The short story here is simply that “the old blog is back.”
I started this blog in early 2004 (and if you want, you can still read the earliest, untitled entries here) and it was an eclectic thing. I wrote about reading and writing and the arts. I wrote about politics and religion and philosophy. Most of all I wrote about my own life and the strange things I saw around me every day. The comments were great, too. I can’t say that the blog ever became “popular,” but I did have a fairly steady following of twenty or so people — mostly family and friends — and occasionally I managed to excite a minor controversy that would lead to a spike in traffic. I liked this blog, and I kept it this way for about four years.
The first shakeup happened in 2008, when my wife and I moved to Chicago, she started nursing school, and I was working a series of jobs to support us. The blog was largely fallow until 2010, though I did update here and there. I had started working as a web marketing consultant, and bought into the conventional wisdom that blogs should be focused, tight, almost nichelike in subject and content. This makes sense for branding a business. But I’m a writer and artist, and if you’re familiar with any of my work, then you know that it is highly syncretic and integrative. My first attempt at rebranding the blog, as an academic discussion of the Gothic in a modern context, badly flopped (although it did yield the web’s most compelling analysis of swooning in the work of Ann Radcliffe). It was too niche. After nursing that project along for a year, I took a second stab, rebranding the blog as an exploration of self-publishing, based on my experiences with my novel Hungry Rats. This was an even bigger flop, partly because there were already so many mature voices writing on this subject, but also because the subject didn’t hold my interest; it was too niche for me personally. For most of 2011, I haven’t updated my blog at all, except to promote speaking events and readings. A kind of a sad end to an eight-year project that had always been a lot of fun.
Well, I’m returning to blogging, but I’ve decided to go back to the old, spontaneous, wide-ranging discussions of its infancy. Maybe I won’t attract many readers or promote my writing this way, but at the very least it will be an enjoyable way to share information with family and friends. Contrary to popular belief, the advent of social media isn’t the death of blogging, although it enjoys less prominence now than before. If you want to read more specifically about Writing, Art, Politics, Religion, the Gothic, or Self-Publishing, you can still do that; just use the category dropdown menu at right to find the posts you are looking for. If you subscribe via RSS, or just check in from time to time, you’re going to find a hodgepodge of things from literary criticism to phenology. It will be a panacea to your want of early morning rambling. It will be, at the very least, an unselfconscious and reckless indulgence in words like “panacea.”