Blog in Progress

I need this t-shirt!

If you've ever lived in coastal Florida, you know this is the time of year when "season" has winded down and things start to get back to normal. Bye, snowbirds! And I mean people from up north who come down to Florida for the winter, not the actual birds. I have to specify that because before my friend Anthony moved to Florida, he once thought I was referring to birds affecting my commute :).

During season, most of the non-profit organizations in Sarasota like to take advantage of more people (with money to spend) being in town, and they plan a big chunk of their events for the January through early April period. For me that means a lot more time spent attending and emceeing luncheons, dinners, galas, etc. and a lot less time to update my blog. But that's not the only reason I've been absent.

When I started this blog, I did most of my writing on my dinner breaks or after work. But since then, my station lost its contract with the provider of our health stories, leaving me to now find and write all of those...which is precisely what I do "after" work...which is really still work, if you get what I'm saying. Also, the station started airing a movie review show, which I now co-host and tape once or twice a week during what was my dinner break. And then when you add up all the dinner breaks spent emceeing those aforementioned dinners, well, it left me very little blogging time.

But I still kept wondering to myself if I had 20 minutes to read a book or magazine, watch "Scandal, or scroll through Instagram, why don't I have time to blog? Then I read a post by a woman who was finding it harder to go back to her at-home freelance writing job with a newborn that she surmises it would have been to go back to previous office jobs she's had. Unfortunately now I can't find that post, but basically she pointed out that writing requires a clear mind and undivided attention. Neither of which you have with a baby at home. Or when you're over-scheduled and stressed.

She explained that there are some things you can half-ass when you're tired, but writing well is not one of them. It's also not one of those things you can do when you have 15 minutes here and there. Writing also requires a lot of thinking time to brainstorm even when you're not physically writing. That works best when your brain is free of clutter...which explains why I "write" so well when I'm in the shower or running.

During the past few busy months, I kept putting off updating my billing information to renew my domain name...thinking I would get around to it and not realizing how much of a massive pain it would be if it actually expired. Well it did and it was a massive pain. I had to spend a long time on the phone with GoDaddy at 1 a.m. to get it back without paying a ridiculous fee.

What happened was a blessing in disguise because it reminded me how much I wanted to start blogging again. And it gave me the push I needed to make more of a commitment to my blog.  I spent several hours redesigning my site, and soon I'm going to have someone design it professionally. I also played around with my "real" camera and researched DSLRs. Then I spent some time reading up on blog advice, because I'm still pretty clueless about this whole thing. But I do have some fun ideas for posts, so I hope to see you back here each week!