This weekend I talked with Peter Grant (of Bayou Renaissance Man) about the blogging. I'm struggling, as my regular readers will have noticed, to stay with a routine here. Some of it, as I told Peter, is that I'm not sure what topics to address. I know I don't want to do politics. Years ago, when I first met Peter in person, one of the things we talked about was building a platform for the fiction publication. Start blogging regularly, he'd suggested then. I did, and it had done well for me for a few years, until the day job and life changes made it impossible to blog daily.
This time, he suggested I go back to the beginning. "When I started a blog, I wrote about the topics that interested me. I thought, and time proved me right, that readers who enjoyed the blog would also enjoy the fiction. You find like minded people when they enjoy your posts."
So that's what I'm going to do. I'm a flibbertigibbet, so the topics will be all over the place, of course. I can't help it. I'm interested in so many things. From exploring the Mandelbulb universes through the lens of programs that employ math I don't understand to make art that speaks to me in a strange language, to books I've enjoyed, to my own mental health struggles (see below) to strange science. There still won't be politics. It's low-hanging fruit that I could use to pick up the blog traffic, but the effects on my blood pressure and mental health aren't worth it. I'd much rather find readers who enjoy the retreat from that unpleasantness the way I do.
I will still make this blog more personal than it probably should be. I think I've said it before, but explicitly, if my working through the struggles I have, in public, helps even one of you find a way to cope with life and improve, it's worth the risk of exposing my own inadequacies. I can't say that what works for me will work for anyone else. And there are things I can't talk about, not yet, maybe in a few years. But I can at the very least lay it out for someone else to perhaps have a spark of an idea, an insight into themselves.
Things I have been reading: Patricia Wentworth, when I find her books on sale or in KU. I find her work comfortingly predictable, although the gothics like Hole and Corner have not been suiting my mood. It's not just that particular heroine being too stupid to live, I don't really want the gloom and horror hanging overhead that epitomizes the genre. On the other hand, I recently stumbled across Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley series and have been delighted with their convoluted mysteries. Laurels are Poison is particularly good, especially if you enjoyed Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night ( to which it shows obvious influence, although it isn't nearly so intellectual). I started with The Saltmarsh Murders which was... complicated. And had a wet fish narrator. I don't recommend starting there.
Self-Improvement: I continue to make art every day. I'm on year... I don't know. Six? I think? I know I've been making art regularly since 2014, but I don't think I started the daily thing until 2016 or so. I've missed a few days here and there due to serious illness or sheer exhaustion, but I do see improvement overall. Besides, it's a nice bit of relaxation built into my day, to sit and focus for a short while on creating. I'm brushing up my Spanish with Duolingo, and I'm on day 123 of a streak of lessons daily there. I'm working towards (again) writing ever day as well. That's a harder habit to keep up, because unlike the art, I have to pick up the threads of a long-term project, not a new beginning every day. It's a challenge!
I should probably make up a list of blog topics, like art prompts, and write one every day... ooh. That might actually be fun to do just like I do during N'inktober, making up a month of oddball words or word combos and then write essays from that? Hm! I may have to solicit ideas in the art groups.
In the meantime, dear readers, before I start working on expanding the readership, you know me and have stuck around this long. What topics would you enjoy reading with me?
Mathematics speaks a strange language and you are led down channels of unknown futures. (Channels, created in MB3D)
(Header image: Moebius Meiosis, from an ongoing mandelbulb chain pong originating from Marijke Groothius and Dat Pham)