I received a notification from WordPress that this year marks my 11th anniversary with them. No. I didn’t pop champagne bottles. It wasn’t a celebratory anniversary of that kind. The news mostly made me reflect on the last 11 years.
2014.
I knew nothing about blogging. A friend had mentioned I should look into it back in 2005 or 2006. I asked him what blogging was. He told me people just write things, and that Rosie O’Donnell had one.
I liked Rosie. She was funny. I had nothing against her; I just wasn’t interested in reading about her daily musings. I didn’t understand the curiosity one would have in strangers writing about their lives.
If I wanted to read something, that’s what books were for, and books were edited for quality.
Then 2014 came around. I published my first book. A novella called Her Name. My editor at the time told me to start a blog. Get myself out there. It’d take me 8 hours to write less than 600 words. I pondered every word, wanting every post to evoke perfectly the emotion I meant to convey.
I felt a sense of accomplishment after each post, and this new excitement of checking how many people visited my blog, especially those from other countries, was an experience I hadn’t known before.
I went all in. I wrote two blogs a week. I put much effort into deciding what to write about. I had a folder filled with blog ideas and newspaper cutouts. I treated my blog as if it were an assignment.
As I write this blog, nearly four months after my last post, I miss the newness of it all. The excited wonder of who will read my blog and what I will write next. I was new to most of social media in 2014. I had just joined Twitter and discovered the wonderful writing community. It was such a supportive and welcoming space.
Everything seemed so much nicer then. Am I a victim of looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses? Or have things really changed that much? Twitter, now X, still has a writing community, but I’m not as engaging as I used to be.
It’s probably me. I’ve allowed time to make me jaded. I’ve let the enthusiasm I once felt wilder away. Half the year has almost passed, and I haven’t written more than an outline. In the early years of 2014-2017, my passion for writing kept me locked in my room for hours. Now, it takes four months to settle myself into writing a blog. Did I say I used to write two blogs a week?
I’m too young to be so jaded and too old to waste time.
Is it common for writers to go through periods of hating, no, despising writing? Of wondering if it’s even worth it anymore, if the joy is gone?
Is it worth blogging anymore, when vlogging has been the trend for years now? Do people even read blogs anymore? But I’ve always been late to trends. I’ll probably start vlogging in 2033, when everyone else has moved up to the latest technological way people communicate with each other.
I’ve got a little more than 6 months to turn this horrible attitude around and start my book.
What methods have worked for you?
aliciajoseph 