Cleaning Out the Cobwebs

Seven months.

Really? Seven months since my last proper post — one that wasn’t simply announcing a new episode of The Writer and the Critic — that’s just … wow. I’m not entirely sure how it happened. Back in September last year I imposed an internet ban on my good-for-nothing self in order to get my pesky Novel the Second finished.* Not a total ban. I didn’t pull the plug to all interwebby goodness or brick myself up in a cave. I just forbade myself from interacting online unless it was absolutely, utterly necessary. No Facebook, no Twitter, no following tasty links from Google Reader, and Definitely No Blog. Too much time-suckery that way went.

So that was September and half of October. Then I went off on a three week trip to Canada and ended up in San Diego at the World Fantasy Convention, which was all kinds of brilliant. Then it was back home to catch up with my other life, the life that pays the bills around here, and then it was Christmas and New Years and damn well 2012, and I still had a metric shitload of reading to finish for the Aurealis Awards, and when I finally managed to look up and take a breath … well … habits had been broken. Facebook I rarely engage with anymore, although some of my tweets get mirrored there and I end up in conversations on other people’s walls from time to time.

Twitter, on the other hand, was a place to which I happily returned. It’s fun and smart and silly and has a drive-by attitude to online interaction that totally suits me right now. The dropping in and dropping out of conversations, the constant stream of links and info that I can take or leave. I don’t feel a need to catch up on Twitter, to read everything, to follow too many tracks down rabbit holes, to obsess over who or what might be following me. And I have to say, I’m a lot happier and much calmer for having taken a step back and really thought about the ways and means by which I want to navigate online spaces.

But — oh! — this poor little blog. As the weeks and months slunk by, it came to occupy this guilt-limned space in my head which forced it into unnecessarily strange and distorted dimensions. It seemed too big. It seemed too inconsequential. It was something I wanted to keep going with. It was something I never wanted to think about logging in to again. I didn’t have the time to turn it into space of deep, insightful commentary. I didn’t want it to become simply a house made of snark and squee. I just didn’t know what it looked like anymore. What it should look like. What I wanted it to look like. Plus, oh dread gods, there was so much Catching Up to do. I couldn’t even think about blogging about this without first remarking upon that, not to mention that other thing, and the stuff about blah, and all those other accusatory tabs holding their position across the top of my browser like terracotta soldiers awaiting entombment. Gah.

And that way, dearhearts, atrophy lies.

So. Here I am again. I still don’t know what this blog is meant to look like but, for now, I’ve decided that I don’t really care.  This year — it’s fricken April already canyoubelieveit! — it will be enough to simply keep a scrapbook. Things that make me happy, things that make me cross, things that make me sad. Things I want to celebrate, things I don’t want to forget, and tabs I want to fricken close before they get all stale and tasteless and cold. There will likely be some deep, insightful commentary from time to time. There will definitely be some snark and a whole lot of squee. What there won’t be is Catching Up. Sorry, that’s off the menu for good.

Onwards, dearhearts, ever onwards!

∞

* It was finished. It was gruesome. The finishing, not the novel. Maybe the novel as well. More on those developments in due course.

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