It hasn't really been a secret that I've been in a rut career-wise. I've been feeling burned out, under-appreciated and generally unhappy to go to work. It felt like something was missing. When I got pregnant, the crazy hormones just  amplified those feelings.

After a lot of soul searching and serious consideration of leaving the business altogether, I think I've figured out what I've been missing - creative writing.

As a producer, I write a lot, but it's mostly rewriting or copy editing. Any original writing I do takes very little effort and I don't get any joy out of it. The writing I miss is being able to tell people's stories, the freelance projects I used to take on and the type of writing I do on this blog.

If you've been a regular follower of this blog, you've no doubt noticed that the number of posts per week and even month has dropped significantly. There are many reasons for the decrease, most recently pregnancy, and I have to admit that I wasn't really even all that concerned with getting back to blogging with more regularity ... that is until I read "30 First Dates".

I've been on a romantic comedy kick when it comes to my reading lately. Although extremely predictable, they're light-hearted and fun to read - a combination I've needed for the past several months. I wasn't expecting "30 First Dates" to offer so much inspiration. It was, in short, exactly what I needed to read.

Although it is foremost a love story, at its core "30 First Dates" is about finding yourself. Erin is a 29-year-old math teacher whose love life is a bit of a disaster. She decides to go on 30 first dates before her 30th birthday, use those dates to cross items off her bucket list and blog about the experiences. Along the way, Erin quits her teaching job to go back to school to be a journalist. Meanwhile her blog's popularity is soaring and leads to even more in terms of her professional and personal life.

Reading this book was like a kick in the pants for me. Somewhere along the way I got away from the creative writing that fulfills me. But "30 First Dates" made me realize it isn't too late to get back to that.

Step 1 - get back to blogging. On top of committing to writing two to three posts a week, I've been working on expanding the blog's presence online, sharing posts to Facebook, Twitter and Google+ (links to all 3 in the sidebar). I've also been going back through my previous posts' statistics to determine what types of posts get the most traffic. Between 2010 and 2012, thousands of people were clicking on my posts. My goal is to get back to that level of viewership and increase the number of comments. Eventually I hope to make a little money by doing this, which is why I've started using AdSense (you'll notice ads in the sidebar and at the bottom of this post).

As for the freelance projects, I've lost contact with the main source of my projects from several years ago. However, I'm researching several online ventures and reaching out to publications in my area. This will be slower to develop but I hope to have eased back into freelancing by the end of this year.

As for the telling of people's stories... well, I hope to be able to get back to doing that even sooner. Things are in the works for just that so stay tuned.