All the time vs Persistent

I don't always like writing in blog style. Even a cursory, "Here's a neat link, check it out,"

"(and here's a little snippet of text from the site itself)"

sometimes seems too much. I'm in the writing game for the excitement. The default language of the weblog is an often oppresive mixture of pop journo-write and creative confessional, a medium wherein the meta-narrative of the author's own life is an almost unavoidable focus of the content. This is no judgement on the relative "value" of blogging; rather, it is an attempt to explain the intermittency of my writing in this space.

I decided to use Blogger for this very reason. It seems strange to me to pay for private server space just to get to rid of the little menu bar at the top of the page and wow your friends with your very own domain name. Perhaps I should be more concerned about privacy. But this is a weblog. It isn't supposed to be private. So why pay for it -- and, most importantly, why pay for it when you're likely to not even use it for stretches at a time?

Some readers might shake their heads at this point. "The first rule of blogging," a critic might say, "is to post regularly. Otherwise you lose your audience." I know that. But in light of my family and friends, my various other writing projects, the hockey season, and Civilization IV I just can't keep up that pace. At the end of a busy day (or even a not-so busy one), the Blogger interface is calming, but not as calming as lying in bed and watching ten straight episodes of 24.

My position is that it is better to take a little time on each post and put it up there with purpose instead of just churning out a flow of links and sassy little remarks in order to maintain some baseline level of "service" to one's (largely imaginary) readership. Readers of this site will learn to deal with dry spells or they will not return; and that's fine with me.

This site is an archive. Its value is not immediately apparent. I can't drop everything and spend all my time working on it, digging through digg and reddit and anywhere else in hopes of unearthing the Day's Hottest Link. I take a longer view. As long as Google's paying the bills, I'll keep it up here, and I'll keep adding to it.

Hopefully, in the battle of Persistent versus All The Time, Persistent will come out on top.

Living About the Future

Perhaps part of the impulse to write about the distant future comes from a longing to experience some of the excitement that will be denied to us by our deaths. It's nostalgia, but in reverse; instead of dreaming of a now-lost past, we envision an inaccesible tomorrow. Either way, it's the same thing. It's about having a little piece of what we can never possess.

I've spent the past ten years (give or take) developing an ability to write screenplays. This work has paid off in the form of a few successful grants, a handful of professional writing jobs, and some story editing and coverage-writing work. But I have yet to have a feature-length film actually shot and released (although a few of my scripts have sold, at the time of this writing, they are all in "development"). All this time, waiting for something to happen. Perhaps the whole effort has been a metatext of some sort, a way of being a filmmaker without actually making any films. Like writing about the future, "living about the future" is a way to fulfill a lack. And that lack is always in the present.

Any teenager knows that most futuristic science fiction is really a way of talking about the present, of pointing to what's missing or overpowering about the Now, and of suggesting in bold terms where it all might lead. This is the accepted function of writing about the future. And so, when one realizes that one has been "living about the future," one must ask: what's missing, what's overpowering, and where is it all going to lead?