Stating the Obvious

So, it’s been a while,…

Major change is coming to this blog. My original idea, to have a fictional character post every week about a fictional town had two major flaws. Flaw number one: My day job got in the way of blogging every week. Instead of flexing my creative muscles in the months of April and May, I was instead grading AP Lit essays and studying new question types for standardized tests. It became clear to me that a weekly post was not something I could always achieve. Then it occurred to me that since no one is actually reading this blog, I could do whatever I wanted. A liberating thought, I thought.

Flaw number two: the set up I established was too narrow and limited what I could blog about in ways I had not anticipated. Or maybe it was just too hard. It’s not that I had no ideas that I wanted to write about, it was more that those ideas didn’t fit into the fictional character and fictional setting I was trying to work within.

So, here’s how this blog is going to work going forward. First, the blog will now be mine not that of a fictional character. The fictional Cassie Bourn will report from fictional Loving, TX, from time to time, but the majority of posts will be me. Unadorned and not hiding behind the screen of fiction.

Second, the blog will become more observational, philosophical. I have been reading John Greene’s The Anthropocene Reviewed lately, and it has inspired this new blog adventure. The book reminds me of the kind of newspaper columns that were written by the great Erma Bombeck among others. Gentle observation and commentary of life’s smaller and less apocalyptic elements with the implicit encouragement to think, to savor, to change. The written encouragement of introspection.

So, that’s what I am going to try to do here from now on. I make no promises as to frequency of posts. Twice a month is my goal, but I reserve the privilege of more or less depending on inspiration.

The world is a pretty amazing place. To focus on only the good and the beautiful is to be willfully blind. To focus only on the bad and the ugly is to be merely perverse. Balance is where wisdom is found.

Type to you soon.

Shelley