Welcome To My Workshop

Who knows what this thing is?

I have done a lot of writing in the past three years, and quite a bit of it has been here on this blog. Here I find the impetus to keep up with posts, to write something, even if it is just a few brief words.

Rarely is much of what comes out in these posts "polished," nor does it pretend to be. Rather, this is a place that stimulates my thinking. It is a place where I can hammer out ideas into words -- in fact, as I've said often, I tend to think things through by writing them out.

Blogging is an experimental literary form. If writing were painting, a blog would be a kind of sketchbook full of things ranging from scribblings to quick but colorful drawings. But it's different too, because everything is set forth for people to see (or read, in this case) if they wish. For your sake, I try to put a little paint and varnish on what is presented here. The result is something that, no matter how primitive it may be overall, is always in some respects a finished utterance.

I like to think that I'm welcoming people into my "writing workshop," where I can be a craftsman of words and offer something beneficial to others by bringing them into the work even while it is in progress.

And there has been lots of progress in these years, considering that without this place I would have done little writing beyond my direct publishing assignments. It has required energy, but has also generated it.

Thanks to the blog, I now have a "workshop" full of roughly drafted texts (close to 600 by jiminy -- and that's after subtracting posts that are just pope quotations or cute Josefina pictures). A lot of written material here focuses around a group of related themes. There is the genesis and the initial development of more than one future book in here, if I can find the further energy (and--let's face it--the courage) to organize and develop, to cut and clarify, to revise and synthesize.