So, around the time my updating got spotty, and then stopped entirely, I'd gone back to work. Back, in fact, to the very job I'd lost when I made the first post to this blog well over a year ago. I said I wouldn't go back to that company, and I said that when I started working again that I wouldn't stop blogging. Amazing what a couple doses of perspective will do on both of those fronts. I'm not going to make excuses, but anyone who still turns up to see if I'm updating after months of nothing deserves a few words of explanation.
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| Did I say early June? The 13th is "early," right? |
Simply put, this blog isn't interesting (for those who find it interesting at all) just because I write it. I have my own writing style, and folks seem to like it, but I won't delude myself into thinking that I'm a special enough snowflake that people will turn up just to hear what I have to say. There are plenty of folks who can do that on the internet with nothing but their name and personality, but I'm not there yet. The geeky content of my articles sure helped define my niche, but that didn't get me all the way there either. There are literally thousands of places someone can go if they want to read a review of the latest comic book film or video game, and a lot of those have been around longer than me, too. So why did so many folks (300,000 hits worth) turn up to read what I post here? It sure wasn't my disastrous experiment with the "magazine" dynamic template that genericized the look of the whole site.
I think there are still a lot of people who are struggling with the economy, they are out of work, or maybe recently were, or fear they may soon be. The perspective of someone coming from those same struggles talking about great horror movies and Star Wars and Game of Thrones provides something special. That, or people just like page and a half articles with 3-4 pictures with sarcastic captions (something else that didn't work with dynamic views.) When my readership started to drop off when I went back to work, this blog went from something I needed to do, and wanted to do, to something that I felt I had to do. It was a second job. To make matters worse, my mind was on fitness, since I spent the last seven months dropping over 80 pounds and lifting heavy weights. To write about what I was really interested in at the time would be further deviating from the interests of my core audience.
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| And really, who wouldn't rather be writing about stuff like the Battle of Blackwater, instead of blogging about picking up heavy stuff, anyway? |
Now, I'm once again out of work. The Foreign Service Office didn't call me up, and I'll keep plugging away at that, but I'm back to my original question of what to do next. Well, a part of what I'd like to do is to get back to writing, and to take advantage of my additional free time to have a little bit of a life outside of gainful employment and the weight room at the local YMCA. I've seen a ton of movies, read some great books and played many, many video games that I hadn't had the time to write about if I wanted to keep enjoying them in these last few months. Now, I want to catch up on the archives of the folks whose blogs I used to read daily and get back into the swing of things. I have all these ideas for new articles, and I'd like to get back to putting them out there for folks to read. Might not be 5 days a week at first, but I'll be putting up new stuff regularly.
Do me a favor? If you just discovered this site, or are a loyal fan that didn't give up and came back to check and are happy to see new content here, drop an occasional comment here and there. It helps a lot doing this if I know that somewhere, someone is still reading. Thanks.
