New Beginnings

So much has happened since I started (and abandoned) this blog. I remember weeks when I would have gone out to 4 or 5 restaurants and had so much content to post about dining in Richmond that my only problem was finding time to write about it all. I loved this blog so much. It connected me to some great friends here in RVA, got me invited to some cool events, and was a great outlet for something that I absolutely love to do, write about stuff.

So what happened?

Life gets crazy. Especially when you are an over achieving, volunteer for everything, don’t know your limitations until you run directly in to a brick wall, kind of person. I have a lot of reasons why dining daily in Richmond no longer fits my lifestyle. I became vegetarian. I opened a business, while still working full time. And most recently (this January), I got knocked up. All of these things are awesome, but at the end of the day, when the blog went silent, something was missing. My outlet for discovering new things and sharing them was gone, and it is about time I do something about that.

Blogs can be stressful. Not soon before my blogging hiatus, this thing was really stressing me out. I would worry that I wasn’t posting consistently enough. I was stressed that my posts weren’t very good. I hated every picture I took to try to make my blog pretty. And if I didn’t get responses from readers, I felt like I was totally sucking. My blog became a thing I was using to try to impress other people and that made it not as fun.

Thinking of stuff is hard. Coming up with interesting content about a pretty specific subject, dining in Richmond, multiple times a week, is really not easy. Some weeks the creativity flows and other weeks I got nothing. I would get really bummed if I went to a restaurant that wasn’t good because then I couldn’t write about it and felt like I wasted not only my dollars, but my valuable blog research time. When my blog was my main hobby, it was easier to stay motivated to be creative, but when my schedule starting filling up, my time to think of cool stuff was fading away.

So, what happens now?

I am going to attempt a do-over, with a different goal in mind this time. I am going to:

Be realistic with my limitations. My goal is one post a week. If I am feeling fancy and have more in me to share, I will. If I don’t, I won’t stress. When I have this baby, I will probably take a break. And if my job/business/life gets busy, the blog will have to wait. My goal is not to be a professional blogger or get a book deal.

Not stress about all the extra stuff. Eventually, I will update the header, links, and blogroll on this blog. The most important word in that sentence is “eventually”. I will not worry about what a terrible photographer I am and stay away from posting pictures unless I have good ones. I will not think about SEO, blog comments, and all the other stuff that turns a fun hobby into something serious and stressful.

Use writing prompts to keep my creativity flowing. I will write about things that I want to read about that most of the time will have nothing to do with eating in fancy restaurants. I put together a list of 52 topics and will pick one every week, so that I don’t get burned out of one particular subject.

Let’s see how this goes…

This week’s topic: “Getting Started”