20190104.0430

It is clear at this point that I am going to try to keep my blog going. I remain a creature of habit, after, all, and that of posting to this webspace is pretty solidly established at this point. There are ways in which writing here is easier than writing in other venues, perhaps because the expectations are somewhat lower. I do not feel compelled to work toward the same production value or quality of content that my more professional online venture seems to me to demand. And by that I mean that I do not have to support my assertions here with the same rigor that I do in the other webspace. Nor yet do I feel obliged to attend to paratextuals quite so closely here as there (which is good, because I do not have the same control of them here as there, owing to platform programming limitations). And while I link from here to there, I do not much go from there to here. I am freer here.
I feel I've been exercising that freedom to better effect here recently than in previous attempts to write prose in this webspace. My posts have been longer, running a hundred words of more longer than their earlier counterparts (in the main; there are always exceptions, but general tendencies are useful to identify). I feel I've been thinking in more depth about things as I've made the more expansive responses; though the Express-News does not have the heft or institutional history of the New York Times (not that that paper hasn't been having its own difficulties of late), the articles I've read and responded to in it have gotten more from me than the paper of The City. Perhaps it is because I am a more mature writer and person now than when I worked from the Times; perhaps, too, it is because the Express-News is closer to home for me, even if I still regard myself as being in some ways in exile from the Big Apple. And even in those posts which have not grounded themselves directly in the readings I do (not do enough of), I am seeing more and better words. Or I think I am; I do not know that I want to know if I am not.
Part goes to my composition process, I suspect. While I do have some buffer set up, a set of posts written ahead of time and made ready to go, I do not have as much as I might like. (I can have more of posts like this than of responses to news, given the turnover of news; I cannot get too far ahead of myself when responding to the newspaper, lest what I write about cease to matter before what I write of it emerges into the world.) Even when I have had more of one, I have maintained it against the certainty that there will be days in which I cannot write; that maintenance helps me feel accountable, which helps encourage me to write at least one post to this webspace each day. (This is in addition to the work I do in the other webspace, where I also strive to maintain a buffer despite lower publication rates, and the personal journal I keep.) Persistent practice, of which I never seem to get enough, does seem to help--as is a commonplace, and in other work than writing. Indeed, had I been so diligent in practicing my saxophone as I was and am with my writing, I might well be a band director today, my initial adult professional goal fulfilled.
That would be quite a different me, though, and I am not sure I'd like him better than the me I know at the moment. That me, at least, will keep on writing here for a while.