If you're reading this, welcome to the new website! A new webhost, new platform, and a new design, all of which will make it easier for me to blog and you to enjoy my blog. There may still be a few rough edges---and new nifty features to be added, but I'm happy here in my new web home.
Bloggity Blog Blog
The old blog couldn't be imported, so scrolling back you'll find only a small selection of the hundreds of posts I wrote in the past ten years since launching A Truant Disposition, and the blog, Idleness. The posts selected to be copied over don't follow a single narrow criteria. They are a combination of best posts, posts I liked, and posts that for some reason I thought I should keep.
Going forward, I'm not yet sure what sort of things I'll write here, or how this will be different from the old blog, except that it's unlikely that I'll post any fiction here since I'm writing so very much for my Patreon. Some of the fiction that has appeared publicly on the web is available as public posts on Patreon, and I'll probably add a few more of the older stories as public posts there along the way.
What The Heck Is This?
I gave a lot of thought prior to moving the website about whether or not to have a blog at all. The old blog wasn't terribly active if measured by number of legitimate comments. I surveyed what various other authors did with their blogs. Blogs with tons of super personal posts with the occasional book-related post, blogs exclusively about writing and publishing, blogs about subjects not remotely related to books, blogs going through the problems of whatever book they're writing in excruciating detail, blogs kept active only by "guest posts" so numerous that it really doesn't seem like the author's blog at all. Blogs which are entirely self-promotion and promotion of one's friends, book review blogs, etc. None of these are right for me. You may find posts here that fall into some of those categories, but I just can't face writing a blog that's just one type of thing. I'd like for my readers to be pleasantly surprised from time to time by posts that are substantially different in content and tone than the previous post. Thoreau said, "I like a broad margin to my life," and if I do this right ("write" I almost wrote), the notes in the margin will be interesting.
"I Must Be Idle." (Hamlet to Horatio)
Why did I call this blog "Idleness"? It seems a strange title for an author who writes (mostly fiction) almost every day. Well, the blog is a bit of idleness. It's not the main job, which is writing books and stories (both of which you can read on my Patreon, either ahead of publication or exclusively). The website name, A Truant Disposition, is taken from Hamlet my favorite play. (Horatio is the one with the truant disposition, which was a flippant answer to Hamlet's query.) Again, it seems an odd title to associate with an author who is writing all the time, but being an author is, by the standards of our society, being something of a truant. Our work is creating imaginary people, places, and things, and telling stories about them. Authors work very hard. Everything we write has to be created in our brain; it has to be detailed, consistent, structured, and put into words (oh, so many words!) which takes a lot of time and energy. And yet...many authors I know feel like they are truants, like they're getting away with something, because they have the greatest job in the world, to imagine everything and write it down. In school I was chided for looking out the window daydreaming. I was an excellent student, but I have always had a truant disposition.
