I recently received this comment from a reader, one missrowanoak:

"WTF! Where are you? Have you stopped reading? I've been checking this goddamn blog for over a year to see if you have read anything. Shit or get off the motherfuckin' pot already!"

(I like your style dude, but there's just one thing: do have to use so many durn cuss-words?)

This was a shock on several levels. Firstly, it was jarring to remember that I actually had a life and thoughts and things to say before I moved to Quincy (we'll get to that in a bit), but also, and perhaps more mind-blowing, I had now to wrestle with the idea that someone actually READS this thing. I fell off my chair, my nose bled, down was up, up was down, I had to call my mom. It was pretty wild there for a minute.

I've recovered to an extent, but I'm going to keep cotton balls in my nostrils until I'm sure I'm out of the woods. Clearly some response is required to blog-commentary of this magnitude. In truth, it's owed to my legions of fans. Who exist, apparently.

Missrowanoak (nice name by the way), it's true that for a year now I've failed to blog. What follows will try to sound like an explanation and not an excuse. I'm a little hazy where the one thing stops and the other starts, so forgive me if stagger over the line now and again.

Weeell, last September I moved to a town called Quincy, Illinois. It has beautiful architecture, lovely trees, friendly people, and I want to burn it down and sew the ground with salt. I can't say that there's anything really wrong with Quincy, it's just not my kind of town. It's got the market cornered on quaint, but not a single decent coffeeshop. It's also closed on Sunday. The whole town.

What I tell people is that it's a nice place to live there, but I wouldn't want to visit. And since I came knowing I'd be here only for a year or so, it's been one agonizingly long visit. I'm in Quincy because going to watchmaking school...like you do.

So here's how that happened; I finished my course work at U of M and set to work on my thesis, and I fiddled and tinkered and generally dicked around and before I knew it my student loans needed paying. I couldn't find a decent job, nor could I defer my loans by going into a doctoral program (because I wasn't technically finished with my MFA). But something had to give.

Now, for some years I'd been working on a theory that an artist can't serve two masters: you can't slave at your local newspaper all day and then come home and expect to write the Great American Novel (don't you hate that phrase, by the way?) at night. No, an artist has to starve OR... be his own boss. I thought that learning a trade would a good way to go; if one works with one's hands all day then one's mind is still fresh at 5:00. And so far this has worked out. I've been developing my talents as a comic artist since I moved to Quincy. I recently adapted James Thurber's short story The Lemming into comic form (this will shortly be published on The Great and Secret Thing, I'll link to it when that happens). But this is probably one of the things that's distracted me from blogging.

Sorry, bit of a tangent there. SO: I applied for watchmaking school. It seemed a good fit: I could learn a trade, defer my loans a little longer, and get the hell outta Dodge for a year or so. Why watchmaking? I dunno. I think they're neat. All those little wheels and springs...

To answer your central question: 'Have you stopped reading?' No, in fact I probably read more now for lack of other things to do. Why haven't I blogged? I don't know. It's hard to say...school is surprisingly intense, but that can't account for all of it... there's also the old 'the-more-free-time-I-have-the-less-I-seem-to-get-done' paradox. I think mainly it's just this feeling I've got that my year in Q-town is a weird in-between-time in my life. I assure you, my blog is not the only thing that's on hold right now.

It seems likely that I'll be moving back to Memphis in October, and I hope I'll be able to pick up a number of threads I left dangling when I moved. The blog is one of them. I will try to blog before then, just so my time in Q can't be counted a as complete flatline. I just read Watership Down (I know it's old news to most of you, but it was my first time and I loooooooved it) and it's still on my mind... At any rate I hope that this will serve for a few more weeks.

Thanks for the heads-up.