Building this site, getting it online and actually having a place to publish some of my own creative writing for the world to see was a massive accomplishment for me, and an extremely meaningful one, as I had, up until that point, done very little writing outside of work, despite wanting very badly to do so. The sense of fulfillment I’ve gotten from writing and publishing things on this site is unmatched; I’ve confirmed for myself what I had long believed in theory, but had not actually experienced: the act of writing, and of exposing my writing to the public, is, for me, not just something I want to do; it’s something I need to do. (And, yes, I do realize that having such a need is a sure sign of serious neurosis and insecurity, but, from what I can tell, these are character flaws that aren’t all that rare among writers.)

Because of all that, it has pained me to let this site die on the vine for most of 2007 … but I simply couldn’t get to it. And what was I doing with the time I would have otherwise spent writing for this site? A few things:

• Near the beginning of the summer, I was tasked with producing a daily and weekly podcast for LiveDaily. Becoming truly proficient at doing so was a time-consuming process that took a number of weeks, and only just recently have I gotten to the point where I feel like I have a handle on it. (If you’re interested, you can subscribe to both podcasts for free via Apple’s iTunes Music Store; click here for the daily one, and here for the weekly one—and please don’t dwell too much on how I sound like Kermit the Frog, or on how my inflection and delivery change from one episode to the next as I struggle to achieve something that vaguely resembles a professional-sounding voiceover. On a related note: our arrangement with Apple has also yielded the new 20-inch Intel Core 2 Duo iMac that found its way to my desk a few months ago. Schwing.)

• As mentioned in an entry from last year, I built, and continue to maintain, a Van Halen-related website. Earlier this year, the group announced plans for a summer tour with original frontman David Lee Roth (and I know some of you are waiting for me to pontificate about that whole state of affairs, which I promise to do soon, but not now), and, in order to make the site useful and viable, I had to do some serious overhauling, and have had to continue updating the content there with greater frequency than was needed last year.

• As the whole Van Halen-website thing should have made clear, I am unable to be a casual fan of something from a distance and leave it at that; I have to immerse myself in it, make it into some kind of pseudo-work type of thing with which to torture myself, find some way to fuse it into my identity. Thus, earlier this year, I registered a Red Sox-related domain and built a messageboard for Red Sox fans. That wasn’t getting off the ground as well as I had hoped, and the domain just seemed far too spectacular to not figure out something worthwhile to do with it, so, over the summer, I created a new version of the site, which I launched several weeks ago, and where I have been publishing a quasi-comic strip thing. With all of the attention on, and hype surrounding, the team in recent weeks, I have felt compelled to put a little more effort into that site than I had originally planned on.

So, take all of that and throw in heaping helpings of parenthood, husbandhood, homeownerhood and unrelenting financial panic, and, well, blogging has been shoved down the priority list in recent months. Rather than spew forth hollow declarations about how “I will now resume writing here with dizzying frequency,” I will simply say that I am hoping to crank this site back up, and, if I should happen to follow through on that, I am hopeful that some of you will keep coming back to read it.

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Filed under: Geek, Life, Red Sox, Van Halen, Writing
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