Back At It

So it’s been nearly a year. A year. A year in which this neglected blog has been left fallow- a fact both embarrassing and unacceptable to someone like myself, for whom consistency is right behind godliness and just ahead of cleanliness on the personal-values index.

To me, a year of non-posting smells like a year of of neglected trash. Looks like a year of collected dust, tastes like a year of stale Nescafe. But enough with the shame and remorse. To be fair, it’s been a pretty busy year.

I got married.

Before getting married, I participated in that frantic rite of passage Americans call “planning a wedding” which, despite my best of intentions, did end up consuming 42.5% of my brain (which seems bizarre and unfair now that I realize I can’t remember any of my hard-earned knowledge about peony varietals).  You win, bridal-industrial complex.

I took a sumptuous Italian honeymoon.

I finally fixed the leak in my roof ($4k later it turned out to be nothing a hurricane sock couldn’t fix, but an emotional victory nonetheless) and we can enjoy the view with a little less angst.

Professionally, I tried something new. When I resigned from my full-time magazine job 18 months ago, part of my rationale was that there was a digital revolution going on in media and I had best go out and seek it on my own terms. I figured this could be a fun side hobby while I developed a rich and fulfilling career as a full-time freelance writer. The (hopelessly naive) adage “do you what you love and the money will follow” might be better phrased in this case “do you what you love only to realize no one pays for it anymore so do whatever you can with your skills which are growing more archaic by the day.” Which is how I found myself with a steady (paid!) contract gig with the New York Stock Exchange as a “digital strategy consultant,” a title which later evolved into more of a producer/editor role for a new network of NYSE Euronext-branded consumer-facing sites.

I’m considering it as tantamount to a year in business school with a new media concentration- partly because I learned a tremendous amount (more on that later) and partly because I have to somehow justify to myself a year of not writing much. I hate writing but I hate not writing more.

And yes- learning. I never thought I would understand the stark distinction between Project Managers and Product Managers. The philosophies behind Waterfall and Agile in the software development process. Why there is a critical dearth of Drupal developers in NYC and the argument against Ruby on Rails (“SO not scalable”). “Dev” does not mean me and “Prod” is not a request to shove over. And maybe most confounding of all, a “story” is not what you think. Not even close. But that’s another post entirely.

So yes, a lot was learned on the job in the past year and it’s all coming with me into Phase 2 of my freelance career. If Nov. 2009 to April 2010 was beta, then today we are launched.

And lest I forget to mention perhaps the very best part of this busy year: my new niece Gabriele Grae, born September 14, 2010.