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November Experiments
So, nearly a month has gone by without a peep from me here. Not exactly what I was hoping for.
I could give excuses and reasons, of course—good ones. There have been friends in town, trips to plan, doctor’s appointments, seminars, a couple of projects, and afternoons spent exorcising my parents’ PC (again). But the truth is, I could have written anyway. Instead, I’ve been spending more time reading editorials and thinking about writing than, well, actually writing.
And the reason for that, I think, is simple: my life has changed, but my writing style hasn’t. There was a time when I could devote several hours to researching and crafting a well-written treatise about current affairs (or whatever), and I did it happily. But my days have become fuller lately, and trying to research and draft that kind of writing has become almost impossible. Maybe, one day, my writing process will dramatically shorten and my typing speed will dramatically increase. But I’m not holding my breath.
I’ve been thinking about how to work around this issue, what to change. I thought about getting rid of it altogether—not a happy option after such a recent redesign—but couldn’t bring myself to devote too many brain cells to it. As inconsistent as I’ve been about working on my projects here, there’s something that’s always appealed to me about this medium. I may have ignored it from time to time over the past five years, but I’ve never been able to walk away.
And so, for the next months, there will be two experiments: shorter, Andrew Sullivan-length posts here in the blog, and a status page to keep tabs on what I’m up to.
For thirty days at least (I hereby reserve the right to extend it to the end of the year if I feel I need to), posts longer than a paragraph—at most two—will be more the rule than the exception. An absence of length, I hope, will lead to a lack of waiting and rewriting between posts, not lead to an absence of quality.
Oh, and in case that sounded refreshingly sensible—one of the “projects� I referenced above is NaNoWriMo. Yeah, I know that makes no sense whatsoever.
(I gave serious thought to titling this entry “The Practice of Balance and the Possibility of Screws Loose�.)
Thank you, all, for hanging in there. It always amazes me that I still have people putting up with me and my flakiness—people who still read this site. It defies description and explanation, and I always appreciate your patience.