I'm back.

Hi everyone ! It’s been awhile since I posted anything. I’m really sorry about that. Life has been crazy, but that’s not really an excuse, is it? Life has been crazy before, and I still managed to post. Honestly, I’ve been suffering from an acute case of writer’s block. I don’t normally plan out my blog posts. I usually just sit down at my computer and start typing away. That’s why my early blog posts were nothing but spelling and grammar errors. I’ve slowly learned that proofreading is a bloggers best friend. For the last two weeks, every time I sit down to post something nothing comes out. It’s really frustrating. The most frustrating thing about it is that I have no idea where it’s coming from. I’ve never had this problem before. So, I spent some time thinking about it, trying to figure out what’s happening and I think I finally figured it out. I got caught up in the whole blogging thing. You know the thing. Popularity. The world of food blogging is like high school. You’ve got the head cheerleader in Smitten Kitchen; the class president in 101 Cookbooks; and of course the most popular girl in school, Pioneer Woman. And I’m the awkward girl with glasses and braces who’s always looking in from the outside trying to hang out with the cool kids. See, in the movies, the awkward girl usually only takes about 40-50 minutes before she becomes the new hot girl. And that’s kind of what I expected. That my blog would take the internet by storm, and within months I would be the new hot girl, the new Pioneer Woman. Wow, I was stupid.

This isn’t the movies, it’s the internet. Things don’t work that way. As with anything else in life, you have to put in the work, and 6 months of blogging isn’t work. I mean, it’s work. But when you come right down to it, what I’ve done over the last 6 months doesn’t come CLOSE to what Pioneer Woman and Smitten Kitchen have been doing for years. So I came to realize that I need to just suck it up, and put in the time and the work required to get this blog where I want it to go. It’s not going to just magically happen overnight.

This post might strike some people as kind of whiny. The reason I say that is because as I write it, I’m hearing it in my head, and to my own ears (or “mind ears” I guess, since I’m not reading it out loud) it sounds whiny. And God knows I don’t mind sounding whiny in real life but on the internet, I hate it. I figure there are enough people out there whining about their lives, you probably don’t need to read anymore. But the reason I started this blog originally was to basically let my mom see what I was making for dinner each night, and I just got caught up in it. How many page views did I get, how many subscribers do I have, and why did that person unsubscribe from my blog? Is TasteSpotting going to accept my picture, and why didn’t they accept my picture, my picture is at least as good as that other one that’s on there. I was concentrating so hard on trying to make my blog popular that it just stopped being fun. And if something like this stops being fun after only 6 months, then something is really wrong. I was trying to copy what was working for other people, and that never works. In the words of the great Tyra Banks (don’t laugh she’s awesome) "if you’re going to copy someone, you have to do it better than they do." And I wasn’t doing that. So, I’m going to get back to doing it for fun. I’m going to write what I want to write, not what I think people may want to read --- if people like it, great. And if not, well, I’m pretty sure my mom will still read this, even if no one else does. Love you, Mom.

Now, on to more foodie type things.

I haven’t been posting these past few weeks, but I have been cooking and baking. There’s a lot of really delicious stuff coming up in the near future. The blog has gotten a face lift, and I'm totally in love with my look. Also, I’ll be having my very first giveaway in the next few days, so stay tuned for that!

See you on the flip side!