If you look around (or, more likely, click through this post’s link in your RSS reader), you may notice this website’s been completely renovated…and stripped. In my oddly timed effort to return to regular blogging (more on that in a minute), I felt my web presence needed to be divided—returning Bleeding Neon to a self-titled, standalone blog, and then building a separate, more static site for my professional stuff (which is all now back at pjperez.com).

It’s an odd thing to start blogging on the regular again in a world where everyone seems to be moving on to tweets and Facebook posts and Vine videos or whatever. I’m guilty of that, myself. Back when I was doing this on LiveJournal, I updated my blog at least once, if not several times, per day, and I was able to be loose and informal—just like I am now on Twitter. But for some reason, every time I write a blog post now—this one included—it seems so stiff and unnatural. However, I figure the only way around that is to do it more often, and build up that muscle again.

Illustration, playing music, exercising—it’s all the same. Do the work or else the skills go dormant—and I’ve been slacking on other things lately that are nearing those dormant states. As Jarret Keene pointed out to me today in an email, my own creative output is suffering at the hands of my entrepreneurial drive. I put both my webcomics on indefinite hiatus, and despite attempting to carve out scheduled time to remedy that (especially for The Utopian Foundation, which was smack in the midst of a storyline convergence), I can’t seem to get back on the horse.

A lot of this has to do with losing the structure of having a “day job” around which I had to schedule my freelance and side business work. I knew there was a limit to what I could take on, and I had set hours in which to work on those things, so I accomplished less but with greater attention. (It’s also the reason Pop! Goes the Icon only put out a few titles over the last few years.)

Unfortunately, out here on my own (with the help of my business partner Daniel, of course) trying to make two startup businesses profitable while paying the bills with freelance writing and consulting work, I can’t afford to be as choosy with what opportunities come my way. Every minute I’m not hustling, someone else is, and my financial status looks less solvent.

With that said, I should probably go now, seeing as I have multiple sets of Google Ads to draft, a press release to send out, and some contract deadlines to meet. So go check out the latest fruit of my labors in M Life magazine, where I write this month about new and revived entertainment options on the Las Vegas Strip, and I’ll see you around the blogosphere.