A Few Notes about the Blog

Though I'm sending this out to just five or seven of you, I'd appreciate any feedback you might want to leave in the comments. I imagine this as kind of a conversation, since I think different aspects of what I'm writing here will appeal to different readers. In any case, I hope it will prompt thoughts worth sharing. Plus, no one likes writing in a vacuum. Actually some people probably do. I suppose that's the essence of a diary.

I can't promise regular updates on the site since I don't know when, exactly, I'll be acquiring new records. But I will post some short bits in between acquisitions, because a lot of these records are good jumping off points for discussion of other, related things. And in these early days, I'll probably go back to recent additions to my collection that are worth mentioning, stuff that I wanted to write about at the time but couldn't because I was procrastinating starting this blog by doing something stupid.

Figure I'll keep this going so long as the self-imposed stakes are low. If I remain convinced that this blog can feel really tossed off and rough, I'll probably enjoy it enough to persist. But the second I put any pressure on myself to really polish the prose, I'll almost certainly beg off. I once wrote a humor piece about a guy trying to write the Great American Novel, but because of his laziness and the impossibility of the goal, he keeps whittling down his ambition until finally he's pleased after a long, hard day's work generating short ideas that might be candidates for the underside of the Great American Bottle Cap. That's pretty much how I feel about writing, and why, I think, I've come to enjoy simply producing jokes; it's a lot easier to whack a sentence into really great shape than a page or a story, or god forbid a book. As an editor, I see people finish books all the time, though I'm baffled at how they do it, how they've managed to navigate and make the 80-90K decisions that a book requires without collapsing from exhaustion or caving under the weight of self-doubt. (That humor piece remains unfinished, by the way.)

I also understand more why revision is writing. Anyone can vomit onto a page, but the real work, the real craft, is in shaping that into something extraordinary, which is exceedingly difficult and time consuming. Though if we might stay in that metaphor for a moment, it's true that some people's vomit is far better company than others. I don't know if that works but if I start thinking about it, I will never post this.

I promise there really will be more on collecting and records going forward.