It is finished.

And yet it's just beginning.

Last night was the last Sunday night I'll ever spend poring over The Vanguard, the student newspaper at the University of South Alabama that has owned me for almost the past three years. And it all came to a close last night with the end of my three-semester-long tenure as editor-in-chief.
I feel ... jubilant. Incredibly revitalized. I feel like a writer again, not just a herder of painfully unreliable student journalists.
For the past year, I've been responsible for ensuring the paper's copy was stylistically and factually correct, and that meant less time to pursue the investigative stories I wanted to go after. It meant less energy to devote to cultivating creative writing ideas. 
The job taught me more than I could ever imagine about professionalism, managing (unprofessional) people, and, above all, what good journalism should be. But part of me vanished underneath the responsibilities, the part of me that writes and doesn't just regurgitate facts in the inverted pyramid style.
The end of my tenure is bittersweet; I'm going to miss the ol' Vanny G, and it's going to take more than a few Sundays to get the editing itch out of my system.
I'm creating this blog, however, to provide a place where I can foster the writing urges I get more often than not. A place where I'll laugh at inane happenings, appreciate the unsung heroes of everyday life, and vent about stupid people.
Hopefully, it'll be a place where you, the reader, will find when you need to get your mind off your own problems so you can chuckle at whatever I'm shamelessly ranting about.
A former colleague once reminded me that if all we do is work, we create nothing. If we create nothing, we are nothing.

The year of nothing is over.