Second star to the right, and straight on 'til morning

In recent months, a certain feeling of ennui has crept into my brain, and it's set up camp on the blog. It's hard not to notice it: my posting has been more infrequent, my commentary less interesting, and my traffic has accordingly been, well, just less. I'm finding myself with fewer and fewer things to say.

Some might say that this is inevitable after more than four years of blogging, and maybe it is. This is probably the reason so many bloggers eventually end up leaving Blogistan entirely -- but I don't know. I've seen lots of bloggers quit blogging, but I've also seen plenty who closed one blog and then returned some time later with a different one. So what happened?

The problem for me, I've realized, is that I'm doing too much sitting at the computer and robotically clicking links, and too little actual engaging with, you know, the stuff that used to fuel my work here. Not enough reading books, not enough listening to music, not enough walking in the park, not enough writing.

So what does this mean for Byzantium's Shores? Well, being perfectly honest, I have considered closing the blog down. I wouldn't do a "Thanks folks, but that's it and I'm done" post, but I'd have announced a date for closure -- a timetable for pulling my troops out of Blogistan, you might say -- and tried to end up with a group of posts summing things up and closing it out. I even picked out a poem that would have served as my final post. (For a lark, ten points to the reader who correctly guesses which poem I was going to use.)

But the problem there is that I know myself, and I know that I can't shut up. And I love having this outlet for things to say; it's why I launched the blog in the first place. So if I'm not closing the blog, what am I doing?

I'm going to listen to more music. I'm going to read more books. I'm going to go for walks. I'm going to write more. Not here, necessarily -- I'm going to write at my other desk, the actual writing desk, on paper, using my fountain pens. I'm going to start reading blogs through my long-underused BlogLines account, and I'm going to start using a timer to limit the amount of time I spend sitting in front of the machine and clicking my way around the Interweb.

So yeah, I'll be posting less frequently in the future. New material might appear here only two or three times a week, as opposed to four or five. But hopefully that material will be better. It won't be "all long essays, all the time"; I'm sure that I'll still get in the playful mood to just link stuff with short comment every so often. The regular features here, Sentential Links and the Sunday Burst of Weirdness, will stick around. (Yeah, the Image of the Week is pretty much dead, mainly because I just kept forgetting to do it.) I will still designate certain beautiful women for ROWR! status once or twice a month; I will still occasionally wax poetic about Star Wars and cyber-stalk George Lucas; come fall I will still take time every Monday to vent my frustrations about the Bills' offensive line and lambaste the Stupid Patriots; I'll still trawl YouTube for funky videos and make vague references to questionable non-desert uses for whipped cream. In short, I'll still be offering the occasional meditations that one would expect from an overgrown hippie who is just discovering the joys of hand tools and who thinks life would be perfect if he could wear overalls all the time.

So anyway, that's the plan.