Well it's official, I took a full year off from writing this blog. I didn't take a year off of writing, almost the opposite, I wrote a ton over the last year, just not here.
So why did I stop writing my blog?
It all started when I decided I just wasn't passionate about writing about domain names any more. I spent over a decade writing almost daily about domains and while I'm still an investor and incredibly bullish about the asset class, it's just not something I have fun writing about.
So I switched to another passion of mine, Astrophysics, but quickly learned this was a topic I was a lot more interested in reading about than writing about.
At the same time, I started to become interested in writing fiction, and not publicly but just for myself. I realized that I didn't have enough time to write my blog and write for myself, so I decided to shut the blog down.
And by shutting it down I mean I actually pointed the domain away from it bringing my traffic down to zero. At first it felt a bit weird, but honestly, it was freeing, I could wake up in the morning and just write, not about domains, not about startups or investing, but instead come up with stories in strange SciFi universes.
I've learned a lot about myself over the last year, and I'll likely share more over time here on my blog. One of the key lessons I learned that I'll share now is that I love writing, but it's no something I think I always need to share with the world. Sometimes I just want to write for the sake of writing, and doing that has been incredibly satisfying.
Isaac Asimov has been my favorite writer for some time now and in my journey as a writer I've gone deeper into understand him both as a person and a creative artist. The world building and character development that Asimov has done in books like Foundation and Caves of Steel is second-to-none, he had a gift, and I've been re-reading some of his books for the second time and getting even more out of them.
For those who read this blog for years, or maybe even a decade or more, you know that there was a time where I had lots of sponsors and was pumping out an article a day. I even reached a point where my blog was generating over $100,000 a year in revenue. You'd think this would make anyone happy, but for me, the pressure of writing that much and the connection between writing and money really stripped the enjoyment out of the whole experience.
During COVID I learned that I'm more introverted than I ever thought. I love just being by myself in a softly lit room writing. And not writing about domains or investing, but writing about the future, about vast expansive worlds that could be and the way we as a species will grow and develop over time. In many ways, writing allows me to combine my passion for space and astrophysics with the creativity that lives inside me.
The challenge we have in modern society, and really dating back long before modern society is that so much of what we do, we do for money. There's something so pure about writing, about creating, and doing it because telling stories is an incredibly powerful thing.
Since the caveman, humans, as a species have been captivated by storytelling. Somewhere along the journey these stories started to worth money and today from more traditional mediums like TV and Film, or interactive mediums like Video Games, storytelling is a big business.
Over the last year we've seen Hollywood Writers and Actors go on strike, two core pieces of the storytelling puzzle struggling to find their way in the brave new world we find ourselves in. As a profession, writing or being a part of a story is harder than ever, very few make enough to do it full time, but so many people love it so much, they dedicate their lives to it.
I see the next decade as a time where storytelling changes dramatically, both in how we tell stories and how consumers view and interact with them. I'm excited to watch this evolution and hopefully be a part of it in some way. But for now I'm just going to enjoy writing mostly for myself.
Which now leads me to this blog. It's been a year, I finally write a post, and the post probably has nothing to do with anything anyone who has read my blog for years would be interested in.
That's okay - life is about change and this blog is going to change, exactly how, I'm not sure, all I know is after a year I'm writing this post, where it goes from here we'll just have to see. I have no plans to have sponsors or advertisers again, and there's also no way I'm going to ramp back up to a post a day.
But I am going to do something here, and if you keep coming back, you'll be able to witness the rebirth of my blog and its evolution. I can't promise you'll like it, but I can promise that a journey, in many ways I thought was over, was probably only just beginning.
To all my readers around the world, especially those of you who have been reading for a decade or longer, thank you. To all the new readers who made it down this far, thank you. Here's to the journey ahead.
