I was once a blogger. It was during the years in which was benched at desk jobs with very, very little responsibility, and I was afforded the luxury of being able to cut my writerly milk teeth by means of web-based rant, analysis and confession. My life and my perceptions have changed since then, and I’ve not blogged with any sort of frequency in several years and good luck tracking down anything I wrote back then.
A couple of years ago, I launched this site with the intention of getting back into the practice. I created blog posts written by one of my characters from my Ministers of Grace series and provided histories for various angels and demons. However, not even a year later, I abandoned it due to time constraints and went back to writing novels, poems and screenplays.
Blogging ought to be considered a medium unto itself with literary potentials that are still being explored, in part because it requires its own skill set that separates it from other forms of writing. Writing on command is a great part of it, which is what makes it sister to journalism, but the fluid, mercurial nature of the internet is what sets it apart, for blog posts can be searched and found and updated and edited and modified, even deleted.
Self-censorship and all other excuses aside, I’ve come to realize that I need to rekindle my facility with the medium. I’ve no intention to blog about my writing process, because I can’t imagine anything more boring to anyone but me. My life is off-limits: I’m a private person, and if you want to know what’s going on with me, you can rather safely intuit my life’s events based upon the matter of what I write. I’ve considered writing about things of a political and social nature, but as they inspire the wrath that curls inside my pen and fuels my creative fires, I reckon I’d drive myself completely insane by consistently focusing on such darkness. Besides, I prefer expounding my opinions via fiction.
Therefore, I’d like to announce the start of a new blog series. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep it up – it could last through the end of the year, or I might be able to keep it going indefinitely, who knows? – but during the third week of the month, I intend to provide a review and/or critical analysis of a book that I probably really should have read by now. You might be surprised: my late teens/early twenties were spent falling in love with Oscar Wilde, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Tony Kushner, Anne Sexton, Lawrence Durrell, C.P. Cavafy, Vladimir Nabokov and, last but certainly not least, Jorge Luís Borges. Weren’t you, too? I’ll be posting the first of this new series on Monday, kicking off the festivities with a post about Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
I am once again a blogger. Hope you enjoy…
♥ EAB
