Why I've been so quiet for two months

Mostly because I'm not 80 yet and there's not much to report on. Although why Dani's not discussing her long-standing 80ship and the raids she's been doing and her move to another guild and spec (see? lots of interesting stuff!) is beyond me. Maybe she hates you, WoW blog. Probably it.

Anyway, I don't hate you, I'm just boring and spinning my wheels at 78. "But, Melissa," I hear you ask, "didn't you level to 70 in, like, two months this summer? What gives?" I did indeed, and really enjoyed most of it, too. I like leveling, I find the constant progress meter comforting and I kine of like playing solo a lot.

And yet, still not 80.

I think there's been a number of factors, which I will present in a numbered list below, because that's the way I roll:

1. When Wrath was released, I was in the middle of finals stuff and had very little time to play, so I got a late start.
2. Over Christmas, I fully intended to catch up, but I got seriously distracted by the epic fantasy novel the boyfriend and I are writing. For real, I wrote like 30 pages in 4 days and another 20 or so pages of world creation-y type stuff. Then I taught myself to draw (which is a new one for me) and started illustrating it while waiting for the boyfriend to catch up. The closer we get to the end of the first book, the less likely it is that I'll be able to stop mulling over it more or less constantly.
3. I may be burned out because I leveled all summer and then didn't actually get to see most of the Burning Crusade raid content. It's like levellevellevellevelraidlevellevellevel. Even people who like leveling can grow to hate that.
4. I....kind of hate Northrend. I find it boring, and miss the psychadelic weirdness of Outlands. I mean, honestly, it's just like looking out te window except that the landscape has dragons in it. So that makes it even harder to motivate myself to level.
5. There's the question of what to do about the guild stuff, about which I am still very much uundecided. I am not good at the social side of the game. Maybe I shouldn't play MMOs?

So, there you have it. I've basically lost my momentum and there's a bunch of things in the way of picking it back up. And the way I tend to work is that I flit from being intensly, singularly focused on something until I start to get stumper or bored and then get distracted (then similarly absorbed) by something else. I'm wondering if this is happening with Warcraft, and if I'm well on my way to being the most casual sort of casual players. Or maybe not. Maybe i'm just sick of playing alliance - I have, over the last couple of days, seriously considered scrapping my 78 priest and leveling a troll instead. But that seems like a waste.

If and when I make any progress on these fronts, I guess it'll count as news and I'll report it here.