For once, I’m kinda caught up with projects and ahead of deadlines (mostly), to the point that I’ve been able to slow down, breathe, and handle some matters that required a little more attention than I normally have to give throughout the course of any normally insane day. Some of those are mundane—getting printing quotes, opening up an IRA, filing paperwork—and some are domestic, like finally putting up a Christmas tree (despite the sad absence of gifts to put underneath due to, well, we’ll discuss that later), removing about two months’ worth of recycling material from my office, hanging towel bars, etc.

Last night—after a downtime-afforded dinner and drink with Sara—I spent some time noodling around on the internet, and dug around both old blog entries here at Bleeding Neon and on my old LiveJournal, the latter of which are all protected to my eyes only now. I shut down my LJ after about four years of very consistent posting back in 2008, not coincidentally about the time Twitter really took off (and not long after, I finally caved to creating a Facebook profile, ostensibly to manage business pages).

As any “regular” reader should know (and I’m not certain I have any of those left), I’ve been struggling with getting my blog groove back for about the last year or two. I’ve blamed it mostly on the fact that, since going full entrepreneur in July 2013, I’ve felt compelled to spend every waking minute on either Creation Forge Studios or my freelance work, which has affected more than just blogging: Both my webcomics, The Utopian Foundation and Sequential Madness, went on indefinite hiatus; same goes for my Homemade Comics Tumblr blog.  I haven’t played any music, written any songs, or made any serious videos (aside from client work). And we won’t even get into the ways in which the situation affected my personal life—let’s just say, Sara’s earned a gold star for her patience.

The crazy thing is, I thought I’d be blogging about this experience the whole way. I figured the trials and tribulations of a bootstrapped start-up and/or the adventures of a wordsmith-for-hire would be terrific fodder for a blog, either here or at the respective sites of said endeavors. Instead, much like in the physical world, I withdrew online, making time only to tweet, basically, and otherwise only talking about stuff on my mind after letting it boil over into venting sessions, either with business associates, friends or (mostly) Sara.

But after digging through the old, more active blog posts last night, I realized why it’s been so hard for me to even get started: I’m over-thinking the whole process. Pre-2013 blogs were often dashed off seemingly as quickly as a tweet, and because I was posting on a regular (in the LJ days, sometimes multiple times per day) basis, there was a continuity, and therefore no need to overload a post with exposition and context. I haven’t been able to blog because I’ve been trying to write a movie every time, when instead I should be writing a TV episode (and yes, I know I’m doing the former right now; gotta get caught up, right?).

The other thing—and this is probably more important—is the comfort I felt being open and honest with my blog, especially when I was doing it on LJ. Yes, there were different layers of privacy on that platform, much like Facebook, so I got hyper-personal with some posts and less so with public-facing ones, but still, for the most part, I just documented things that happened as they happened, and I think people could either relate, or in the case of my more ludicrous experiences, live vicariously through those posts.

Of course, my life’s not quite as full of those experiences anymore. I’m older. I’m married. I have a mortgage and pets and a business to run, and I’m not likely going to be blogging about waking up in a random suite at the Hard Rock Hotel after a night of partying. The types of stories I write now have changed as well—fewer interviews with rock stars and celebrities, and more focus on real estate, community and tourism—so the behind-the-scenes glimpses aren’t quite as lascivious, either. But that’s fine, because all of you have gotten older, too. Your lives have changed. And I’d like this to be a place where I can bring up whatever the hell is on my mind, you can comment, and we can get a genuine discussion going.

So … that’s all out. Do you want to hear about the $5500 we spent last month to get sewage to stop coming back up into our house? Or maybe about how our dogs only seem to really get sick when it’s a Saturday night and a wallet-poaching emergency vet is our only medical care option? Or how the new U2 album would be a pretty good pop-rock record if people could get over the fact that it’s a U2 album? This is the place for it! Hey, you get what you pay for.