I didn’t, I promise, intend to take more than a month off from this site; I didn’t intend to take any time off at all, but if there had been a break in mind, it would have been both shorter and announced in advance. What happened, quite simply, was my new job, and its demands on my time.
It took quite a while for me to find a way to negotiate my first full time staff writing gig in more than a decade in terms of how it fits into my everyday life. I didn’t expect that in advance, I’ll be honest; I had this idea in my head that it’d simply be like being a freelancer, except that I’d only be writing for one outlet instead of multiple. Moreover, in my imagined scenario, because I’d had an ongoing staff position, I’d have new amounts of free time because I wouldn’t be looking for new gigs all the time, nor invoicing at the end of the month. Oh, what an innocent I was…!
The reality includes daily timekeeping, eight-hour workdays (plus an additional hour lunch, meaning it’s nine hours total, necessitating an earlier start time each day than before), more meetings than I’d imagined, and no shortage of training and internal communication to keep track of. I spend probably a similar amount of time writing as before, but now I have all manner of additional duties. (And, not unimportantly, additional things to think about, too.)
Add to that the fact that, for the first six weeks of my official employment, I had three different comic conventions to attend across the country — San Diego Comic-Con, followed by C2E2 in Chicago two weeks later, then Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle two weeks after that — and the reasons for my accidental absence become clearer, I suspect. I was in motion, constantly, both literally and emotionally. Things kept happening.
I’m back now, or at least I intend to be. There’s one more convention I’ll be attending in person this year (New York Comic Con, next month), and another couple I’ll be working on from the comfort of my own home, so I’m sure I’ll feel busy and overwhelmed again at times. But this is somewhere I don’t want to leave for too long, I promise. I’m sorry I was silent here for as long as I was.