Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

more return to blogging garbage

I saw a bunch of articles recently about “the return of the blog” and suddenly remembered I have a blog and I never update it, and maybe while I’m circling rudderless on this next book, I should maybe think about that.

I have all of these various “content boxes” to fill, and never know how to evenly distribute the random chunks of thought. Should I be posting ideas to twitter?  More pictures to tumblr?  “Serious” photos to 500px?  Meme photos to Facebook?  Stories here, or submit the stories, or expand the stories and push them into books?  And when I do all of those things, in some mystical, perfect combination, then what gets posted here?  News and info, or what I ate for lunch, or… what?  The anxiety and uncertainty over all of that makes me not post.  The only real answer is to write.

They are drilling a hole under the highway across from my house. There’s a large vacant dirt lot across the street, the immediate view under my third-story windows.  The power company has leased the land and has an armada of heavy machinery there now, large drills and generators and containers and backhoes and other unknown things, surrounded by a temporary fence emblazoned with the name of an industrial rental company every ten feet. During the day, they’re essentially drilling for oil sideways, running segments of pipe into this patch of mud and debris. I think they pump in water, or suck out mud, or something, the mess being sifted by a large machine that looks like if a dumpster had sex with a Sherman tank. The sound is not incredibly loud, but it’s loud enough, and constant. I think they will be doing it for a few more weeks. I hope they find some dead bodies, or a UFO. I’ve got in the noise-cancelling earbuds, which do little, and have some stupid new-age meditation music playing, because I have a splitting headache.  (I think it’s mostly allergies, though.)

I started my own social networking site this week, and then decided that was a stupid idea and closed it.  So now I’m sitting on the domain for RathSpace.com and don’t know what to do with it.  Any of this stuff is a waste of my time though, and I should be writing. I have become more and more disillusioned with Facebook, not the actual software itself or the company, but the people I follow. I have some really good friends on there, and then a bunch of people who only post about Ebola and whatever NFL player did whatever to whoever last week. I often wish I could find my own clique or group out there, but the more writers I find online, the more I realize I’m army-of-one’ing it over here.

I have been piddling with this UFO cult book, and it’s going slow, so I keep throwing words into the chasm of this book that’s essentially a sequel to Atmospheres, but that has no tracks yet, no structure or theme or anything else. It’s fun to work on, though. The audio book for Atmospheres is done, awaiting approval, so hopefully I will have news on that in a bit.