Just a Note on Downtime

When I started blogging, I discovered a compulsive need to open the tattered edges of my emotional raincoat and expose the nasty parts beneath.

That's Ayelet Waldman at Salon, touching on the first of several reasons she stopped blogging.

I wanted to throw this up here real quick this week because it says so much about why I decided to take another breather and stay away from hacking through a bunch of emotional turmoil here moment-by-moment. Some of that has abated, which is why I wanted to post the link above. The other part is that she's very right about the other big problem with blogging: the blogging is fucking with my real writing. When your goal is to write books, and someday make a living doing it, well... this moment-by-moment knee-jerk gut-reaction real-time stuff is a very different type of writing from the mull-over-your-experiences-distill-reimagine-setup-imaginary-template-plot-out-cut-distill-squeeze type that I do in my book and story writing, and switching gears is a bitch.

And that's a problem. And I don't have a solution to it, except to close up shop a few weeks a month, or stem the tide of posts, limit myself to once a day.

I'm going to need to find a way to balance a lot of things in the coming weeks and months, and blogging's going to be one of them...