Blog Gossip

One of my periodic State of the Blog updates.

Name Change? Even I admit that we have an awful name. I happened to be in despair at the time I started this page, and I succumbed to overdramatics I'm not sure if I can change it without starting a whole other page (not that that is not an overdue move itself). I had a dream the other night where I received correspondence from a (completely fictitious) female fan of the site who addressed me as 'Bishop Orgasm', which now that I am reasonably coherent I realize would not be a good name for a man of my age and station, though it is still better than "Bourgeois Surrender". The novel I was toying with that had the working title of "Bourgeois Surrender" I have momentarily changed to "The Benchwarmer", but there are already many blogs by that name out there. I could write under my real name of course. For some reason I don't want to do that yet, because I still consider this as a sidelight to my actual career, which I don't actually have. There is still a symbolic hurdle there.

The second volume of my novel is available now. I have not received my own copy of it yet so no photos. I will write about this more when I do get the book. I was overcome today by the desire to make this announcement somewhere. As you can imagine when I started writing this book many years ago I had very grand visions of the drinking and flirting and condescending I would be doing when it was published--I had an idea of going on an incredible bender, rendered allowable by my genius--how so many plans end in such sexless whimpers. I am also working on getting a paperback edition ready, which would offer my less well-off fans a more reasonable price if they are too shy to ask me to send them a free copy. Hopefully this will be ready soon. There are I think some pretty good episodes in the second volume. The denouement is drawn out a little longer than I would like--it is one of the harder things in novel-writing of course to control all your various storylines and try to tie them up in some way at the end, and I was not entirely successful in doing this--I can't say that one volume is definitely superior to the other however. The second is maybe slightly less conventional. (Do not feel imposed upon, reader. We authors have to talk about our work somewhere even if no one has asked us to. There is no lonelier career than that of the unsuccessful author).

I Guess the Blog Will Go On For Now. I hope that the final publication of this first book will free my mind up to go ahead and pound out another novel now, or perhaps a small volume of stories, which is an item lacking from my oeuvre. I haven't done much fiction writing over the last year or two, and I have been feeling the urge to try to work in that vein again. My hope is that that will help the blog too. The blog overall has been a disappointment, a much bigger disappointment than my novel, which I still think is decent in places. I have never been satisfied with what has come out on the blog. I just need too much time, and too many rewrites to ever have an effective blog, because I cannot overcome the insistent nature of the form that requires regular posting. Obviously I still like the idea of the blog, and I think I am getting better at it. I still think I could make it amount to something that would be of interest to a certain sliver of the potentially worldwide audience within its reach.