Venial Sin

About a million words, somewhere in the realm of ten thousand comments, four years, seventeen billion crying jags, thirty-eight distinct dramatic moments, a dozen-odd close new friends, twenty-nine “you said WHAT about me?” confrontations, a hundred and some rethinks, eleven panicky e-mails to support staff to undo changes, four botched backup attempts, six thousand agonised (and agonising) phone calls to some very patient friends, innumerable IM conversations, and just about as many telephone calls. Not to mention the week spent feeling phantom pain from closing this down.

We’re done here people.

But I may just get bored one day and come back on. Until then though, I don’t really have much else to say.

See you.

My hosting and domain name contract expire in about a week or two, and right now, I’m thinking of simply shutting down the blog. Votes aside, a number of things have contributed to this, and I’ve been struggling with the idea for the last year or so.

I don’t know if any of that conflict reflected in the blog itself, I’m too close to home as far as this issue goes to really address it with any accuracy, but there’s been a growing sense of disenchantment and other such fun experiences, and all of them basically lead me down the same garden-path: this blog should just come to an end. Protestations aside, that makes me really fucking sad. Four years is a pretty long time; it’s certainly longer than I’ve held any one job, and giving up Venial Sin is going to be a little bit like amputating a limb (if you’ll forgive the melodrama).

But at the risk of stretching the analogy just a wee bit too far, when something reaches a point at which it’s septic, you cut it off. I’m done with people presuming to know/judge/criticise me on the basis of this little portion of my life, I’m tired of actually thinking that I have to base what I write on what I assume people will think, and I’m really not happy with how strangers or acquaintances take what I’ve written–and without a shred of decency–spread it to the known universe, thereby leaving me stranded with awkward moments (an example would be back when someone who knew the Guy from back in January of this year went up to him and babbled on about how I’d been writing all about him–even more embarrassing if the person isn’t actually the object of my affection, but you get the drift–and the only plausible way for that to have happened would be through this site).

Like I said in the post before this one, I’m not going to stop writing. I am going to write something different, and what that different something is, I haven’t a clue yet. Maybe it’ll be my first attempts at a novel, or a collection of short stories, or just more “blog” stuff, I haven’t got the foggiest. I may well wind up spending hours on end composing passages about Ellen, her damn’ dog and Benazir Bhutto, that remains to be seen. But I think I would like to perhaps start writing that long-elusive novel, and see how it comes along.

This is probably pretty self-defeating, but I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have met a number of wonderful people via this site (there are more, but I’ve run out of words through which to link ‘em), both in real-life and “online” (which is pretty real in any case now), so for those of you who would like, drop me an e-mail at {sin} a.t. [venialsin]{.}com and I’ll most likely be happy to provide you with the link to the new site. This is probably not the most effective way to drop out of sight, but at the very least it’ll ensure that–to begin with–only the people I really want to, have access to what I do/say/feel.

I’ve dithered on long enough (I’ve been trying to write this for about a month so far). It’s been an…experience, certainly.

So yeah.

Bye.

I realised something a few nights ago when talking to a friend who bounces between continents the way most people commute to work.

I don’t much like blogging any more.

It’s not the comments (a lot of the hate-filled ones I delete anyway, because I’m just tired of getting into flame-wars with random prats), or that I’m looking for some sort of affirmation (“Oh do keep blogging, don’t ever stop!”). It’s that I’m not doing it for the same reasons that I originally began, which weren’t all too clear to begin with, and only got more complicated over time.

You’ve got to acknowledge you have an issue when your Technorati score is a prime mover of how your day is going to unfold (i.e. with a good attitude or a terrible one).
Read the rest of this entry »