The Long and the Short of It

I really want to start posting some longer pieces. I have much that I want to say, particularly on religious and biblical topics. Some of these are in production and will be posted when they are ready, others reside only within the deep recesses of my mind and shall emerge into blogland only when they have taken on a more substantial form. I post shorter stuff because of the felt need to publish regularly. I do have returning readers and I don't want to go days without giving them something new, so sometimes, what with the pressures and duties of daily life, I will find a few minutes here and there to write something or other. Often, as you can see if you investigate a little, I will just link to an article from elsewhere I find interesting. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, as it still amounts to blogging, especially when I make a comment or two on the item in question. Some blogs I've seen are actually primarily composed of such links. This can be a legitimate endeavor, for such sites not only provide a means of finding things and stories you might never have found on your own, but they also give a glimpse into the individuality of the blogger and their personal likes and dislikes. Some major non-blog sites (I'm thinking of the Drudge Report) consist of only links, without even comment and with very little in the way of original material.

You may ask what I'm working on right now, but I think it better if I surprise you. I will only say that some major topics will be covered and I hope that someone will find them enlightening. I enjoy writing and I always have. I was not and have never been one of those who want to "have written" but do not want to actually write anything (beyond text messages and emails, anyway) and I think what stops most people from writing anything substantial is simply the fact that it's very hard work unless your name is Isaac Asimov. Now there was a man (a good and decent man from everything I've read about him, even though he was an atheist-I mention this not because there is anything to suggest that atheists are bad people, but because so much of the population makes such erroneous assumptions) who loved to write and found it easy to do so. There was not much else he wanted to do with his life but write. When he became very ill shortly before he died he announced to the world and his many fans that he had stopped writing and there was no more certain way of revealing how serious his condition was (he had AIDS, which was not revealed at the time, and he had become infected when he received tainted blood from having surgery in the early 1980s) then telling us he couldn't write any longer. Asimov once said that people should write even if they aren't very good at it as long as they enjoy it (I think he assumed that many refrain from writing out of fear they are terrible at it) and he compared it to dancing, saying that people still dance even though they'll never be as great as Fred Astaire, but they enjoy it and that is the main thing and they should take the same attitude with writing. It is nice to see so many people writing regularly with the advent of blogging as a major activity. The trouble is there are many apparently abandoned blogs out there, with either only a few posts or in some cases more than few but none after a certain date. The blogger just gave up, finding, I suppose, that maintaining a blog is not easy, even if you're just writing for yourself. Again, some people like the idea of blogging (or writing a book) more than they like actually doing it. As I said, I like both the idea and the doing (though like sex, sometimes you just don't feel like doing it) and I've spent many hours with pen in hand and with fingers on keyboard writing happily away. I won't go back as far as my juvenilia (well, I guess I just did), but I mention those early works (mostly quite awful fiction, usually in the attempted style of some author I was infatuated with at the time) because the instinct to put my thoughts and ideas on paper (or now into cyberspace) has been with me for as long as I can remember. Someday I may write more about my writing history, but I'll leave it for now. I'm rambling, but at least I got a bit of a longer post by doing so.