This picture will now accompany every post that’s all about me. That should keep people from reading it.

When I initially built this website I had a goal to update the blog twice per week. I (mostly) kept to that the first year. Now halfway through my second year of maintaining the site, my goal was to just update once per week, as I knew balancing a newborn, my dayjob, and my actual writing would be a challenge.

For a while I was doing okay. But then… well… choices had to be made.

Writing blog posts is actually a lot of work for me, and I don’t think I’m particularly good at them. I’ve spent a lot of time recently reading through Chuck Wendig’s TerribleMinds archive. His archive begins around 2012 and at that point he had already been blogging for something like ten years. Amazingly, for years he had new posts up five days per week. A combination of writing advice, life events, personal news, opinion, and guest posts. While he did that he wrote several novels, started self-publishing, wrangled an agent, got traditionally published, and had a kid. The sheer amount of work he put into his success is impressive. It’s taken me a while, but I’ll never be that prolific.

There are lots of reasons for that. I don’t find myself all that unique or interesting, so throwing up blog posts I find worthwhile is a struggle. I’m not as transparent about my opinions as other bloggers (although I probably should be–to this day the two most frequented blog posts are Is the Forever War Homophobic? and Christopher Nolan and Smart Movies for Dumb People). And, most importantly, I can’t justify the time it takes me to blog over writing short stories and novels, spending time with my family, or going out to experience the world (inasmuch as one can experience the world during a never-ending pandemic–get your shit together, America).

This isn’t a blog post to announce I’m no longer blogging. I’m just re-prioritizing and holding myself less accountable for constantly missing my weekly deadlines. If an opportunity presents itself where I can get back on that schedule, I absolutely will. I have enough data now to know what youse like to read from me (mostly hot takes and the “My Favorite Stories” series). In the grand scheme of things, though, blogging isn’t as important as storytelling. So that’s where my focus is for now.

Along those lines, I hope to have some exciting announcements soon. I just finished editing a short story collection, am in the midst of revising a novel, and hope to have two more works ready for publication next year. I do plan to start posting vignettes again. I owe you twelve on the year, which means I’m five behind right now. To catch up I’ll need to post two or three per month the rest of the year. That will be a fun challenge. I may already have a few primed for launch.