Part of why I haven’t blogged so much this calendar year has been that I’ve been busy with other things, namely other writing projects. That’s especially been the case this summer, since I didn’t wind up with a class to teach; between the start of May and the end of June my fiction-writing total alone reached over 250,000 words. I haven’t been quite so productive this month, in part because I’ve needed to shift my focus back to editing what I’ve already written (you just don’t write that much in so short a time without a lot of it being crap, but at least it was all salvageable crap), and in part because I really messed up my back a couple of weeks ago and I’m still recovering from that. I finally broke down and bought a seat cushion to help me with the tailbone problems I’ve had all of my life, and I felt like I should have bought a case of Ensure to go along with it. (Then I caught myself wiping my boogers under my computer desk earlier today, and now I feel a lot better.)
As wonderful as all this work is, though — some of it is starting to yield fruit, even if The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon remains stuck in slush-pile hell — I find myself once again coming to the end of the month without having posted a blog, and now struggling to come up with a topic to blog about. Although there’s certainly a lot going on in the wider world, it feels like everything that’s catching my interest is too broad to write a simple blog entry about. (Then again, that could just be me being used to writing much more long-form stuff than this blog, even though I’m incredibly long-winded by modern blog standards.) I’ve pretty much fallen out of love with all sports now, I don’t watch much television besides the news, and I’m just not going out that much because I’m trying to save my pennies until I start teaching again next month and have more money coming in.
I’ve always been very introverted, and I’d like to say that spending so much time working at home these past few months has been a real problem for my social life, but the fact is that my social life wasn’t exactly that big to start with. It’s definitely gotten worse in recent years thanks to some bad situations I found myself in that left me with wounds that haven’t fully healed yet. It’s not that I haven’t gone out and socialized with people, but I’m doing it far less often than I think I should be, and that’s saying something. It hasn’t gotten to the point where I’ve put out a friends-only post on Facebook asking for local people to come meet with me somewhere, but I’ve certainly been thinking about it.
In the meantime, though, since I can’t quite talk about these writing projects of mine yet (although I look forward to doing that soon), I’m feeling kind of adrift. I need to keep this blog up — even if I didn’t feel a need to keep going with the .org after nearly fifteen years, this site is going to be vital if I ever get any of my novels published — but I really don’t know how to do that now. The underlying problem isn’t that there isn’t stuff to talk about, though; the problem is that I don’t feel like I have stuff to talk about because, to be blunt, I’ve been doing so little here that I’ve kind of become dull to myself. That’s not a very wise thing to admit, I know, but I can’t deny it.
By this time next month I’ll be teaching again, and seeing the world through many more pairs of eyes as I talk with my students, so maybe this is only a temporary problem. Still, I don’t like half-assing a blog here just so I have something up here for the month, and that’s just what I’ve done here. I’ll try to have something more interesting to write about here next month, but all things being equal I should probably ask you all for help with that, since (as has been the case throughout my life) I clearly need all the help I can get. So, um, help?