I tried to write this post dozens of times over the last few months. The farthest I got was a couple of stream-of-consciousness notes on my phone, thumb-tapped out when the mood struck. Nothing complete ever came out of it.
I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching about what I want this blog to be. Over the course of the 10+ years that I’ve been blogging, I stuck mainly to entries on wine, food, theatre, arts and related areas. Those were the main topics on which I was writing for other publications over the years, and the focus of most of my spare time, so it made sense to blog about them.
But I’m not just a wine or theatre writer anymore, and I feel really constrained trying to think within the box of a particular theme for this blog. I’m keenly aware of *branding* and how, if I want to try to capture the most readers/hits on this blog, I should craft a brand and stick to it. That has always felt odious, even when I was genuinely following it, so I’m giving up the pretense of attempting that.
A few times over the last few months I thought about blogging on astrology. Yes, astrology. It has become one of my most favourite hobbies and areas of joy. I have a fairly robust set of personal pastimes that bleed over into my professional life, in that I find ways to monetize them by scoring related writing gigs, thereby justifying my continued pursuit and education in these areas. I haven’t done that with astrology – yet – and I’m trying to avoid it this time around, because I want it to stay fun and not feel like work, which happened long ago with wine and then theatre.
I’ve realized that whatever this space used to be, and whoever I used to be, this is/I am no longer that. Plus the URL on this site is my name, so it follows that what you’ll find here is me. This is my attempt to write for the sake of writing, without an ulterior motive or with an eye to advancing my own personal brand or whatever; this space is for writing about me and for me. Me, me, me! Hey, it’s 2020 – some degree of selfishness is a survival tactic at this point in the timeline.
I won’t be writing about theatre for the foreseeable future.
I’ll probably write about wine here and there. That’s how all this got started and I just can’t seem to stop it.
I might write about astrology, because I don’t think I’ll be able to stop myself.
Oh hell, let’s just go ahead and get that over with right away: today the moon conjoined Neptune in Pisces, which is my 11th house (using whole sign houses, a system that I think I’ve finally decided to adopt over Placidus or another quadrant-based house system after much hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing). Opposite that is my Virgo 5th house, which the Sun and Mercury are currently zipping through. Lately I’ve had to channel those git-er-done Sun-Mercury-Virgo energies into less 5th house topics and more into 6th and 9th house areas, as I’ve been studying for my next CEBS exam (an insurance industry certification program that I’ve been working towards for years, grudgingly). Today all those good concentration vibes got completely derailed by the dreamy, watery, I-can’t-focus-for-more-than-10-minutes-no-matter-how-much-caffeine-I-drink Moon-Neptune-Pisces energy.
So here I am, posting my first blog post in months, by making a declaration that instead of continuing to blog about a focused set of topics, I’m going to write about…something. Anything? Sure. And that, friends, is a perfect expression of this current space weather as it is hitting my natal chart (minus all the BS trouncing all over my cardinal sign houses which I’ll talk about another time, maybe).
So, hey! Maybe this is going to become an astrology blog after all. Wine and astrology. I’m sure I’m the first person in the entire world to ever put those two things together.
In all seriousness, though, this blog is going to be about a bunch of different things from now on, not just about theatre any more. If that interests you, cool. And if it doesn’t, that’s cool too. Thanks for reading until now!