In our last post, which was really more of an explaination for an ensuing period of silence than a blog-suidcide note, honest, I suggested that I was uncertain whether I should continue to maintain this space. As you might guess from the title of this post, I’ve deciced that, yes, I’ll be sticking around a little while longer.

What I was hoping to learn from my time off was this: Why should I bother writing a blog when there are so many reasons not to? After having done this for so long (since 2002 in some form or another), and spending the end of each day facing down a headache and a dozen abortive blog posts, I’ve managed to collect a lot of those reasons not to.

Not blogging — not writing, in fact — has shown me some reasons for staying. One thing I discovered was that writing, for me, has become something like a biological imperitive. Now, there are many great artists who put pen to paper (or whatever) out of some broken psychological well-spring — but that in itself is no reason to think that the need to create is in any way related with the ability to, or skill required for meaningful personal expression. In abstinenence I found desire. But desire does not necessarily lend itself to skill.

The most important thing my mini-vacation taught me was how I’ve been looking at this whole thing all wrong. I know that my lack of skill will forever keep me out of writing as a profession. I’ll never be published in a magazine, or sell anything to a publishing company, I thought, so why bother self-publishing on the web. Obviously I’m not good enough to get paid, so obviously no one would want to read me at all.

It was this post over at Booksquare that changed my mind on this subject. (Also: It would be dishonest if I were to omit the fact that the most important factor in my decision to stick around awhile longer had to do with a very kind comment that someone left on my previous post. But more on that anon.) Kassia Krozser is talking about good authors who have trouble blogging well (“In fact, after long consideration, I believe that most authors should not blog, especially if they’re accepting the messy diarist definition of blogging.”), but I think it’s applicable to me because it’s just possible that the reverse is true. Some bloggers just should not write anything but blogs.

Actually, that’s a little too strong; I wouldn’t dream of telling anybody else what they should or should not write. So, let me rephrase that: This blogger, if he’s going to write at all, should stick to blogging. What’s more, I’ve been doing it for long enough already that maybe I should actually invest some effort in doing it better.

Of course, much of my decision-making process might have been influenced by that comment I mentioned earlier. It meant a lot to me — made my year, really. Thank you very much.

Are there still some doubts? Of course there are. Can I ever be good at blogging? Can I continue to afford to maintain this website? Will I be struck down by some horrible illness? Who knows? We’ll just have to go forward as long as we can, and try to figure this thing out. That’s what the future is all about, isn’t it?

Join us, won’t you?