The Year of the Blog.

    I’ve become worried, over the last little while, that I’m not a writer anymore. Five years ago, this idea would have been absurd. I was more dedicated to the craft of writing than anybody I knew; I wrote stories, I was working on a novel, I could even do some nonfiction, in a pinch. Then I went to graduate school for creative writing. Somewhere in those three miserable years — and they were miserable, the worst years of my adult life by far — my drive to write began to wane. I graduated, tacked a desultory end onto the novel I’d been working on for years, and then came to a halt. I haven’t written a short story in more than a year. I can’t figure out how to fix my novel. I have always believed that, fundamentally, you are what you do — and if that’s the case, I’m not a writer anymore. I’m just a guy with a degree and no life plan.

    So here’s the plan. You don’t have to follow along, if you don’t care, but this isn’t about following along, really, for anybody but me. For the next 52 weeks — until this time next year — it’s my plan to make at least one entry on this blog every business day. That’s 260 entries in a year. A lot of them will probably be short, and stupid. Some of them may be very long and entail footnotes and metaphors and even interviews and stuff. Maybe. Most of them will probably be short and stupid.

    In order to do this, I’m going to have to change a few of the paramaters I’ve always had for the various blogs I’ve kept (and failed to keep up). First my no politics rule is out. There are going to be days, especially as we ramp up to next year’s Presidential election, on which that’s all I have on my mind. Which means another change for me: I’m going to have to change the way I write about politics, at least a little bit. I’ve come to think of my major mode of political address as inveighment: I get an issue in my brain and then throw an onslaught of rhetoric at it until I’ve made it seem — even if it isn’t true — that people who might not agree with me are preposterous, obnoxious, possibly odious. This is why, for the most part, I don’t write about politics in public, because I don’t like the way people respond to that kind of thing. So, in order to do this the way I want to do it, I’m going to have to stop telling people they’ve got their heads lodged firmly up their asses, even if they do.

    Other things I’m probably going to write about that I’ve resisted writing about before: my cat, my personal life, the weather, bad jokes, the internet, podcasts, food, walking, clothes, my health — mental and physical —, sex, work, boredom, beer, and a bunch of other stuff that’s probably not occuring to me right now. I’ll have to write about writing, if this project actually turns me back into a writer. The social anxiety that makes it hard for me to do the one thing — be a radio reporter — that I really want to do right now. I don’t know. I’ve often been accused of being cold, abstract and cerebral. Well, being cold, abstract and cerebral takes a lot of work. Maybe, just maybe, this project will get me to stop.

    So let it begin, the Year of the Blog.