Practice Blog #2

Tuesday I gave my first public speech about the novel. Next Tuesday I'm scheduled for the second one. I'm being hosted by the Bluffton Library, which means I'll be among friends. The stakes are slightly higher: Among friends are people who care a lot that the work is good, that what I say is honest, and that the book does the university proud.

First Post (experimental)

So I’ve figured out that every author’s website needs a blog. I don’t know how to write a blog. I regularly scribble in my journal (hardback spiral bound, fountain pen, corner of the couch, coffee) which nobody reads. Once every couple of months I write something in a box on my Facebook site. But a blog? In verb form, “to blog” means to produce a particular kind of fresh, smart, friendly prose that must seem to be written quickly. (Okay, I have ten more minutes.) The blog (noun) should be personal, off the cuff, and full of interesting detail. I have friends who blog, brilliantly. I enjoy reading their blogs. I wish I had their panache.

This blog must be public, and it must connect to Riders in the Storm, a novel I’m proud to have written and extremely glad to have finished. There are eight complete versions on my computer, many versions of each chapter, and several file drawers full of notes. And, I suppose, there’s a lot to say about it. I’ve written a “sixties novel” not because I wanted to, but because I’ve known I had to write about 1968 ever since January 1969, and once I figured out how, in 2002, I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I had hopes that it wouldn’t be “just another sixties novel” – because it takes place in Cleveland, the year before the river caught fire, and because it deals with a current question: how do you handle becoming an adult in a world full of cataclysmic events, including an overseas war that’s doing a lot of damage, an increasingly unfair and exploitative division of wealth, and a good deal of injustice?

Ten minutes is up. More soon, as I get the hang of this.