer. I’m glad I did; it was the right thing to do, and the results are, so far, good. But, it was extremely draining – not just the journey, but also the emotional implications of the journey.

And then there was some other stuff in my personal life that I don’t want to share because I realized that I’m not actually that blogger. I’m not the blogger who is going to discuss every fleeting feeling, or even the more permanent ones. I like some of the bloggers who do. There are some tell-all bloggers I don’t care for, but I think it’s more about their writing style and what they reveal about their life choices in their writing. I think that the emotionally revealing blogging is a valid category, it’s just not the category for me.

I spent the last 9 months or so paralyzed from blogging because so much of what was going on in my life was deeply personal, and in some cases, not entirely my story to tell. I didn’t want to delve too deeply, but I was trying to follow the advice to rip away the delicate veneer of social acceptability and lay it all out there.

Opposing forces left me in the middle, stuck. I miss it. I miss being able to share some of the silly, entertaining stuff from my life. I probably have some funny stories about fixing toilets on airplanes, making rookie mistakes that result in large amounts of oil and grease soaking my clothes (though fortunately not poop, not yet, anyway), the peacefulness of lying in corpse pose under an airplane engine.

As for the nitty-gritty feelings? I still have them, and I’ll write about them, but rather than do so in a tell-all blog, I will use them to fuel my fiction, which I also miss writing. The second novel is a sequel to Raising John. I started it because numerous readers said they wanted to know more about John’s story. I have a full draft, and it’s not bad, but it’s not good yet. It’s a bit … bloodless, but I think I have enough stored-up angst and turmoil that I can put the blood and heart back into it.

Thanks for reading.