About a year ago I started work on another novel. As that work gained traction this blog was one of the things I simply set aside. We still made visits to both coasts to visit grandkids (and their parents), I still maintained and expanded landscaping operations, I served our little church as Deacon, and I continued to neglect restoring my 1929 Model A Ford. Work on the novel grabbed every available brain cell.
I am now committed to a draft that has been through the alpha/beta test regimen and have begun the odious process of finding an agent/publisher combination who loves the book and its characters half as much as I do. “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” As much as I hate it, I’ve been through this process before in widely different professional disciplines and have had some modest success. So, for all the reasons I find self-promotion distasteful, there’s a part of me that says, “Sit down and buckle up, Buttercup!”
To that end, I’m returning to What Then? to see if I can find a public voice that I won’t later disavow. According to all the how-tos available to unpublished authors, I must have a social media presence. I have two Instagram accounts that I update regularly but the subject of those are sunrise over the lake (@lakefreemansunrise) and shapes and colors that catch my eye in the clouds (@monticellosky) and, to be honest, I would post to them even if nobody ever liked/subscribed.
So, what’s the difference between my reluctance to blog and my enthusiasm for sunrises and clouds? Sunrises and clouds are real things that can be captivating, and encourage reflection on the world around us and life in general. My opinions or perspectives on anything are every bit as fleeting as clouds and sunrises but their origins are more suspicious. Ebenezer Scrooge, when confronting the apparition of his deceased partner Jacob Marley dismisses the experience this way: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
I tend to think of my musings with the same suspicion. With heartburn, however, there are remedies to alleviate both the cause and the effects, but with pseudo-profound observations on life found on the internet, the reverberations and echoes continue to stupefy for ages.
To that end, I’m restructuring the blog to encourage myself to post and, hopefully, make it easier for readers to find something of interest. I’m going to be categorizing posts by kind: 1) Chat about what I’m working on, 2) observations on my personal life, 3) commentary on bite-sized ideas or thoughts of others, and 4) Short takes on things I like and recommend (and why).
This will make it easier for me to contribute regularly and increase the likelihood there will reason for you to return, if for no other reason out of morbid curiosity. Sort of like watching Hot Ones (https://youtu.be/97SPDxM3Ezw?si=CfvcV-dz4Ra8fOd3) but without the celebrity victim and no eye-watering Last Dab.
What Then? 