Not the most exciting headline for a blog post, no. But I realize it’s been a long time since I posted anything and I don’t want the blog to go too quiet. Twitter and other outlets have taken up some energy that blogging uses, true, but I value having a space in which I can say pretty much anything I like, whenever and however I want to say it (within the bounds of legality and civility, natch).
Anyway, journalism has been keeping me busy, as it has a way of doing. I just posted about 10 stories in the Bibliography section here (see the “Recent Work” column to the right). I’ve been writing about altmetrics, what university-press folks talked about at their annual meeting, about a major textbook publisher declaring bankruptcy, and about a classics scholar embedded in the Duke library (a nice reversal of the embedded-librarian phenom).
In other news, my family got a dog–a senior beagle rescued from a high-kill shelter in North Carolina. I read Cloud Atlas (a book so good that I miss it now that I’m not reading it, almost the way one misses a person who’s been visiting and has gone away again). And I wrote a lot of fiction, enough to have a muddled half of a novel that I hope to unmuddle and finish soon. The midpoint of a big writing project can be a tough spot. What if it wants to be this, not that? Is the story going anyplace or is it going around in circles? And so on.
What Hemingway told Fitzgerald back in 1934 is as good advice as any:
For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
