Welcome Back … Maybe
Posted By admin on October 6, 2009
The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging has a lot of good advice.
One bit I disagree with though: their admonition that the blogger never try to explain or explain away an absence.
Fine. I won’t.
I’ve been gone. Now I’m back.
Maybe.
Don’t expect regularity – that’s why some wonderful bodger invented RSS.
I have had a lot of life changes since I stopped writing in March of this year due to an affair.
Those changes have, in their turn, prompted me to realize that I’ve had a lot MORE major life-events over the past six to eight years. I’ve been doing a lot of reflection. I have sued for, and for the first time, I have achieved what amounts to a snarling yet grave-like peace with a lot of issues, including what some would consider a handicap.
Discussing those things, when I care to, does not lend itself to the media-type I’d been seduced into pouring myself into over the past seven months.
Yes, like many others, I’d allowed myself to be seduced by Twitter. She was fun.
Hell, she was educational. Bracing. Even confidence-building.
Not bad for a cheap thrill I allowed to suck seven months of life out of me.
Affair’s over. (Although I certainly don’t plan to avoid her on the street – she’s got a hell of a body, and we still make great conversation over the *occasional* cup-a-joe.)
But frankly, I’m tired of the almost Newspeakian way I’ve begun speaking — and worse THINKING (can it be called that?) — in sentence fragments.
And I’m tired of trying to write for an audience I can’t seem to reward for their patience, an oddly splintered, self-limiting audience half of whom seems to get jealous when I spend too much time on the other half.
Then again, I’m continually reminded that for 42 years, I’ve NEVER had the pleasure – until the advent of social media – of realizing how many people really do like me. In person, I am simply unable to tell. Online’s not much easier, and I place a lot of weight on numbers.
So, after questioning my motives, realizing that popularity was beginning to overtake content originality, I’m back.
*I* am back. Though YOU, dear reader, may not always see me.
Why?
Because I’m transitioning from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the frenetic world of the 140-word fragment to the leisurely pace of the 140,000 word leviathon.
(Leisurely pace, me arse. Four notebooks in four weeks of writing, not counting the character tracking grid that occupies another notebook, plus the 24″ x 36″ gross-grain chrono. Where the flip is that Dell Mini 9 I ordered two weeks ago? Dell? You’re not THAT busy.)
OK, we’re probably looking at 280,000 or 420,000 words because the second novel — actually the first-conceived — keeps trying to push its way past the first, because I always write in threes and because there’s definitely a third novel back there because I’m too damn chicken to kill more than a billion people in any given one of them.
On the advice of a friend (you know who you are – and thanks for the workload <smirk>) and my own autistic ability to basically create an entire novel in my head before writing it down, I’ve restarted a project begun exactly eight years ago this evening, when I began to write out the first of three novels that materialized in my head back then following the loss of friends in the WTC on 11 September 2001.
Those novels sucked. Or, rather, their characters sucked.
But then again, only four (to perhaps a dozen) autistic authors (in English language literature) have ever managed to create believable characters.
I sure as hell didn’t.
But like I said – a few other things have happened in the six years since I quit writing:
A diagnosis of severe “High-functioning Autism”,
I came within a few breaths of losing my life (and remained in that near-breathless conversation with Death for about two and half days in May of 2007),
I completely rethought and rebuilt my religious views – the result of which may make me damn unpopular with a lot of people who thought I was a friend (think Frank Schaeffer)
a dramatically re-ignited (some have dared use the word impassioned) relationship with my wife of 16 years (Is it possible to be more desperate for her after that many years? That’s rhetorical by the way.)
a political campaign filled with writing exercises (thanks again to the same individual mentioned above for the wake-up compliment) and a following that made me believe that there were at least a few others out there who felt like I did,
and, in an odd twist, the resolution of bloody near every other personal battle I’ve fought for 5 to 35 years — in my favour.
I no longer feel like I have the luxury of keeping what’s in my head private.
Not to mention I’ve got a wealth of incredible material.
So I may not be “over here” on the blog much – and since I’m not keen on using my real name on the manuscript when published – I likely won’t talk much about it.
But at least you know where the hell I am. Assuming you can tolerate me writing the way I actually feel.
