First of all, I have to day that I’m feeling a little silly, right now. Trying to get back into the blogging thing feels awkward. It has been nearly a year since I wrote anything here, and I don’t have a real reason for my absence. I have been thinking of coming back here for a while, now, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. And I didn’t want to risk a vicious cycle of “post for a little while, go silent for a year”. Which means that I had to think about why I stopped writing here, and figure out how to motivate myself to keep writing here.

So, what went wrong?

First and foremost, writing these blog entries has always been a bit of a challenge for me. I’m not super comfortable talking about myself. Talking about my life in general is a little easier, but made more difficult in this case by the fact that I can’t talk in specific ways about the people in my life. (I mean, I could, but I don’t have their explicit permission, so it feels unethical.) All of which is further complicated by the fact that I use a pseudonym. (It’s not a secret; it’s right in my author bio.)

I think the pseudonym was part of a second problem. I felt that since I was using a different name, I had to create a different identity for myself. It was hard enough to share myself online, but now I was adding extra limitations, because there were parts of me that I felt didn’t belong in Aurelia Osborne’s life, and that therefore I could not share here.

The third problem was that I followed the advice of well-meaning friends who told me that to increase the following on my blog, I needed to have a brand of sort. People would be more likely to visit if they knew what to expect was the general idea. It may be so, but it added up to even more limitations on what I felt that I could talk about, until one day, I missed a post and had no idea how to get back on schedule.

Now that I have some idea of what went wrong: too many self-imposed limitations. The solution would therefore be less self-imposed limitations, so we’re going to try that and see how it goes from there.

What can you expect from this blog? For the next few Sundays, I’m going to queue a series of posts about what has happened during the hiatus. So far, I can think of six posts. I might think of something else, but unless/until I do, I will say six weeks of hiatus updates. After that, I will keep on writing every Sunday, but about what? Who knows?

I will also try to write book reviews every Tuesday, I do have a year’s worth of books read to pick from, and I am determined not to limit myself to the books that I believe to be part of the “Aurelia Osborne” brand. And once or twice a month, on Fridays, I will write reviews of movies or plays, or other things that are week-end activities. (That’s all I can say without spoiling future planned )

So I’ll talk to you all again on Tuesday.