Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Sad blogiversary
Tomorrow, April 11, Balls and Walnuts turns six. I’ve stuck with this longer than many of my blogging friends, for what that’s worth; that blog roll on the left is full of sites that haven’t been updated in over a year. I miss them. Jona was one of my first readers. Ishbadiddle was great at finding off-beat stories. Invisible Lizard (who writes great movie reviews) posts infrequently. On the upside, I had somehow convinced myself that Jim Donahue had closed up shop, but no, he’s posting regularly and he’s still on point with his sharp, quirky sense of humor. How the hell does he do it?
I keep wondering when I’ll get my mojo back. But as I’ve speculated in the past, I suspect my early drive, what kept this place hopping for years, was fueled by dissatisfaction with the life I’d built for myself and my family up north. I’m in a better place now (with regard to work — Bako is most definitely NOT a better place than the North Coast) and I can’t seem to generate enough angst to want to create.
No, that’s not quite right. I want to create, but the paint on my palette has all dried up.
The only silver lining: since I’m not writing, I have had a lot more time to read some great fiction.
D.
Maybe it had more to do with that awful job detour beginning in August of 2008. In July 2008, I still posted daily. By August and September, things started going to hell. Then I had that stint in Walnut Creek which was a great job, but 2.5 to 3 hours of commute time daily will take it out of you. My weekends were only good for one thing: catching up on lost sleep.
As for the creep who recruited me away from the great northwest, I had a dream not long ago that he was trying to recruit me back*. Funny thing was, he was a disembodied head kept alive by a heart-lung machine.
*Would never happen. Which is another very funny thing about that dream.
Thanks for the shout-out Doug. I still keep up with my blogging friends, although I find little time to post myself. I’ve got a dozen movie reviews half-written that are sorely outdated now. But I *have* been working on my own fiction lately. If the trade-off is that I have less time for blogging because I’m taking more time for writing, then perhaps I can consider that my blogging experiment has accomplished its mission. Regardless, I will continue to post (infrequently). I suspect that I’m like you in that after almost 6 years of blogging, I’m just not ready to throw in the towel.
Happy Blogiversary!!
I have to make myself blog, but it’s always been that way. Apparently, I’m not chatty or something. lol
As for writing, I do believe that creativity is indeed fueled by dissatisfaction. For me, at least, it’s hard to find the gumption to write when I’m happy, when there’s enough money, things are going well, and life, in general, is good. When I’m pissed off or worried, I can write like nobody’s business. Treating it like a job – write no matter what – takes discipline, which also seems to be in short supply when I’m content.
I can, however, always find time to cook and sew. 😉
Well Liz I still lurk about your place (and apparently you lurk here, too!) I’m glad to hear you’re putting so much time into your writing.
Hi, Tammy. Cooking and sewing are so pleasantly mindless, don’t you think?
I think there are many reasons for it – the general decline in blogging as personal expression (they’re all on facebook now, and tweeting, and… whatever), for one thing, and the general rot that sets in when you don’t constantly chase down new connections.
You’re probably at the spot I was at a year and a half ago or so, wondering what’s the point?
What is the point, indeed?
I suppose that the personal blog (I still hate that word, even though I use it – I hate it) is really an art form now. It has no intrinsic value, it exists purely for its own sake (it is neither more or less self-indulgent than bad paintings of flowers, for example), and thus it is worthy to be called art.
Which is an attempt at justification, I realize. Let it exist for your sake alone, if you like.
I’m going to be changing ours to make it less blog-like, more… something-else-like, at least partly in recognition that blogging as it has been practiced for lo-this-net-age of about 10 years is tired and worn out.
Oh, and I don’t think it’s a sad blogiversary. It bloomed, it faded. It acquired a patina. Nothing particularly sad about it it, to my way of thinking.
Still feels sad to me. I miss the old days. OTOH, blogging was always (for me) an excuse not to focus on my fiction, and that’s still a valid gripe.
I note from a quick perusal of their blogs that Neil Gaiman posts once or twice a week. But Scalzi posts multiple times per day. WTF?
I can’t see replacing my presence here with Facebook, even less with Twitter. Not into Short Attention Span Theater.
Sorry, what where you saying?
…
(hyuk, hyuk)
I’m still here too Doug.
Life’s been different* and the blog just wasn’t a priority. But I check in with B&W (and others, Dean) regularly just to see how y’all are traveling.
*not bad different, but creative-energy-sapping different.
Glad you’re still here 🙂