Bless Me Father, For I Have Blogged

Bless me father, for I have blogged. It has been eight days since my last post.

In those eight days, I have been evaluating my priorities not just for this blog but overall in my life. I've also flown to San Francisco and back, so I had plenty of time cooped up on airplanes to turn my thoughts inward. But London is a thinky sort of city; being around this much stuff makes you start to look at things in ways you didn't before. Moving has that effect as well: a need to re-evaluate aspects of your life (do I really need to keep this coffee mug?) inevitably leads you to re-evaluate other aspects of your life (do I really need a big house that I feel compelled to fill with meaningless bullshit?)

I got some of my old fiction out and read through it, especially a story that I loved writing but hate the ending of called The Paper Priest. It's a story that started with a title and worked from there, and the first three-quarters are some of the best stuff I've written but it ends poorly. If I cut out the offending part, it doesn't end at all and clearly lacks something. But I've been writing other things. In fact, I've written almost two short stories in the last week - the second is incubating in another window as I type this - and I'm slowly taking this opportunity to shift some of the proverbial boxes around in my mental storage space to make things more conducive to what I want to do with myself. And one of those boxes is this blog.

So to any of my coworkers reading this, I apologize in advance. I've been posting about PR and marketing and Web 2.0 and all that stuff and while I find it academically interesting on the surface, I feel that it's a subject where most people have said all there is to say and 99.9% of the rest of us are just playing echo chamber. I'm not doing it anymore. Unless it somehow fits into what I want to write, I'm not going to be making any more fancypants posts trying to impress people (and myself) with my superior knowledge of podcasting the digital media revolution.

I'm getting reacquainted with my creativity and he's an old friend that I feel I've neglected far too long. I originally started this blog after one of the writers I most admire recommended blogging as a way to keep the creative pen sharp. For the almost 5 years I've been doing this, I've struggled to find a voice, largely because I've been concerned about what people would want to read on here.

Part of what I realized is that catering to what I think people want to hear - so-called New Marketing professionals, or PR people, or whatever - isn't true to the original intent of what I set out to do. It's not keeping the creative pen sharp. My creativity and I need each other, like peas and carrots, like Batman and the Joker. And I've been driving him away by flirting with all this other, well, bullshit.

So expect to see less of that and more of what I want to write. That may mean that I update less often, but if that happens, it probably means I'm off doing something more creative with my time. Like finishing this story.

Speaking of.