On Coming Back From the Dead

So, if you've been a regular reader of this blog in the past, you've probably noticed that I kinda skipped the whole year of 2011.

It's something I could be kicking myself for now. After all, isn't this the cardinal sin of blogging? If just not posting regularly is bad, think of how bad it is to evaporate for 12 months or more...no word of explanation, no goodbyes, no nothing. And before I disappeared, this blog was doing pretty well. It was popular, it had garnered some industry attention, and it had a readership. And then I quit. Which is actually pretty out of character for me. I'm one of those annoying, type-A overachiever people. I work hard. I study hard. I cut my hair so I wouldn't have to let it down.

I don't know what it was that made me want to disappear. Some of it was that I was busy. Extremely busy. But really, if you want to do something, you find the time. I think there were other factors, though. I was looking into using Twitter to expand my business. I was working on my novel, and my super-talented literary marketing friend kept telling me I needed to get myself out there and start a personal / noveling blog. My acting teacher said I needed my own YouTube channel, I was starting to think about a "strategy" for LinkedIn...and then all of a sudden it just got to be too much. Too much exposure. Too much out there. I started to feel like I wanted to be a hermit for a while.

I guess what I started to feel was that the online world was getting too demanding. Not my readership here, but just the general constant demand to expose more, to share more, to be "social" in a way that sometimes felt more self-promotional than social to me. I just had this emotional reaction to that. And unfortunately, CatalystBlogger was one of the casualties of that--for a while.

I also felt like I'd run out of things to say. I think a lot of bloggers go through this, and I'd gone through it in the past--but never to this extent. I felt like I'd said what I needed to. I was done. I just couldn't think of anything else insightful to write about. This happened for a week...then a month...then two months. And after a few months of this, I started wanting to go back...but once you stop for a while, it's hard to get started again. You start to feel guilty about all that time, and you start avoiding thinking about it, and then all of a sudden it's been a year.

...and you realize you miss it.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I just read a post about pretty much the same things I'd been feeling--over at Men With Pens. And even Bob Bly apparently took a hiatus recently. It's good to find out I'm not alone--that even really high-profile bloggers sometimes spazz out and quit for a while. And I love what James says about using this as a time to remake the blog, to get back to what made her passionate about blogging in the first place. Before I quit, I was thinking seriously (had been for years, really) about getting a pro wordpress design...maybe I'll actually do that this year. Maybe that year-and-some-change break I took was just the springboard I need.