This should feel significant. There should be a wind whipping across a darkened plain, a crack of thunder in the cloudy skies above, a dark and battered figure striding dramatically across the landscape, and a narrator (preferably James Earl Jones, if we can afford him) intoning something dramatic and portentous. 

But instead, it’s just me with an iPad and a bluetooth keyboard on my lap, attempting to put into words why, after a gap of nearly three years, I’m resurrecting my blog. The simple answer is that as I’m currently redesigning and sprucing up my site (with lots of help from my girlfriend), it seems sensible to also give blogging another go – I notched up nearly five years of regular output over at my blog’s previous home of Livejournal, and the full history of that blog has been imported here. It’s all available, even the stuff that charts some of the more difficult times in my life circa 2008-2009, and I’ll be blogging here on a semi-regular basis. 

I haven’t been completely silent on the blogging front. In 2011, I had a go at doing a full-on review blog called Schizopolitan, and I’m still proud of my output there, but I never quite got the balance right, and the kind of site I wanted to do would have taken *way* too much work. It’s hard to do a sharp, professional, regular website when you’re having to do 95% of the work yourself. I burned myself out on Schizopolitan, and while I am going to be posting occasional pieces and thoughts up there, my life as a full-on comics blogger is kind of over.

It isn’t the case here, though. I’ve had some ups and downs over the last three years, and one of the reasons I wanted to start blogging again is so I can talk more about the process. The mechanics of writing are something that interest the hell out of me, and I want to try and get my thoughts on it down in a way that’ll hopefully make sense. 

There’ll be advice, but it’ll be broad, helpful advice – the kind that someone with some serious confidence problems has found useful and/or informative. Writing’s a weird life, and I feel like I want to record some of what I’ve been going through. For posterity. For analysis. For the hell of it.

So, welcome to my blog. The full site is still being constructed at the moment – you’re welcome to have a poke around, but there are things that don’t quite work yet (and the look of the site will soon be having a complete overhaul – the current look is an off-the-shelf WordPress theme which will very soon be changing). If you’re one of the handful of people who used to follow Crawling from the Wreckage on Livejournal, then welcome back to my blog. If you’re new, it’s nice to meet you – please feel free to say hello. Make yourself comfortable. Help yourself to the Twiglets. And I hope you enjoy the ride.