Auld Lang Syne

As in "been a while." Pertinence to the date is an added bonus.

In spite of enjoying the principal benefit of having no audience—owning nobody an explanation—I should like to account for my absence these last few months, even though there's not much to say.

Some time ago I mentioned working on a longform fiction piece. It's still underway, and it's been my exclusive creative focus. (A file-naming snafu forced me to go back and redo almost two months' worth of work, but the less said about that, the better.) It's still some ways away from being finished, but progress is being made. I wish this were a world where I could write unmonetizable blog content in the morning and then work on a novel that no imprint wants in the evening, all while being able to afford to pay my grocer and rentier—but it is not. I've had to prioritize.

But: lately I've been reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies, and it's given me an itch to return to this format.

For a long time now, an impediment to getting this thing updated at all was not having any kind of regular schedule. For the time being, I'm going to try to produce one post per month. However short or long it is, the post of the month will be substantive and written with forethought.

Elsewhere, I am attempting something I've never done before: going to bed early and getting up early. As in conking out at 10:00 PM and rising at 5:00 AM. For the last couple of years, my writing routine has been:

1.) Come home from work.

2.) Decompress for a couple hours.

3.) Attempt to write, despite fatigue and the demotivational effects of decompression. Procrastinate for at least an hour.

4A.) If unable to write: go to bed in a bad mood.

4B.) If able to write: bang out some pages, stay up too late, be miserable the following morning and probably unable to write the next evening.

Perhaps getting up at the crack of dawn and spilling my ink before going to work will be a more productive way of going about it. We'll see.