Goodnight, Blog

I'm closing the blog again. Two reasons.

First, I  created this blog to let people know that I was okay when I was writing something obsessively, but frankly, I haven't been writing obsessively, and besides there are better tools to do that now anyway. (So, yeah, I'm on FaceBook. I've had an account in heavy stealth-mode for a few months while I tested the defensive shields. I've decided I can live with it, so the account is out of dry-dock. If you know my gmail address, then go ahead and "friend" me.)

The other reason I'm closing the blog is because I don't like the type of writing I do here. It's just an extension of my type-A public persona, and I'm working on digging a bit deeper. That's really hard, and it's not something I can do online.

This isn't really goodbye, as I'm sure I'll see almost everyone on FaceBook, but I do appreciate the support over the years, especially during my NaNoWriMo fits.

The Girl Who Rides Bulls

1.

in the splintered bleachers

of the Kahoka rodeo

to watch her daughter—

the champion barrel-racer—

my grandmother hears

my mother’s name 

instead announced

as a bull rider.

2.

in a flooded ravine

a man not yet my father

kicks the passenger door

of his inverted car

and shouts Stop faking!

at my mother

and her shattered pelvis.

3.

in the bedroom

of the farmhouse

of her birth

my mother 

holds her belly

and her tongue

as her father declares

he don’t want no bastard

calling him Grampa.

My Darlin' Coraline

I'm going to commit a cardinal sin and plug a movie I haven't seen. Please, please, please go see Coraline this weekend if you can. I am a huge fan of animation in general, and stop motion animation in particular. If this movie doesn't have a good opening, the small animation studio that made it will probably shut down. That would mean they would never tackle their next film—"a sweet comedy about a boy who communes with his dead grandmother and who must take on a small army of misguided zombies." Do you really want to live in a universe that didn't produce that magnum opus? (Thanks to Neil Gaiman for the article link.)

I spent awhile tonight talking to Nerkymarg, and she gently castigated me for not updating the blog daily. I guess I'll try to be more regular about that, although writing the blog is not as important to me as writing the novel. Still, it's great that people are checking in on me and my progress, and as that is the ostensible purpose of this blog, I'd better stick to it.

If you don't routinely check out the links on the left side of my blog, Brad Green wrote a superb essay entitled "Plucking a Wild Growth." Please check it out. BG has a flair for indelible imagery and metaphor, and I sometimes turn a mottled emerald when I read his stuff.

Anonymous

You can now post comments to the blog anonymously. Huzzah!

Migration?

It's become a tradition for me to create a private blog when I'm working on a novel. I've got a handful of friends who are very supportive, and furthermore they seem to be genuinely interested in the whole messy process. Writing the blog is nominally more efficient than writing (or more generally complaining) to each person individually. When the first draft of the novel is done (none of my novels have survived a second draft yet), I have taken great pleasure in ritually closing out the blog.

This month I started a blog to track my day-to-day writing, even though I'm not writing a novel. It has been enjoyable to produce something for public view every day. Furthermore, because I post a running word count, I feel embarrassed if I skip writing, and humiliation does wonders for my motivation.

The problem with my previous blog is that, although it looks sharp, it's actually a pain to maintain because I can only post to it from my home computer. For that reason I am looking into moving my blog here, to Blogger. I'm not committing to it yet, but I'm going to give it a go.