In a comment below, anonymous asked, “Have you abandoned this site?”



Fair question, given nearly 3 months of silence.



Contrary to appearances, I haven’t officially abandoned it. I’ve primarily been distracted by an immense amount of work. I have a nasty tendency to load myself down with too many projects, so that no free time exists. An additional problem is that, when you’re working on upwards of 10 ideas at once, none of them get finished. So I’ve recently, after a short vacation in Slovenia, limited my load to 2 projects—a screenplay and the final book of the Eastern European series—which has helped considerably.



Also, looking over what this blog had become, I found myself somewhat dismayed. Ideally, a blog is about ideas. About insights into whatever the blogger has privileged access to. And while over the previous year I’d made a few posts along those lines, the bulk were simply house-cleaning pieces. Links to reviews, website modifications, career tracking. Essentially, it had become a board to display updates about me.



Which struck me as kind of boring.



Recently though, I’ve been thinking a lot about this blog, and about things which can be discussed with some fluency. And anonymous’s question is encouraging me to stop thinking about these subjects, and start writing again.



For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about ambition. Literary ambition in particular. What is it? And how, in today’s McWorld (to steal a metaphor from Donald Hall), can one sustain it? Check out this particularly interesting essay by Mr. Hall over at The Academy of American Poets’ site, on “Poetry and Ambition”.



I think that subject will begin my re-introduction into the blogosphere. And this time, I’ll do my damndest to stick to it.



But first, the boring update (see above in a little bit).



-Olen

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)