MetaBlogging

So I’ve been blogging for over five years now, and I’m still not entirely sure why. Is this thing an extroverted version of the diary I never managed to keep? Is it an attempt to scratch the writing itch without doing any actual writing? A hopeful shout out into the void? A reason to spend even more time sitting in front of a computer?

The short answer is “I don’t know”. The long answer is “I lack the epistemological basis for any sort of definitive assertions on the subject.” The surrealist answer is “The cheese rises splatterwise in the eye of the molting cow!”

But the good news is I’ve discovered an actual use for this thing: it turns out to be a really good life barometer. Which is to say, I’ve found that the quality and frequency of my posts correlate pretty much exactly with the quality of my mind — when the mind is engaged, stimulated, exposed to new things, the blog is happy. When the mind is plodding, sluggish, or looping through the same basic patterns over and over again, the blog is unhappy. It’s a sort of canary in my mental coal mine.

The canary’s been ailing recently. Not quite dead, but sort of hanging upsidedown on its perch, squawking plaintively, pining for the fjords.

So it’s probably a good thing that I got accepted into Clarion this year. Clarion is a sort of intensive six-week scifi/fantasy writing workshop, taught by established writers in the field, held every year. I’ve been reading about Clarion for a while, and almost-but-not-quite-applying for nearly as long. It’s a big commitment — you basically have to drop the rest of your life and focus on nothing but writing for a month and a half.

But I finally pulled the trigger and applied, at the urging of my wife, who pointed out (nicely) that I’m getting too damn old for the luxury of this kind of feckless vacillation. You either want to be a writer or you don’t. Choose. (It also helps that Cory Doctorow, one of my heroes, will be teaching this year).

So it’s finally happening, and it’ll probably be the most radically different thing I’ve done in a long, long time. If my blog barometer theory is correct, this should jolt the canary upright, maybe even send it spinning crazily around its perch.

I guess we’ll see.