Bye for now
I’ve been giving thought to this for some time, both before and since the blogging hiatus I took this winter, and I have determined that I need to hang up my blogging spurs, such as they are.
Basically, I am not cut out to be a blogger. No matter how I try, or how I try to convince myself that it’ll be different this time if I just do this instead of that, I don’t do short, breezy, and casual very well. Nor indeed short, hard-hitting, and serious. Mostly I don’t do short very well. And I don’t do it reflexively at all. I tend, as anyone who’s read this blog very much already knows, to write essay-length pieces.
A little aside on this, if you’ll indulge me: Most writers I know seem to find over time that they have a “natural length,” an average quantity of verbiage they are wont to spew in the average day’s work. My “natural length” as a writer, if such a thing can be said to exist, is about 1500 words. As some of you may recall from agonized attempts to pad out college term papers to their requisite length — and I must note that making wordcount on academic papers was never my personal bugbear, but when I taught undergraduates, many of my freshman comp students seemed to struggle with it a great deal — writing 1500 words takes a lot more time than reading 1500 words. 1500 words — about 6 double-spaced typed pages — is a pretty good writing day for most of the writers I know. Sometimes I have a really good writing day and I get more than that. Sometimes I spend all day grinding against something that’s hard to structure or express and I get less. But that’s about average for me.
And herein lies the basic problem: writing 6 pages takes time and energy and concentration and so on. I only have so many hours in the day, and only so much energy and ability to concentrate. I can spend it on blogging or I can spend it on writing books, but I can’t really do both. Not reliably, and not well. If I’m writing a lot of blog stuff I’m usually not writing a lot of book stuff, and vice versa, and either way the guilt sets in, and either way something isn’t getting done the way I would prefer it to get done, and, well, it’s just not helpful.
If I could easily and reliably write short’n’sweet for the blog, and writing blog entries didn’t suck time and resources away from my work, it might be a different story, but it ain’t. Turns out that the answer isn’t “take some time away from thinking about the blog and then things will be different,” after all.
Oh, as they say, well.
I plan — as I have time — to finish recording podcasts of The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, to which I will post links in this blog as I can get that done, because I’d like to finish that for those of you who’ve been listening. And I’ll leave the blog archives where they are.
Thanks for reading, and may all your domestic adventures be delightful.
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