blogs

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.

Well, I’ve gone and blown out my RSI-afflicted right elbow again, doing yardwork, so I’m not doing a lot of cooking for a few days in order to give it a chance to settle down.  I suspect we’ll be eating plenty of kimchi fried rice this week, and a not insubstantial amount of toast and tea.

I am, however, currently brining a batch of sauerkraut.  I’ve made various kinds of pickles in the past, everything from Sichuan pickled cabbage to dilly beans to gherkins, but this is my first time making sauerkraut on my own.  I assisted with kraut-making a number of times as a child, when my grandmother made it, so it’s not entirely unfamiliar territory.  And indeed, sauerkraut is not one of the world’s more complicated pickles: the ingredients are cabbage and salt, and the rest is the inhuman alchemy of lactobacilli.  At any rate, my confidence has been bolstered by Sandor Ellix Katz’s book Wild Fermentation, and I am plunging forth, with a nice big head of shredded red cabbage sitting saltily in a gigantic pink plastic bowl, doing its best to turn into one of my favorite pickled vegetable preparations.  So far so good.  I’ll let you know how it goes in a week or so.

For the two of you yearning for more of The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, here is Chapter 6.

And for those of you who are interested in my nonfiction work, and in what goes on in the teeming kitchen-midden I use for a brain, I’ve begun a little project called Shevangelist.com, which you can best think of, or so I see it, as a combination cutting-room floor and odd-sock-drawer of my work life.  It comes in podcast and print flavors, so you may exercise eyes, ears, or some combination thereof, if that’s what amuses you.

I am not inclined, under normal circumstances, to check my web stats or userlogs.  I know I probably should, but as it is, I get around to it about twice a year.  Maybe three if I’m really procrastinating something just as hard as I possibly can.

But I recently did check my blog stats and user activity logs and whatnot for this blog, just to see what the activity’s been like since I resumed posting here more regularly, and was bemused to note that one of the posts that gets the most traffic is an old post on how to wash dishes by hand.  It’s the post that gets the most search engine traffic by far.   At least a few times a day, from the looks of it, someone lands on that blog post after searching on “how to wash dishes” or “washing dishes properly.”

Or, in the case of one obviously harried Googler, “how to wash the dishes properly m*th*rf*ck*r.”  (Naughty word disemvowelled for your work-browsing pleasure.)

A friend of mine wondered aloud whether this might’ve been Samuel L. Jackson, between housekeepers.

(Just in case it was, Samuel, please, in the future, feel free to have your agent call my agent and I’ll get in touch with you directly.  It’s cool.  I understand.)

Which brings me to the burden of my speech here: I never would’ve expected that post to get so much traffic.  Of all the things I could write about, and even of all the domestic-labor-related things I could write about, I must say hand dishwashing never seemed like it would be so popular.  Or a matter on which so many people would turn to Asking Uncle Google, for that matter.

So I invite you, should you have unresolved housekeeping or cookery questions, please to feel free to ping me with them. I can’t promise to have all the answers, but I’m happy to offer thoughts if I have any.  The dishwashing post was the result of a couple folks asking me about it, and it seems to have proven useful, and I’m all for that.

Do please leave comments in the actual blog, though, since I don’t see them if they’re left somewhere on some RSS feed.  People reading this through the LiveJournal feed particularly should keep this in mind, because I’ve noticed that people often leave comments in LJ to posts that do not actually originate from LJ, apparently out of reflex.  But here’s the thing: if you comment on LJ, I will not see it.

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I’ve put up the next two chapters of The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, in case anyone has actually been listening to them.  Sorry for the delay in getting these up.

The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, chapter 4

The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, chapter 5

Autumn (the best season, and make no mistake) is on its way.

I have proof.

Or rather, I had proof.  But, because I am basically a LOLcat at heart, I eated it.  Nom!

The first Mellocreme Pumpkin of the season has been et.  Bring on the Autumn!

Fez is ready.  She is practicing her hibernation skills with the dog’s squeaky stuffed hedgehog.

Y’all know about the Schadenfreude carnival that is the Cake Wrecks blog, right?  No?  Well, now you do.