"I really ought to start writing again." It's something I've said many a time, and each time nothing ever really seems to come of it. For whatever reason, I seem to have mostly lost my motivation to write.
I think there are a couple of reasons for this. First, now that I'm out of college, I'm no longer really having active conversations about politics or anything like that. I still follow the news, and I'll occasionally make a comment or two, but for the most part I've become passive on that front, and it did seem to have been most of my writing. Another factor, also related to being out of college, is that I don't have to write anything. There are no essays to be done, no columns to write for The Stute, so writing is no longer a natural part of my routine.
I can't say I'm really too happy with it though. I like to write, and there have been plenty of times that I've sat down with time allocated for nothing but writing, and come away with nothing. It's more than a little disappointing to read back through some of my older entries, especially things that took about five minutes to write, with no prompting, and find yourself unable to get back into that same mode.
The problem has been more general than just writing, though; for quite some time, I hadn't really done any coding either, which is another thing I like to do. I'd have a day or two where I'd take a little bit of time and fix a couple of bugs in some of my projects, but it was rare for me to spend any time on new development and rarer still for me to show any progress in it. Lately, though, I've been a lot more productive. I finished a major upgrade to my bookmarks script (which also provided my first exposure to developing something to use AJAX) and I'm just now finishing up an entirely new image gallery to replace the current poorly-designed and written solution. I've got a couple of other things in the pipeline, like a redesign (or perhaps a first design) for this site. I'm hesitant to schedule anything, though, because I seem to get most of my coding done while at work, and it's unpredictable how much free time I'll have at any point in the future.
As far as writing goes, I'm definitely going to lay off politics for a while. I've definitely got an acute case of "outrage fatigue", and really, there aren't any points that I can make that thousands of other people aren't also making, with about the same significance. Considering that my life is fairly boring, I'm not sure that I'll be able to provide anything of interest from that, so I'm not exactly sure what future content may be. I am hoping to start writing about photography (which some might say is like "dancing about architecture"), primarily because that's what I'm most captivated with at the moment, and I think that being openly critical of myself (as opposed to just deleting the not-good-enough photos without too much reflection) will do some good.