A Temporary Abatement

I mentioned that the summer has come to an end and that for the next couple weeks I’m actually free of class.  I also said I didn’t know how this would affect the ongoing, intermittent “hiatus” I’ve been on most of the summer: whether I’d be going back to daily posts or not.  After thinking about this for the past couple days, I believe I’m actually going to have to intensify my so-called “hiatus”.

It’s not that I need a break from the blog, or even want a break from the blog.  I truly enjoy putting up stuff for people to read, and I find it a necessary release for my creative energies when I don’t have enough time to put into actual story writing.  But even though I’m not in class or studying in the evenings, there are other considerations I need to be making, right now, on how I use my time.  Chief among which is the fact that over the past couple years (and over the next nine months) I will have accumulated quite a lot of debt related to obtaining my MBA.  Not as much debt as our mortgage, but with a higher interest rate.  During this next school year, I’m going to need to justify, for myself and for my family, that debt.  Which means, more or less, doing something positive with my career that I couldn’t have done without the piece of paper I will be handed in roughly nine months’ time.  And I have to find a way to make that pay the bills, so to speak.

Concomitant with that goal, I need to spend a little more of my free time focusing on this particular aspect of my future, and a little less on the blog.

I’ll still be posting here on a weekly basis, but I expect I’ll be down to one or two posts per week, instead of three to five.  On the temporary chopping block will be my weekly “Writing Quotes” feature – meaning Sundays will go dark.  I probably also won’t be doing many stories on Fridays.  I plan to keep doing Weekend Assignments, so I should have a post at least every Tuesday.  But beyond that, I’m not planning on doing much.

This downturn will probably continue at least until the end of September.  In the meantime, I’ll also be working in the background to slowly build up a buffer of new posts so that when I return from this “abatement” I can keep up the posting schedule while still on light-duty.

As the new Fall semester gets started, I may need to revisit this.  In the meantime, it saddens me greatly to be cutting my posts back so drastically.  But when I come back full-force, it’ll be ever-so-sweet – at least for me.

Until then, keep writing, my friends!  I’ll see you here on Tuesday.