So, um, hey. How ya been? Uh, yeah, it *has* been a while and that’s… kind of a funny story. See, I didn’t mean to take a year + hiatus from this blog. In fact, I didn’t mean to take a hiatus at all. And since the last thing I posted was about me possibly closing my eBay store you probably thought I fell off the face of the earth, didn’t you?

Well, here’s what actually happened. I decided not to close my eBay store and then didn’t queue up any more posts here because I was about to absolutely bombard you with new content as soon as I got the A-OK. See, I took a job as in house blogger for an e-commerce company where I was writing them multiple articles a month. These were long, more in-depth articles than I usually got the chance to do here so I planned to do shorter pieces here on the same topic and direct you to those articles for a more detailed take. It was a solid plan and meant plenty of content here for months to come.

Except the A-OK kept getting delayed. And delayed. Even now, a year later, they are still holding months and months of articles I wrote for them at the ready for when their new product launches. On one hand, I’ve already been paid for them so it doesn’t really matter to me when they post them but, on the other hand, it really mucked up my master plan.

In the meantime, shortly after my last post here, my fiction career had another upswing and I was buried under deadlines. I wrote about this here but the TL;DR was that, while I had an incredibly stressful summer… I pulled it all off which helped me slay my own personal writing White Whale and made me feel like I leveled up. All in all, I put out 10 plays last year and made significant progress on even more so I never stopped writing, even when it wasn’t happening here. As I talked about back in this post, now that my fiction makes more than my non-fiction, I really have to give those opportunities a higher priority when they come up.

While that was all going on, we had to very quickly pack up our home of nearly eleven years and stage it to sell. We had to find a new house and move, pronto, because we were expecting a new edition to the family! Long story short, old house sold, we’re getting settled into new house and baby is here and she is adorable! Getting there involved so much real estate drama I never want to move again but it’s for the best because there’s much more room for the kiddos to stretch out where we are now.

So, I was blogging for the vault, basically, and beasting out an impossible amount of fiction, house hunting, dealing with real estate stupidness, packing up a decade of my life while chasing a toddler and super pregnant and all the while I was aware that there was a big fat nothing on this blog but it was not exactly my highest priority. And the more time passed without a post here, the more awkward it got and things were so crazy anyway I was like, haha, it’s fine, what’s another month without a post? Until here we are.

And now I’m back! Sort of. I still have a fiction career that takes presence for the time being and a newborn that’s cutting into my time for, well, everything. Because of the move, there are so few items in my eBay store right now it’s embarrassing. But I am going to start posting here somewhat regularly again. In the short term, that’s going to mean more timeless stuff and less hot takes on breaking news until my schedule normalizes. I have no idea when I’ll be able to share those posts I wrote last year with you but, in the meantime, I’ve got the rest of the eBay Marketing Makeover series and a few other things I wrote during the last year but felt silly posting without some kind of explanation for the long and unannounced hiatus.

I have lots of cool plans for The Whine Seller in the future but, if the last year has taught me anything, life laughs at your plans so you might as well go with the flow! If you’re still here and reading, I thank you so very much for sticking with me all these years and hope we’ve got plenty of whining and complaining yet to do in the future. I will try not to drop off the face of the earth for that long ever again!

Now, let’s get back down to whining and selling!