Hopping The Train From Monster Island

Written By: Ken Hulsey

I'm certain by this point that many of you begun to wonder what has happened to me? Monster Island News has been devoid of updates for about a week now and people have been starting to become concerned.

First off, let me assure you that nothing has happened to me, I wasn't in any sort of accident, or I haven't suffered any sort of health problem. I'm fine.....well physically anyway.

I have, however taken a week off from writing here on MIN to do some soul searching and begin work on a new project. More on that in a minute.

Over the past few months I have begun to notice that my writing has become more a more labored. I just kept finding it harder and harder to come up with interesting things to write about. I honestly hit a wall. I think that the whole thing came to a climax last Friday when I tried to write a review of the 1977 William Shatner movie, "Kingdom of the Spiders", I tried to write it a couple of times, and ultimately I just couldn't do it. All I produced was random thoughts with no substance.

I know what your thinking, "But, Ken all your articles are just random thoughts with no substance?" True, but this was different.

It was at this point that I had to be honest with myself. I am burnt out. Big time.

For those of you, who don't know my history of sci fi and monster related websites. I started doing this kind of stuff way back in 1998 with a couple of groups on MSN. One about the TV show "Babylon 5" the other about "Star Wars."

I them founded kensforce.com, and ran that from 2000 to 2007. I then founded two Monster Island News blogs, monstermovieblog.blogspot.com and, of course, robojapan.blogspot.

That's about twelve years of sci fi on the internet and it's been hard to keep it going for that long.

I've had a great time and I have met a ton of great people over that time period, but I think that I need a change.

Over the past week, I have launched a new blog that centers on my first true love, trains. Yes, besides being a sci and monster geek, I have always been a train geek as well.

Oh, here is the new site, I call it "The Railroad Modeler". It's kinda a online model train store and railroad news site.

Well, to make a long story short, I have been extremely happy working on it, and I believe that I will be for a long time to come.

So what I'm getting at is that I will be shelving Monster Island News indefinitely while I work on my Raidroad site.

I have a passion for this project, which has been missing for the sci fi and monster stuff for some time.

At this junction, "The Railroad Modeler" is making me feel positive, while "Monster Island News", just honestly doesn't.

What does this mean? Well, I don't know. I have put some thought into relaunching MIN after the first of next year, but the more I think about it, it seems that will be unlikely.

I don't want to close the doors on the site, I have invested too much into it, but the writing appears to be on the wall.

I do want to mention that part of my thinking is financial based. Money is tight......real, real tight, and MIN and the Monster Movie Mall make little to no money.

I do need to take time to pursue better employment and get my affairs in order and I just can't do that and devote the time I need to keep MIN running right.

"The Railroad Modeler" is much less time consuming to work on, and there is far less competition for selling model trains than sci fi merchandise.

I do want to thank everyone for reading my ramblings here. I truly love you all!

I will be contacting a lot of you personally to talk this stuff over.

I'm not going to be saying goodbye at this point, just see ya later.

If you want to find me, I will be sitting track side watching the trains go by.

Go to: THE RAILROAD MODELER