…which makes it an ideal time to dip my toe back in the water, of course. (Hell, do I even have any readers left?)
I’ll spare you the bulk of the navel-gazing – but oh, my darlings, I have been blog-blocked for The. Longest. Time. (Maybe I still am. We shall see.) It’s been a Misplaced Paradigm thing, I think.
This place used to be a hit-and-run, don’t-look-back, bash-it-out-in-your-coffee break kind of enterprise – in intent, if not always in execution. (I’m often at my most productive when expectations are set at their lowest. It’s a simple sleight of hand, and I can be good at self-sleighting.) But then, that’s how blogs were, back in the day. Then the (perceived) paradigm shifted, and deftly crafted, neatly turned, on-topic, stylistically consistent, passively-aggressively careerist (I don’t altogether mean that, but let it stand) essaylets became the norm. And so began the (almost wholly imagined) peer pressure.
And then the freelancing thing came along, and with it the imperative of discipline. Word counts; neutrality; taking the “I” out of everything. Which, once you’ve mastered the processs, can cast an unattractive back-shadow over what you have come to see as your juvenalia.
Except – and I only realised this the other day, when necessity sent me back to an archived piece from 2002 – the juvenalia wasn’t really all that juvenile after all.
In fact, now that I can view it from a reasonably objective distance, some of it was really quite, you know, good. And that made me sad. Sad for what had been lost.
So I’m stepping back into the saddle, but hopefully on my own terms. Jeez, it’s a freaking blog!
troubled diva 