Changes in the Air

It’s not just the chilly mornings and slow-turning leaves.

I’ve reviewed what used to be 630 or so blogposts. That’s after having reworked all of my Blogger tags and turned several of them into pages accessible on the black Tabs bar below the banner. Many posts were untagged, however, which required another long stretch of tedious, painstaking work. 

I completed this project as of 1300 hours, Monday, 28 August 2017. I note this detail because it marks the end of too many years of wandering lost in the wilderness with this thing. I didn’t have a lot on this blog after six years and change, but it took two long weeks to go through it all, tweaking grafs, and deleting many of those posts in the end because the featured topic was a trivial thing three years ago, and means even less now. 

I still have a lot of frivolous “look at the funny picture, please buy my books” posts that I should take down. The rewriting could have been better than merely taking out all those excess exclamation points and ellipses. With my Patreon debut imminent, I’ll have to be content knowing my blog finally has the one thing it’s lacked after all these years online.

Focus. 

Try not to get sidetracked.

This seems quite the punchline now that I have no less than a dozen category page tabs on the bar below the title banner. I also have seasonal and occasional tags I intend to use throughout the year. But after years of rocking the tagline “Zombies, music, and fits of observational Tourettes,” after the aforementioned two weeks of re-tagging and full-blog review, I’ve discovered I’m good for several things. 

The dozen or so tags can be condensed to “Fiction, Photography, Poetry, Thoughts on Writing, and Occasionally Amusing Miscellany.” “Focus,” of course, doesn’t have to mean, “I do one thing and one thing only.” It’s not all post-apocalyptic, living-dead darkness with me. Every once in a while I like getting out and taking photographs of where I live. 

Sunsets are free and very conveniently scheduled. I can’t recommend them enough.

I like thinking and writing about things other than how it looks swinging an African cane-cutter through a forest of grasping arms and gnashing teeth. If you’ve read any of my SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER series, you should understand why I might need all the flowers and cats and sunshine-through-the-leaves, light-on-the-mountains I can stuff my eyes with.

“Look at the flowers,” said the lady pointing the gun at the girl on that TV show. My morbid imagination can be that hard to get away from sometimes.

The Wrong Kind of Dead will close out my DEAD SILENCER series, and there will be other things to write. I’m not done entirely with macabre fiction, but, again, if I feel like doing something else, I’m doing it. The job, as always, tells me what to do, and everything feeds into everything else. If you see me cranking out poems all of a sudden, it means I’m also on a hot streak in zombieland, and I’ve probably got some more photo essay posts of scenery and cats to come. When I’m blocked or otherwise uninspired, I’m more or less blocked completely. I’ll bang away at one thing or another until the block is broken and inspiration and energy return, but, as we saw last year, that can a long time.

All my nattering on my issues from last year will give me plenty to talk about in my upcoming podcasts. I know, I’ve been talking about doing podcasts for literal years now. I’ve been cringing through each and every one of those posts for the last two weeks.

If Patreon has got to happen, and it does, then so do the podcasts. Remember how I mentioned how, if I’m doing one thing and another thing, I’m actually doing a little of everything? By that, I mean I already have the first scripts started.

We’ll see if we can’t get this going over Labor Day Weekend. That’s the idea, anyway.

Burning daylight, and, soon enough, the midnight oil.