personal blog

When You Have Nothing to Blog About: A Late-Night Honest Look at Writer’s Block

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

It’s 10pm, and I have nothing to write about. Not “nothing interesting”. Nothing. A blank where blog ideas should be.

I know the stakes of skipping tonight. Miss one day, and missing the next becomes easy. Then the day after. Then suddenly it’s the end of the month and I haven’t published a single word. So here I am, writing about having nothing to write about. Which, if you’re a blogger, especially a personal blogger like me, is probably one of the most relatable things you’ll read all week.

The honest truth about a “boring” life and blogging

Here’s my reality: I go to work. I come home. I sleep. Months pass without me leaving the house for anything other than those two destinations. I don’t even do the grocery run anymore, my husband handles it. Work. Home. Sleep. Repeat. You can see how that’s not exactly fertile ground for content creation.

And yet here’s the strange thing…I used to be a prolific blogger/journaler. As a teenager, I filled journal after journal. Handwritten, no internet, nowhere near as “eventful” a life as I have now. And I never ran out of things to say. My life was just as uneventful, arguably more so, and I wrote as though every day was worth documenting in full.

I wrote as if my life were the most interesting thing in the world. What changed?

The real reason writer’s block hits harder as we get older

I think I’ve landed on something. Teenage me wasn’t writing about what happened. She was writing about what might happen. Hopes. Plans. Dreams she was still building toward. The future was open and full of possibility, and that possibility was endlessly interesting to explore on paper.

Now? The future has arrived. And some of those plans didn’t pan out the way I expected. It’s harder to write with the same breathless wonder when you’re no longer looking forward to an unknown life because you’re living the known one.

That’s not hopeless, by the way. It’s just different. And maybe the work now is finding that same sense of meaning in the ordinary that younger me found so naturally.

So what do you do when you have nothing to blog about?

Tonight, my answer is: you write exactly this. You write the struggle. The blank screen. The 10pm desperation. The surprising philosophical detour about hope and aging and what it means to document a life.

Turns out, “I have nothing to write about” is itself something to write about.

As for the rest of tonight, I’m signing off for a long hot bath and a book. I’m torn between the horror ARC I’m working through and a possum shifter romance I picked up on Kindle Unlimited. (Yes, that’s a real genre. Yes, I’m reading it. No, I’m not sorry.)

Then bed. Because I really am a thrill a minute.

Do you ever blog through the blank? If you’ve ever stared down writer’s block and published anyway — or have your own theory about why we run dry — I’d love to hear it in the comments. And if you have a nighttime ritual more exciting than mine, please share. The bar is genuinely on the floor.

The 3am Lie (And What the Sun Shows)

/ Winona Morris / 10 Comments

Yesterday was April Fool’s Day, and the universe took that personally.

My body decided to mark the occasion with a hormonal symphony (the kind that only people with uteruses truly understand) and paired it, generously, with a manic peak. Then I forgot to take my melatonin. So 2am, 3am, and even 5am found me flat on my back, blinking at the ceiling, drafting blog entries in my head and mentally crafting things I’ll never actually make.

Every time I drifted off, my brain jolted me back awake like it had something very important to say.

It did not.

Somewhere in those restless hours, I was struck by a profound and generous thought: I should embrace life’s circumstances. Take the bad, alchemize it into good. Lean in.

Nighttime lies to you like that.

There’s something about the dark, whether you’re in pain, sick, sleepless, or just running on scrambled brain chemistry, that warps your perception in both directions. When you’re suffering at 3am, everything feels catastrophic and permanent. But when your mind is buzzing with too much serotonin at midnight, you feel invincible. You feel chosen. You draft manifestos. You solve problems. You decide, with full conviction, that you are finally going to become the person you were always meant to be.

Then the sun comes up.

And the sun is honest in a way the night never is.

In the daylight, the catastrophes of 3am shrink back to their actual size so they feel more manageable, ordinary, and survivable. But the grand plans? The invincibility? That shrinks too. The world, it turns out, does not reorganize itself around your 3am epiphanies. The world just keeps going, indifferent and unimpressed, and now you have to put on pants and participate in it while running on three hours of sleep and whatever is left of your dignity.

Last night, the world was my oyster.

This morning, my neighbor’s dog will not stop barking, and I am fantasizing about consequences.

The gap between the 3am visionary and the 9am wreckage is one of the more humbling places to live. But maybe that’s the actual insight that survived the night: you don’t have to be the person who has it all figured out in the dark. You just have to be the person who shows up when the sun comes up anyway.

Pants and everything.

Rebelling Against December (Softly, With a Blanket)

/ Winona Morris / Leave a comment

Happy December 2nd, Wildlings.

It doesn’t snow where I live, but today the sky is a soft grey bruise, and the rain is tapping its tiny fingers against the windows. It’s the kind of day that begs you to burrow under your favorite blanket with a warm drink. (I’ve got a mug of Brooklyn Beans Black and White Cookie coffee beside me, in my “Death before Decaf” mug.)

I’ll admit December and I are not on speaking terms. Over the decades retail work sanded away whatever holiday sparkle I had left. After so many years of watching shoppers melt down over shopping carts and wrapping paper, the season feels less like cheer and more like a test of endurance. There are kind exceptions, but they grow fewer each year. And every year, I retreat a little farther from the festivities.

So lately, instead of leaning into the holiday machine, I look past it—toward January. A new year. A reset button. A chance to change everything, or change nothing at all.

This December, I’m choosing underconsumption. Purging instead of piling on. I’ll buy gifts for my kids and my husband, of course, but mostly I’m staring down my own clutter. The empty jars I saved for “someday crafts.” The hole-filled work shirts waiting to become rags. The storage shed full of objects I’m convinced “Future Me” will definitely use for something.

But honestly? I’m drowning in things. And you can’t welcome the new if both arms are wrapped around the old.

So this December, I’m letting go. Releasing. Making space for whatever the new year wants to bring in.

What about you, wildlings—what are you ready to release?

Merging my Split Personalities

/ Winona Morris / 4 Comments

Ko-Fi Makeover

Today I spent several hours editing graphics for my Ko-fi page.

In the past I have kept switching back and forth from it being for my crafts to it being for my writing. Back and forth, over and over. Decisions are hard, and we’ve concluded already that I lack the ability to niche down at all. So today I decided that there, like here, I’m just going to stop trying to squeeze my square peg into a round hole.

Ko-fi is a site where you can take “tips” or “donations,” but it is much more than that. You can set it up like a patreon with hidden content for paid members. You can also open a shop there, which is something I hope to utilize to my advantage. The shop lets you sell both physical and digital items. So if I do decide to go digital with my mail club when I get it figured out then I’ll probably do it through there.

I can also use it to sell ebooks in the future if I so wish.

For now I plan to use it as one of the places I’m going to try to sell the things I craft, to help generate money not only for more craft supplies, but for further publications.

WIP Wednesday

Speaking of crafts, I have a few I’m working on that I need to get a move on. Right here is a SMALL cross stitch of a mushroom that I should be almost done with by now…but I kind of keep just not working on it.

Other Works in Progress include:

  • Tracing/carving some images onto/into rubber blocks for block printing.
  • Removing the sleeves from a torn t-shirt and using it as my first print on fabric test.
  • Work on/finish the diamond art that I’ve been working on for literal YEARS so I can move on to the next one I want to work on.
  • Make the large coaster I told my son I would make just for him to hold his chicken nugget plates on.
  • Finish the frog I have a commission for.
  • Get Settled into my new journal.

Chaos Journal

I have finished Chaos Journal #4 (the one on the left) and will be moving into #5 (the one one the right) today.

A chaos journal is sort of a beast of my own invention. A lot of journals have journal ecosystems, where they have a different book for every kind of journal they keep. I was trying to do that as well, only to find that I just….stopped journaling altogether.

So a Chaos Journal to me is an amalgamation of all the other journals I would like to keep. Dream journaling, book reviews, Commonplace notebooks, junk journaling, daily journaling, art journaling, bullet journaling, they all go into this one book.

It is handy to have all my brainstorming ideas in one spot when I want to remember something, and it is also fun to watch how the journal changes as I use it over time.

To be loved is to be changed.

Lastly for today, this is the social media link image I made for my Ko-fi today. I think it’s cute. I’m thinking of making a smaller one as a signature to sign off my different types of blog entries I might write.

One Year Later

/ Winona Morris / 9 Comments

How odd, my friends, that it has been a year exactly since I last sat down and wrote here. This wasn’t planned, I just noticed it as I sat down to write.

“Nobody reads personal blogs anymore”, I’d tell myself. “If you’re just going to be talking to yourself, what’s the point? You can do that on all of your social medias.”

There have been several times in the past year that I thought about writing. I’ve even gone as far as to open WordPress and stare longingly at the blank screen. Inevitably I always convinced myself to not post anything after all.

At which point I’d go back to my social medias and scream into the void. I do seem to spend a lot of time on Facebook for someone who never gets much engagement unless she’s complaining about something.

I’m tired of always complaining about something.

It is past time I reconnect with the Cozy part of my Feral Coziness.

REWIND

I accomplished a few things in the past year.

Through most of 2024 I was entering a monthly flash fiction contest, and through most of that time I placed in the top 5 every contest, even getting grand prize twice. The winnings, and the positive feedback I kept getting on my entries really reignited my passion for writing. And writing used to be THE passion in my life.

So, in November of 2024 I put out a collection of short stories. I had been talking about it off and on for years, and one day I decided to quit talking about it, to quit making excuses as to why I hadn’t done it yet, and just did it. And that started a pleasant chain of events.

Putting out On Darkened Wings and Other Short Horrors turned into me finally being brave enough to submit work to other anthologies and a couple of them were accepted. That in turn led to be being asked to write something for an invite only anthology. Then I was invited to join The Butchered Writers, a horror writers group that I had been stalking reading for several anthologies.

So, between November 2024 and October 2025 my work had ended up in 9 anthologies, with more to come for sure.

In non-writing related news, I started a new medication in May for my diabetes. I had been on metformin for a while and it wasn’t having the effect on my A1C that my doctor wanted.

A common side effect of this medicine is weight loss, and lose weight I have. I’ve lost enough weight to create a 7 year old child. 60 pounds in 5 months is no small feat. Of course, it is because this medicine has kept me horribly sick in every possible way for the past 5 months, but.. the good news is that my blood sugar seems to be pretty stable about where it ought to be so hopefully I can ease off ALL my meds soon.

CURRENTLY

My left hand is itching like crazy today. That means fortune is coming my way, right? Goodness knows I could use some. I have about $8 to my name right now.

I do have a lot of irons in the fire right now, though most of them are non paying, so I don’t see wealth coming from them any time soon. But lets see what I’m up to:

1. I’m putting together Bushy-Tailed Demons, a collection of squirrel themed horror stories. – It started as a novella (in progress) by me, and I’ve decided to make it into an anthology with some of my author friends.
2. I still need to finish 2 articles for The Butchered Writers webpage.
3. I need to get a couple of stories finished for the 31 SHORT STORIES being offered on the Butchered Writers webpage in October. That’s like a whole collection for the price of NOTHING.
4. I’ve got a frog commission to do, and I need to make a couple more frogs to put up for adoption aside from that.

LOOKING FORWARD

First and foremost I want to start blogging again. Not as self promotion, or to monetize, but because I used to have a lot of fun blogging, and damnit, I want to have fun blogging again. I want to talk about the books I’m reading, the crafts I’m making, the life I’m living and maybe….just maybe…I’ll find a secret tribe of personal bloggers to share my life with along the way.

I’m also hoping to work crafting/creating back into my life somehow. I don’t know how because I’m ALWAYS at work, but somehow. Right now I want to start making block prints on cards and clothes, and hopefully open a shop online again….etsy or Depop or storenvy or something somewhere.

I also haven’t given up on the idea of doing a newsletter type deal. I just can’t decide if I want it to be done digital as a PDF download, or if I want it to be more physical and mail it myself. Or if I want a combination of both. That might be a 2026 thing though, as I can’t get the logistics worked out in my head right now.