The Near Death of a Blog

It’s been nearly a year since the last update to this blog. In that time, things have been… crazy. I needed time away to try simply to survive. Well, since I’m writing this, I obviously survived.

What happened: I work at a public university in an, um, ‘upper middle management’ position. With the recession, we’ve been experiencing budget cut after budget cut after budget cut. I’ve worked my hardest to keep my staff from feeling the brunt of the cuts. For the most part I succeeded until August 2011 when it became my office’s time to take a cut and I had to lay off the supervisor of a critical (and very stressful) office. At the same time, we also had to lay off others in the overall unit and I ended up having to pick up a lot of the slack. Considering we had already had staff reductions (made by not filling positions when people retired or left), that translated into ‘a lot of slack.’

Those of you who know me personally, know that my position is already an amalgamation of multiple other positions that have been vacated. The joke around the office is how many different hats I wear. Well, this time, it reached the tipping point, and I had to go ‘underground,’ so to speak, at least as far as Ray Gun Reviews was concerned. I fell off the radar, big time.

It’s now a year later and things are as bad as ever, but I’m thinking I can make a go of this again. I make no guarantees, but I’m hoping soon (in the next week or so) to get some reviews written up and queued. For now, my goal is to review whatever I happen to be reading in the genre, whether it be new or old. As usual, I’ll space the reviews out to one per week, unless I get quite a backlog (hah!). However, if I get to a doorstop of a book, there might not be a review that week if I don’t get through a book. If things get too busy and I don’t get time to write… no review. You get the picture.

But, I’m looking forward to getting back into the reviews. If I can keep it consistent, I might even beg and plead with the Ray Gun Revival Overlords to spare my puny blog and reinstate the column in the mothership.