This Is A Test Of The Emergency Blogcast System

If this had been an actual emergency...

Just testing Windows Live Writer.

Back to Blogging

I’ve been away from this for a long time. I was never here. I just toyed with it a bit earlier this year. For anyone who missed the news on the other sites where I took my first blogging steps, I resigned from the foreign service in July, returned to the United States in September, and have been using Virginia as my base while I shop this great land for my next home.

I’ve done a lot of other things in that time as well, mostly related to finding my bearings as a writer, i.e. novelist, essayist, and freelance corporate writer. When I left Tokyo in the summer, I assumed that I’d work as a freelance copywriter upon returning to the states. But a copywriter conference that I attended in October revealed that this corner of the advertising world doesn’t appeal to me.

So, I’ve turned my efforts to the writing that’s truly in my heart: fiction and creative nonfiction. In November I started writing a novel, which is something I’ve wanted to do since I was a boy. It’s exciting and it promises to keep me busy for a long time.

Mixed in with all this has been an interest in blogging, but blogging has stumped me ever since I first tried it in January. There are so many blogs on the web and they range over so many topics, that I’ve been uncertain how to use this tool in a unique and interesting way. But I’ve explored some ideas and I now look forward to seeing where this takes me as a writer.

If anyone happens across this page then please know that I’d enjoy hearing from you and that I welcome your comments.

Begin the break...

Herewith betrays a vague promise to myself from a long time ago: to studiously avoid, at any cost, ever having that most bourgeouis - and God help me, teenage - trapping of suburban angst: a buh-laah-gue.

Then something changed.

Somehow, in the recent past, this has come to interest me. Some...thing...seems to be coalescing or finding a way to express itself. Is it creative expression? Or release? Self discovery? An...epiphany? Is there anything at all or am I simply restless? I don't know right now, but it seems there is something clutching for air and maybe this is the straw that will float it.

And maybe not. It’s unclear what this would be for me; how it would fit in; how it would rig out; how it would function; or what purpose it would serve.

But for now and if nothing else, this might be a good place to track interesting lyrics, poems, expressions, aphorisms, conversations, observations, or turns of phrase.

-jmh