Happy New Year

I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. Mine were nice, and I certainly don't have anything to complain about. One thing I did notice this season, though, regarding my mood/attitude/whatever you want to call it -- I've always been very lucky in the sense that I'm easily amused. I've also found over the years that there are tricks to sort of fake my way to happiness. Even if I'm not in a great mood, I can fake it until it becomes an actual good mood.

But the holiday season usually inspires a bit more than happiness. All that merry-making and celebrating and festivity and eating and drinking and decorating and giving and receiving are usually catalysts that hit a critical mass to formulate something more potent and rare. Joy.

And this year, I realized that I can't fake my way to joy. I can get to content and even happy, but that final, wonderful leap to joy isn't something I can fabricate. It either happens or doesn't. This year, it didn't. And that's okay, cause, like I said, I was happy enough. But it also made me realize something else that's been going on for quite a while.

When I started writing, it was fun. There was, as lame as this sounds, an element of joy. When I started this blog, it was also out of fun. It's expected that writers have blogs to promo their works, but without going into a long diatribe of my personal peccadilloes, promoing my own stuff is difficult for me. But I figured I could slip in a few obnoxious posts about my books between other stuff that was enjoyable. So I did have fun. Seriously. As silly as it sounds, I got a kick out of working myself into a lather to bash Chris Daughtry. Good times, good times. Over the years, that enthusiasm has dropped off. This is not a commentary on the state of entertainment at all. I've always been capricious in my interests, and I assume this is another, normal "seven year itch" situation. For example, if the sight of my beloved Conan returning to late night -- wearing jeggings -- wasn't enough to inspire a giddy essay, I don't think very much will.

This is all subject to change, of course. Maybe I'm just lazy right now, or having trouble sitting my ass in a chair to write. But until that potential time that the pendulum swings back and I once again feel it appropriate to knock out some frothy, lunatic rantings about whatever, I didn't want to keep feeling guilty for only posting promo notices.

So this is my official acknowledgment that this blog has, indeed, devolved into not much more than a place to slap up notices about my writing. As you can imagine, given what I've just told you about my general apathy towards writing, those will also probably become less frequent. But I feel better about at least being blunt with the admission that I'm no longer making the effort to entertain here. I apologize for it, but I also thank you if you ever came here expecting to be entertained, because that's the biggest compliment I could've ever asked for.

So with that, I thank you for stopping by in the past, for reading this now, and I hope you'll continue to check back once in a while in case I either have smashing good news or do rebound with some vicious commentary. Until then, I wish you a very happy new year. I hope it's full of health and happiness, and, hopefully, even some smatterings of genuine joy.