The thing about having a blog...

...is that there's a certain pressure to keep maintaining it, even if you don't have that much to say. Such is the situation in which I now find myself. I think maybe some people kepe blogs because they really really like to talk, chatter, spred the word on various things they care about, and so on; the blog is their forum, in a way. That's not really the case for me: I write all day long, more or less, so don't feel like I need a forum in which to write. The other thing is, the day-to-day life of a writer really isn't all that fascinating; you go somewhere quiet, sit around for most of the day writing stuff out in notebooks or on a computer, look at it again, write it over, type it up, write it over, set it aside, look at it later, write it over. I'm not complaining, by any stretch, just trying to explain why the lags between blog entries seems to be getting longer...

So anyway, that's what I've been doing--various projects which are now in various states of semi-done-ness, or barely-started-ness, or spilled-out-in-a-rush-ness. But there's not much I can really talk about yet, which maybe gives the impression that I'm not doing a great deal... when actually I'm doing about five things at once. Oh well.

Current read: The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu. A history of early comic books, from the appearance in the early 1900s through the 1950s, when they came under increasing attack from various quarters, notably the Catholic Church and opportunistic politicians who wanted to be seen as enacting meaningful legislation agsinst social ills (juvenile delinquency paramount among them) without actually having to experience any of the side effects themselves--because none of them read comic books. It's an interesting window into 1950s America in all its McCarthyesque myopia, and the descriptions of book-burnings, orchestrated by numerous Catholic schools and presided over by the nuns, are quite chilling. (Contemporary commentators pointed out that the Nazis had orchestrated similar events 10 or 20 years earlier.) All in all it's a lively, readable book, appealing I think to anyone with any interest in this art form.