Doing It Wrong

For the last few months, I've been a strange combination of busy and mentally blocked. In the summer and fall, I was concentrating on my work for my contract position (which has since ended) while doing a few portrait shoots in my free time, plus a few informal events. I always forget about how time-intensive the editing process is, though, and the combination of an aging computer, general mental fog after work, and a cat that repeatedly jumps on my keyboard means there's sometimes a long delay before I get the shots ready for other eyes to look at.  It's sometimes longer if I see the pictures I took at an event or shoot didn't turn out as expected; it discourages me from wanting to work on the raw images. I regularly forget that I am getting better but just need to play around more.

I'm reading more these days. It's due to a combination of seeking something that resonates with me and forcing myself to finally examine work I've always been curious about. I sometimes wonder what I absorb out of the books I go through, and whether I have the focus, discipline or talent to come up with something longer than a blog post. I don't mean this in a self-pitying way; it's more a fundamental re-evaluation of where my priorities lay, especially now that I'm in my 30s, working full-time, and realizing how finite time is as a resource.

To be honest, writing got away from me. I've mentioned my writer's block before, but it was getting to the point where anything I came up with made me angry. I would write entire drafts of posts, decide nothing was salvageable, and delete the whole thing. I had to consciously step away from the idea of writing anything for a while. Even composing an e-mail to an old friend is a long, difficult process. When I post here, I wonder whether I'm actually putting the work into it, or if I'm just trying to keep up appearances.

All this to say that I still don't know what this site's supposed to be about.