As I look over my later entries, I'm not sure why I stopped blogging, beyond my usual dilettantish trick of haring off after some new and different project. But it may have something to do with the fact that I was back in town, and no longer needed to connect with my friends and family in New Orleans. Nor did I need to record my graduate school experience anymore as I had, in fact, graduated. (Work, actual work, was not nearly so exciting or challenging as grad school.) Nor did I feel such a pressing need to make sense of the aftermath of Katrina. Once I was back at work at my old employer, and had purchased a house to replace the one I had lost, I could fairly say I was "recovered," and the recovery as a whole was not so pressing an issue for me. Which is not very nice, considering all the people who cannot yet say that, but there it is.
I also, I'm sad to say, drifted away from the nolablogosphere as a whole. I rarely even read Jeffrey's blog anymore. I have yet to attend Rising Tide. I don't read The Lens NOLA or Humid City or even The Blog of New Orleans. I moved on to other things.
But now I want to get back to it. Blogging. Since I started in about 2000, blogging has always been a relatively painless and enjoyable way for me to practice my writing skills and express myself. It is part of my more general thrust to start writing creatively again, after a long period of quiescence which started before Hurricane Katrina, and which was hardly helped by that catastrophe, after which for a long time the vast majority of mine and my family's energies were taken by just trying to recover, with all that this entails. But that is done now, and I feel the need, to write again. So I enrolled in an online class on "How to Blog" and I am dipping my toe in the water of blogging and writing again. I'm hoping that some success in this form, which I have used successfully before, will strengthen me for the daunting task of facing fiction writing again.
When I quit writing before, I was very burnt out and angry. So why would I want to subject myself to that torment again? Well, I have my reasons -- but that requires a whole 'nother post.
Is this Kirsten 3.0, then? No, that would occasion a whole entire reordering of my life like Katrina -- perish the thought! I wouldn't even say this is Kirsten 2.2. Let's just call it K2.0, the reboot. That in itself is going to be challenging enough.
