Back?

Whoa! Look at me! I hardly even remember how to post to this thing anymore. But I'm glad it's still here.

Does blogging work as a way to get one back in a writing groove? I've heard people say that. I'm going to give it a shot. I really need to remember how to write. It's been a long time.

This semester, I've been able to set aside a fairly substantial chunk of time for writing; this, and joining Dame Eleanor Hull's fall writing group, is a way of making myself accountable for it. Sometimes this kind of accountability works really well for me; sometimes it just makes me cranky. I'm hoping for some good positive experiences this semester.

To that end, this blog may take on a slightly different tone. I've given up on hopes of resurrecting the crazy all-night-long conversations of several years ago; that was a magical moment, and I'm all kinds of grateful to those of you who made it happen, but it's not something can be manufactured at will. I'm not sure quite what this space will turn into, but for now I'm going to use it to report on my writing progress, and to try to make writing a more regular habit. (All of you are, of course, welcome to hang out, drink, burn things, distract yourselves from grading, and embrace various kinds of silliness at will.)

Where I'm at: I have about 300 pages of notes based on the last couple of years of research, in which I was just playing around with various sources to see if there was enough material out there for a book. Turns out there is. Right now these notes are a giant pile of loose ideas that need to be sorted and stacked so that I can build something out of them.

Big goal: A book draft, maybe by the end of next spring.

Goal for this semester: To get into a regular writing groove, at least 8 hours or 2000 words a week. Doesn't matter where - last summer I experimented with just diving in and writing various pieces to pull together these idea-piles, and that worked fairly well. I'm trusting that once I've done that for a while, a larger structure will start to take shape. But I don't think that can happen until I arrange some of these littler piles.

Here goes!