Writing and Not Writing

Why have there suddenly been posts here in last week or so, when there hadn’t been for months? What’s been happening recently that’s different?

Quite simply, I’m writing more because I’m reading, watching, and listening more. I write when I feel I have an idea worth sharing. Those ideas largely come from somewhere outside my head, from a book, an article, a video, or conversation. They then bounce around inside my head, collide with each other, and turn into something new. For the first four months of this year, though, I wasn’t exposing myself to those idea sources nearly enough.

And that has changed.

One Hundred and Eleven, To Be Precise

I’m now more than a hundred days into the year, and the first four months of 2013 have been a whirlwind of doing. One of my few regrets about it has been that this blog has dropped off the bottom of the priority list. What’s been above it?

• Building my first fighting kit and authorizing as an armored combat fighter in the SCA (as well as becoming a herald).
• Getting back into running by slowly up-ing my weekly mileage and doing yoga everyday to prevent the kinds of injuries that have plagued me before, then catching a cold and losing almost a month of workout time.
• Retiring my Dying Kingdoms character in epic fashion and rolling in a new one.
• Spending almost every weekend since the beginning of the year with Gwen, either at a DK or SCA event, or skiing.
• Handing off my Scrum Master responsibilities at work to the person who I had (secretly) trained to be my replacement.

When I write it like that, it sounds like so little, and yet, it’s been all-consuming. It’s also been a ton of fun, though I do like that I’m coming up for a brief bit of air.

Where Have I Been?

I’ve been trying to pay attention to this advice.

More (hopefully) to come.

Mostly Back

As you might have noticed, I haven’t been here much. That’s because in addition to my usually busy-ness, three things happened in close succession:

1. I came down with two colds in a row in the latter half of March, which disrupted my carefully calibrated schedule,
2. I shifted most of my personal creative work from a laptop to my new iPad at the beginning of April, which involved figuring out how I needed to do things differently, and
3. Our cat Milton died unexpectedly this week.

So, as I have done before, I’m slowly digging out, catching up, and getting back into good habits. Expect to see more soon about what I’ve been up to during my radio silence (because there’s a lot of cool things).

Approaching Another Finish (and Starting) Line

Doing the Post-A-Day thing this year has been tremendously satisfying. I’m also glad that I’m almost done with it. Its relentlessness is a two-edged sword, and I’m looking forward to stepping away from the Damocles role for a little while. I’d been looking around for a similar thing to do in 2012, something to push me creatively in a way that I wouldn’t push myself otherwise. Then I found this, which seems to fit the bill perfectly.

I’d already been thinking about doing the picture-a-day thing, but I wasn’t sure that was enough by itself. The rest of the list would definitely push me in new and not unpleasant directions. And I was able to commission a lovely scrapbook for this from Sara Hindmarch, so what’s not to like?

So while I might not be posting as frequently here when 2011 ends, you’ll still have something to look forward to.