State of the Blog: February 2008

I liveblogged the Superbowl this weekend and realized in the process that my blog has become unfocused, sporatic, and uneventful.  I mean dude, really, what was I thinking?  Years ago, I started blogging about being a struggling unpublished children's book author in the hopes that someday I could blog about being a successfully published children's book author.  But somewhere I strayed from the path and started adding in politics, sports, observations about breakfast cereals, and all kinds of stuff that might have a place elsewhere but distracts from this blog's intended purpose.

So I'm taking this blog back to its roots.  This will again be a kidlit blog about writing and reading literature for children. There will be reviews of books I've read, ponderings about the theory of literature, and updates about my own writing--so if you're not interested in that, go ahead and unsubscribe from the RSS.

Another painful acknowledgment: I have come to realize that maintaining a blog takes a different skillset than writing a novel--timely entries, frequent updates, quick writing without revision, and a conversational style.  Some people are natural-born bloggers, but that will never be me.  My strength is in revision, which is great for writing novels but I will always be disappointed with anything quickly dashed off, like a grocery list, ransom note, or blog entry.  I either spend way too long polishing each blog entry, or post some rough draft that I'm not happy with, or end up not posting anything at all.  That's never going to change, so even if I'm on topic from now on, I can't promise to post to any regular schedule or to post anything that's particularly brilliant.

Finally, I haven't had as much time in the past few months to read many blogs.  I feel bad about that, because I have friends who are doing remarkable things with their own writing careers and I'd love to be able to give them a shout out and congratulations for each new sale, book event, good review, or award nomination.  Especially my awesome classmates in the Class of 2k7.  You guys rock, even if I don't say so enough.

So, anyway, yeah...that's the State of the Blog.  It'll get better, but probably not all that much.

PS: If you were expecting SOTB to stand for "State of the Baby", she's still not born yet.  Any day now...any hour, really, and we'll be bringing a new reader into the world!