In the middle of July this year, the blog went silent. Unfortunately, I didn’t provide an explanation. On the one hand, my plans to increase content for the blog went down the tubes. On the other hand, I jumped at a rare opportunity. To avoid jinxing myself, I’m going to leave the details of the opportunity rather vague. I will only state that the blog’s silence involved my work on a personal creative project, a large-scale fictional endeavor long in gestation.

As noted in previous updates, this blog is a one-person operation. Due to my work schedule, I can only really produce new content during my weekends. When this creative opportunity presented itself, I pushed everything else aside, including this blog. I devoted my weekends to it. Creative production involves several aims, the primary one being getting the damn thing done. During the time my blog remained silent, I worked on revising and polishing my fiction project. I wanted it to be as good as it could be. Good enough to submit to a publishing professional and to satisfy my own personal standards in terms of creative production and consumption. I’ve written some pretty merciless reviews for novels I’ve considered sub-standard. So my bar remained high. There’s been many a literary critic whose forays into fiction led to disaster. To use the cliché: Live by the sword, die by the sword. This a highly roundabout way to say: I didn’t want my creative project to suck.

In terms of blog posts, I will be posting a brief essay on the new Dune movie. Neither a “hot take” nor a full-blown film review, it will be more a rumination on the anxiety of influence, genre expectations, and personal opinions. With winter soon arriving, the cold weather will give me more opportunities to post, catch up on book reviews, and provide more content for consumption. (What an anemic clinical turn of phrase.) As always, the key factors are: scheduling, motivation, and inspiration. A busy holiday season may result in me simply not wanting to post. At least money isn’t a factor, since that won’t compel me to produce content of a sub-standard quality. The profit motive can sometimes lead to the mass production of junk. The Internet has enough of that already. That isn’t to say each blog post will be a Faberge egg of hyper-polished exquisite craftsmanship. The challenge is finding the happy medium between material “workshopped to death” and “slapdash ephemera.”