While the general thrust and tone of this blog will remain the same, I'm going to implement some changes, starting with removing all previous posts and rebooting.
Why restart this blog now? Simple: I'm in the mood for a fresh start on a refreshened site at a time when renewal and new starts are much on my mind.
I won't rehash the near-death (very, very near death) medical cataclysm that rendered much of my 2009 calendar moot and void, and put a dent in the first months of 2010. (Hint: Long-expected, "minimally invasive" heart surgery to fix a congenital aortic stenosis, followed by, to phrase it with comical understatement, "complications.") You can backtrack through it via my wife Elizabeth's daily LiveJournal starting July 11, '09 (some posts Friends-locked), and/or open my own handful of LiveJournal summary write-ups under my LJ tags "heart surgery" and "heart surgery recovery" dating back to July '09.
Addendum: Here in Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL, a couple of later posts under the Blogger label heart surgery serve as brief follow-ups.So, yeah, I had my life shaken up like a bag of marbles in a clothes dryer that tried its best to plummet off a cliff and burst into flame. But now it's Spring 2010, I'm alive, chugging through recovery just fine, scars are fading, life's feeling pretty good, and I'm looking around wide-eyed asking, "Now what?" Months of incapacitation piled onto the current crippling recession means that my reasonably healthy freelance writing business is experiencing its own temporary slowdown. It reminds me of that scene in Singin' in the Rain:
Cosmo Brown: "Talking pictures, that means I'm out of a job. At last I can start suffering and write that symphony."Whether I like it or not, at last I can start and/or stop suffering and write that symphony. Which in my case means getting back to the fiction and other writing I've put off for too long. (For a while there I was a hot up-and-comer in the science fiction & fantasy field, and then I stopped. Several reasons, all boring now.) I'm also considering some travel writing, specifically a chronicle, Bill Bryson-style, revisiting my Southern roots; especially since, with both parents passed on, I'd be revisiting certain shaping places and influences for the first time in my adult life without external duty forcing me back there. But that's for later.
R.F. Simpson: "You're not out of job, we're putting you in as head of our new music department."
Cosmo: "Oh, thanks, R.F.! At last I can stop suffering and write that symphony."
This new(ish) blog is a tool. It's here to help me refocus attention onto some new writing as well as who I am and what interests me after the events of 2009. To help me answer, "What now?" And to keep me in touch with friends and acquaintances -- some old, some new -- who revealed themselves to be more numerous and more important than I had suspected before.
Thanks for being here. It's nice to be alive to see you.
Music: Steely Dan, Gaucho
Near at hand: duck-on-bike windup
