writing about not writing

I keep thinking I’m not writing for this site, or doing any other professional writing, because I’m busy, or because I’m writing more fiction, or because I’m focused on doing instead of reflecting.

But I realized recently that when I look back at the period when I was speaking at conferences and writing a lot, and then what happened after, that maybe I don’t know anything worth saying.

I talked about getting teams to talk together about finding and sticking to their core values, and we didn’t do that process when our team changed, and while I don’t want to get into it, that was a failure.

I talked about, and wrote about, the process that we used for strategic content development, and I thought it was generally applicable. Turns out, it wasn’t, or at least, I wasn’t present enough at the right moment to figure out how to make it so.

On a very small scale, I got very hyped about Features in Drupal, and even talked about it, and then our implementation went horribly wrong…apparently in the way almost everyone’s implementation does.

And so I look at that, all the times I thought I was speaking with authority and excitement, and I can’t help but doubt.

So…I’m writing more fiction, and that’s actually pretty great. And my day-to-day is pretty busy with just doing the thing and not being theoretical about how it works. But also, I don’t know if I have the confidence to tell anyone else about pretty much anything professional. Maybe that’ll change someday.

Author: Elaine Nelson

Elaine Nelson was directionless with an English degree in the late 90s and then: GODDAMN INTERNET. In her current gig, she wrangles content and content management systems, but she's also been a Webmaster, so she's dabbled in all sorts of web work. She's an editor at The Interconnected, previously published in The Pastry Box, and once had a poem published in an anthology of GenX writing, when that was the big new thing.