To do:

Find a header image for this blog that looks less like a stock photo, even though in fact I took it myself. Let’s see, what’s wide, flat, and says “me?”

The results are in, and–

I will in fact be a member of the 2011 Clarion class this summer! Which is very exciting news, and no, I certainly didn’t think I was going to get in. But am very pleased and intimidated and fearful and excited.

And also this blog is mentioned on my Twitter profile which means people wandering over to check it out and there is nothing here! It is like they have come to my apartment and I don’t have a table or chairs for them to sit on and am sort of awkwardly offering them juice in plastic cups while I try to find a milk crate that could be emptied so we don’t have to sit on the floor.

It is sort of like that.

So this is meant as a welcome mat of a post: hi, fellow Clarionists and Clarionatrices. I’m, um, going to start using this thing, really I am.

Current Status

Things I should be doing: working on various writing projects; preparing for long scheduled plotting session tomorrow

Things I am actually doing: playing with my wordpress layout; listening to Teenage Fanclub

Things I have learned: Typekit is awesome.

That is all.

More soon.

Or rather, more soon?

See, now that I’ve gotten the stupid First Post out of the way I can write something real and interesting now (if I want).

The title of this post is also a lesser-known Panic at the Disco song. The More You Know!

Blogging about blogging: the bloggening

Looking back at the two previous blogs I’ve begun and, eventually, abandoned, I find that both of them began with what at the time seemed like at-worst-cute, at-best-poetic attempts to say “Here I am, a guy with a blog like all those other guys with blogs.” Both of these Hello World! posts are now kind of embarrassing, in that what they are saying is: I feel dumb leaping into actual content with both feet.

This is still true, but more so, since this blog *has no readership*, because nobody, even good friends, even knows it exists yet — both previous blogs were LiveJournals, and in both cases I had at least a small ready-made audience of friends who would notice if I posted. That is not the case here — I can essentially treat this space as a weird, boring private journal until I’m Icerocketed out of anonymity by a bored friend, or until I choose to reveal the power of this fully operational space station.

Whyso, since I could just pull a LiveJournal out of mothballs and start writing there like nothing’s happened? Well, mostly I want a fresh start. But also because LiveJournal is quite good for active communities, and somewhat less good, I think, for individual journallers — it puts a premium on comment counts and friend counts, and the way it’s set up seems to cause an inverse correlation between quality of post and number of responses.

This may be true out in the big wide world of blogging as well, but since the big wide world of blogging doesn’t have this notion of “friend” relationships there’s less packed-in pressure to write for comments or to write to gain “friends.” Building an audience is, well, harder, I think.

Anyway. This is more a bit of personal thinkery on my part than anything else, but as I mentioned, no one’s reading this blog, so I can do whatever I want. Ha!

Hello.

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.

-Federico Garcia Lorca, from “Balada de la placeta”