20190604.0430

I have not been as successful on writing on 4 June as I have on a number of other days; I appear to have done so in this webspace only in four years previously: 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. The last of them, again, is a poem in a sequence of them and cannot be understood outside of that sequence--and I might someday revisit that project. There was promise in it, but I am not skilled enough a writer to  fulfill that promise. The 2016 piece was an occasional poem, one of many I've written that could do better as prose; I am not sure what I've tried to do with line breaks other than highlight things, but that highlighting doesn't make much sense to me at this point. The 2015 piece ruminates on then-present circumstances at what my Mrs. and I called Sherwood Cottage in something of a romanticizing gesture that had the benefit of being easier to write and reference than "the place we live/d in Stillwater." (We refer to our apartment in Brooklyn as Bedfordside Garden for a similar reason. Other places we've lived get other names.)
The 2014 piece, as I look at it again (and it's been five years since I have), warms my cockles. It talks about the beginnings of the Tales after Tolkien Society blog, with which I was and still am heavily involved, as well as with the Society that operates it. (Clearly so; I was one of its first vice-presidents, and I am currently its president. It's hard to be more involved with it.) I was and still am enthusiastic about that project, though I do not post in it as frequently as I do in other places (such as this one), and being reminded of my early enthusiasm for the project (which helped the Society come in as a World Fantasy Award finalist in, I think, 2016) has not so much rekindled my enthusiasm as it has restored to me a little bit of joy I had not recalled having.
Leaving aside the discussion of scholarship and audience that runs to self-pity--the tendency to it in my writing is one I've yet to outgrow, despite being many years no longer a teenager--I had no way to know at the time that things would progress with the blog as they have. I've been fortunate to see some of the most popular and insightful commentaries about some of the most popular medievalist mass-media to emerge in a while develop, and I've seen the popularity of those commentaries mount; having some small part in it has been gratifying. Having my own work, much more modest, receive some attention alongside it has also been enjoyable--as well as helping my writerly voice develop further. I've worked to improve how I write for broader audiences through the work I've done on that blog, and I flatter myself that it's influenced the other writing I've done since starting on that.
I often use reminiscence and rumination to chastise myself. I look back on what I have done and what I have written, and I think about how stupid I was in whichever then is in question. Occasionally, though, I am happy about what I see. It's a nice thing.