Oohhhhh, now I remember what that feels like!

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The recently enlarged fam

***The above was typed by G when I wasn’t looking. I’ve decided to keep it — it’s his first blog post! ;-)***

But back to me (’cause I’m so vain I thought this blog post was about me).

If you know who I am, you know I’ve been gone for quite a while. I got pregnant, I had a baby (more on this later). I worked and I played. Basically, I lived life. But somehow I lost both the desire and the need to write.

As a blogger who writes as much about my personal life as anything else, I require a certain amount of hubris to be able to compose posts. Either my life has to be genuinely interesting to others, or I have to be sure my writing about the uninteresting stuff makes it more exciting/humorous/enlightening than it actually is.

I lost my blogger mojo.  Blojo?  Oh my god. No, forget I ever typed that…

I’m not entirely sure that I have It back yet, but I’ve had that tickling in the back of my brain and in the tips of my fingers… that ITCH. You bloggers know what I’m talking about. More and more, I think to myself “Now THAT would make a GREAT blog post!” Not that I’ve managed to remember any of those things long enough to post about them… but I’m getting closer to that place where blogging is a routine part of my life again.

I’m having a lot of thoughts about why I blog. I’m pretty sure that if my goal is to continue to write with fewer disappearances, and in a way that would actually attract readers, I have to make sure I know my identity, my purpose. What can I bring to this community that could maybe make a difference and fulfill me beyond “Hey! 10 people think I’m funny” excitement?

In no particular order, here’s what’s important to me and what I’d like to try to focus on:

1. Child Advocacy

2. Education about Depression and Social Anxiety (and mental illness in general)

3. Writing. Primarily, I want to focus on my fiction. Writing fiction makes me happy. I’d like to get concrit. I may never write a novel, but that’s not really why I write, so that’s OK. This will probably take the form of participating in writing prompt memes.

4. Education about fertility; pregnancy; birth

5. Parenting with intention

6. Finding 10 people who think I’m funny

Additionally, I think many of us would agree that, in a perfect world, blogging isn’t just about writing. It’s also about reading, and even more — communicating. At one point in time I was trying to read around 50 blogs a day. Maybe some people can do that, and to those who can, I salute you (and also want to know what the hell is in your coffee). Me? I’m coming to learn that there’s a limit to the number of blogs I can read if I expect to interact with the authors. This means I’m going to start with a clean feedly*, and add slowly and with intention (there’s that word again, I’m sensing a theme). It means that when I participate in a writing prompt, I WILL be clicking through to other posts on the link-up, and I WILL comment.

I know all of this sounds dangerously like NYRs (New Year Resolutions), but the timing is truly coincidental.  Much more to blame are the rad bloggers I’ve come across just recently, or who I’ve been following for a while faithfully.  Amongst others, big shout-outs go to Daddy Doin’ Work, Momastery, and Just A Lil Blog.  Aside from being entertaining, these bloggers are involved and making differences in their chosen subjects (respectively: awesome dads should be the norm, not the exception; life is both beautiful and damn messy all at the same time; families with children with autism are more (and less) like your own than you imagine**).

And to cap off this burst of blogging energy, I’ve done a small site redesign.  Let me know if it sucks.  Or don’t… you could let me stay blissfully ignorant!

Hopefully my next post will be a link-up with Lance at My Blog Can Beat Up Your Blog for 100 Word Songs.  See you then!

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*Google did me a big-ass favor by shutting down Reader.  It forced me to start from scratch with my reading lists, and I’ve done so using feedly.

**These descriptions are my very hamfisted attempt at paraphrasing very complex topics into pithy one-liners.  Any misrepresentation of the aims of the authors is my own and hopefully they all don’t sue me.