Stepping Back from the Blog

It’s been a while since the last update. I missed a few that should have been normally scheduled, which definitely hasn’t been the norm (since I started several years ago I generally only missed one or two regular updates). But a few recent things have happened all at once, and it’s had me reconsidering several things.

The inciting incident is world stuff that I don’t really care to go into. Suffice to say, that world stuff has put me in a funk that’s had me dropping some of these hobbies, and this is going to be a casualty alongside that. I haven’t dropped everything to live in a joyless haze. I just felt a lot of my interest in maintaining the tasks that require, well…work.

As much as I enjoy writing and the process of thinking about these topics, trying to maintain this output isn’t sustainable. Admittedly, writing an essay every two weeks is fine, but writing an essay requires an idea. And those ideas have to come from games I play, which means time spent gaming. And there’s no guarantee that a given game will provide a spark of inspiration, so that means not just playing one game a week, but multiple games a week. It creates a pressure when I’m playing a game, because now I need to find something to react to.

And on top of that needs to be juggled eating, sleeping, working, and socializing. It’s a lot.

So like many in this same boat who write merely as a hobby, I find the process of maintaining all of this to be a bit much. And so like so many others, I need to step back from it all.

I also feel the quality of my output diminishing as I continue. As that pressure to find a topic grows, actual subjects become tougher to find. Maintaining that schedule means tapping into a well that is drying up. So I am obviously forcing myself more and more just so I can pull less and less from that well. Recent products have felt fairly forced, not necessarily because I didn’t believe in the ideas at all, but simply because I had to make sure that the essay got finished before the deadline hit. At best I can hope the end results don’t showcase that pressure, but whether it is visible or not, it was still hanging in the air for me. It’s additional stress in more ways than one. Instead, it’s better to just stop. Either those ideas will fill up again with time, or they won’t.

My plan moving forward is to halt the normal update schedule. As much as I enjoy writing, finding the time and the ideas are too much.

I don’t plan on shutting things down completely. I have a handful of essays that are half-finished or conceptualized. I figure I’ll finish those out. But rather than trying to post them at the normal pace, I’ll post them all in one big batch when they’re finished. That’s about ten or so different topics, so it will take some time to do, especially without that schedule looming over me.

After that, I will occasionally update, but I’ll return to the stuff that I enjoyed writing the most, which were much longer and more thoroughly researched pieces. The kind of stuff that might span several different posts. I do have a couple topics in mind to start, but that will take a while to put together for various reasons.

With that, I want to thank everyone who has been reading these posts and providing support, and I can only hope that you will join me again whenever I get around to the next set of updates.