Blogging; Writing A Play

Every blog post I write appears in three places at more or less the same time: on Christianity.com, Crosswalk.com, and on my WordPress blog. Together the three bring me some 40,000 "views" per month. I have no idea how many people that number represents, but I'm guessing I couldn't fit them into my living room at once.

I've been blogging for one year now. It's become one of my two primary creative outlets: I blog, and I write books. Both are dear to me.

Lately I've been doing neither. I'm between books -- the editing of one done; the exact structure of the next still in the works -- and my last blog post was on May 6, four days ago. Four days isn't much time in real life, but in Blog Time it's about four months. My view numbers have plummeted like a toddler on a tight-rope. Posting to a blog is like drinking water: If you don't do it all the time, you pretty quickly expire.

I like to post a new piece at least every other day, because I know people are showing up to my blog, and I hate the thought of not giving them something for their trouble and precious time. It kills me that people come to my blog. I feel it as an honor. So I want to do my best by the people who show up here; I want to show them, via the quality of what I give them, the same respect they show me by coming here in the first place.

Lately, though, I've been having one of the most exceptional writing experiences of my life. I'm writing a three-act play. I figure it's at most ten hours' work away from being finished. I expect to have it done by the time my father arrives here this Thursday. (I wrote about my pop's upcoming visit on my last post, My Dad, My Book, and the 2008 San Diego Book Awards.)

I won't bore you with why, exactly, I've found writing my first play such an ... enveloping experience (especially since I know I'll never fully understand it myself) -- but it has meant that lately, whenever I sit down to write a blog post, I instead open the play and work on it. Which is so bizarre I can barely think of it without making funny Martian noises. I never don't blog. At this point, I don't even know how not to. I think in blog segments. I've felt destined for a daily column since I first learned there were such things. Blogging for me is like swimming for a fish.

Except that lately I've been being Joe Playwright.

I'm afraid all I'm saying is that I may not post anything new here until my play's finished. That might be tomorrow. That might be in two weeks. I have no idea. But somewhere in there, for sure.

You'll wait for me, yes?

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