Anniversaries and Endings

JK Parkin was kind enough to ask me to participate in part of Robot 6's weekend-long first anniversary celebration. The feature is titled "What are you excited about for 2010?" and my (not terribly exciting or enlightening) response is the last one in part 3. (Yeah! Batting clean-up!!)

Thanks to JK for allowing me to contribute, and congrats to all the hard working bloggers at Robot 6! Here's to another wonderful year of exhaustive, eclectic, well-rounded comic-book blogging!! As JK's bio for me points out, I'm kind of the Bizarro Robot 6 blogger in that I never actually blog anything anymore.

Which brings me to another thing I'm looking forward to in 2010: My retirement from blogging.

After three and a half years of blogging here, I've decided it's time to call it quits. My output was never prodigious: in 3.5 years I only managed just over 400 posts, which puts my blog's developmental maturity much lower than its calendar age. The fact that I could only muster seven posts in the last five months of 2009 is pretty clear evidence that my heart just wasn't in it anymore. One of my personal blogging benchmarks was that if I ever went a month without posting anything it was time to start thinking about shutting things down. And December 2009 came and went without a single post from me, so here we are.

I remember a teacher in grade school telling us that it takes 21 days to make something a habit and I think that, over time, not blogging became a habit for me. Whereas in the past I couldn't read a comic without multiple ideas for posts popping into my head, recently my default response to reading a comic has been simply enjoying it or disliking it with no further impetus to share my thoughts with the rest of the blogosphere.

There are probably many reasons why my enthusiasm for blogging has waned, but here are the biggest two from my perspective:

1. As with the last time I quit blogging, events in my offline life have conspired to eat up almost all of my free time. Simply put, I just haven't been able to devote as much time or energy to blogging as I once did.

2. My reading habits over the past few months have evolved to the point where I consider myself a much more casual comic reader. I'm not following as many blogs or sites as I used to. I don't track release dates obsessively anymore. I'm buying fewer and fewer books and choosing instead to read things through the library, usually long after everyone else has read and discussed them. All of this has probably contributed to a laid-back attitude that is less than conducive to blogging.

I guess what it boils down to is: The urge to write up my reactions to what I'm reading is just no longer there. In many respects, my comic reading habits have become more or less indistinguishable from my consumption of other forms of entertainment. Just as I've never really felt compelled to write about the movies or TV shows I watch, I don't feel driven to write about comics anymore.

Part of me worries that tomorrow I'll be flooded with ideas for blog posts and I'll regret announcing the end of this blog so definitively, but a bigger part of me believes that, in the long run, I'll be happy not to be bothered by little bouts of guilt when I realize days weeks months have gone by without any updates from me.

Thanks to everyone who has read, commented on, linked to, or reacted to this blog over the years. It was fun while it lasted. And who knows? Maybe in 2012 I'll be rested, re-energized, and ready with the final installment in my comic book blogging trilogy.

Labels: The End

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