Southern Discomfort

holy crap! While sad, I can't wait to see the direction this takes. 'Cause I'm a little techno-bass-ackwards it took me a few minutes to figure out what happened...freaked out for a minute...all better now...you go girl! Sometimes cleaning house (metaphorically, of course...tee hee) is the way to go.

Thanks for your support, as always. (And you know the "cleaning house" bit could stand to be literal as well as metaphorical!)

Oy vey! Glad you aren't ditching the idea of blogging though!

Thanks. I know this must be a little weird for you to be seeing from the sidelines, as we've only recently and then only barely become electronically acquainted. But I'm definitely not throwing it all away. I didn't sink more than four years of my life into blogging (longer than I've put up with lots of relationships!) for nothing. It's taught me a lot, even if a big part of that was learning what I didn't want to be doing anymore.

((((Screams and gnashes teeth)))

I'm glad I read your insightful posts about your ex, and your lives together, first. I hope you saved your wonderful work!!!!!

:(

I feel like that was partly me, and sorry about that. I just wanted you to know what was happening. I hate when *I* am the last to know. I did not want your comments taken in the wrong way, blah blah, and was just giving you a heads up. Okay? I NEVER INTENDED you to delete your blog, and harumphing madly over it. :P

I admit, I like the name better, though!

I'm glad I read your insightful posts about your ex, and your lives together, first.

Well, thank you. I think that was my laying down some formative groundwork for the book. I did back everything up, and please be assured that, in the scheme of things, this most recent blogospheric dustup played a relatively small role in the decision to go nuclear.

There were cracks in the foundations of what I had been trying to accomplish with this blog, and I could no longer either pretend those fissures weren't there, or continue to drain my life away with ineffectual efforts toward "repair."

Well, don't take this the wrong way, but for me as a reader, it sucks. It's your space, so you could and should do what you want with it... it's one of those strange tensions with blogs since they are neither wholly public nor wholly private, but I know I'm much less likely to comment here any more. However, I can always comment on my own blog, so it's just a shift from one scene to another I guess...

Yeah, sorry. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that future posts will cause you a lot less irritation. I do recall that you temporarily unfollowed me on Twitter when the quantity of my overtly political posts (or perhaps it was their quality? - hard to judge in 140 characters, perhaps) got to be too much.

In your place, I'd have done the same.

I did unfollow you for a while but, as they say, "it was me, not you." Hey, as long as you are doing what you do because you want/need to for your own creative and philosophical reasons, then go for it. It's the whole thing about comment areas being a pseudo-publishing space that Link is always talking about. It's the risk you take investing time in something that you don't own that those things can disappear.

I just hope you aren't unduly influenced by a few knuckleheads who can't stop pecking at you. I think where we most diverge is in the need to remove a bunch of previous writing (including some really beautiful content) in order not to write about certain things anymore. I like the blog as an evolutionary artifact, warts and contradictions and changes in position and all. But this isn't *my* blog :)

I meant to mention another impetus for the blog-nukage: this. (And I laughed when I read this apt comment from you.) While McLeod kept his blog but nuked his twitter account (though I see he has since restored it for archival purposes), I went the other way, because, oddly enough, my twitter usage felt more congruent with my artistic needs than my blog usage.

I'd been reading him for a long time. Every now and then I'd come back to his How To Be Creative post and mull over the matter of just what in the hell I'd been doing with my blog, anyhow. How I'd managed to stray so far from my original intent, back in 2003 or 04 or whenever it was I first started "blogging." (I started using Blogger in 2004, but for a while before then I was doing my own craptastic thing with FrontPage. It looked like shit but the content was in lots of ways better than much of the material that followed.)

So all that was already weighing heavily on my mind, when yet another damned episode of feminist intrablogwarfare erupted, which helped to push things over the edge.

There was intrablogwarfare?

I always miss these things. Ah it's good to be a math and physics student. ;)

Um... just in case anyone is planning to give me some well-deserved crap for taking as credible the above-referenced bit about Hugh MacLeod's killing his Twitter account (whether it was all a joke, or he simply changed his mind, as this seems to imply), I am aware that he's back. (And glad of this. Welcome back, sir!)

But the premise - that one's choice to withdraw from processes that may be serving as much to distract from, as to strengthen one's artistic intentions - remains valid, and, for me, applicable.

It's the whole thing about comment areas being a pseudo-publishing space that Link is always talking about. It's the risk you take investing time in something that you don't own that those things can disappear.

That is, indeed, the most vexing aspect of this for me. If you'd like, I'd be more than happy to extract from the backup any and all posts to which you made comments, and make those available to you, or anyone else who asks. (If they're nice!)

I think where we most diverge is in the need to remove a bunch of previous writing (including some really beautiful content) in order not to write about certain things anymore.

First, thank you. Second, part of it is, I need to look at the same material with fresh eyes. For example, I'd had material for my story Oklahoma Funeral strewn between two or three different posts (and miscellaneous comments, both here and elsewhere), and I desperately need to pull all that material together to write the story, the whole surreal thing from recognizable beginning to recognizable end. So don't look at it as throwing-away, but as recycling. Rather radical recycling, but recycling nonetheless. :)

Wow, you deleted everything? Huge change. I don't think I could do it without hyperventilating.

Actually, I couldn't have gone on as I had been without hyperventilating. :)

Ummm, i think congratulations. But you write so beautifully that I think I will miss returning to the old posts to admire them.

That's very kind of you to say, and I dearly appreciate it. Again, it's all backed up if there's something you need... I know there have been some valuable conversations hosted here, and in some ways it was selfish of me to torpedo everything in this way, but after hours of trying to pick and choose between what to save and what to delete, I realized I was going to second-guess myself to death and end up worse off than I was feeling to begin with. Which was pretty bad.

Some time ago I said I wished my wordprocessing program had a "lapsing into polemic" check... and that wasn't a joke. None of my convictions have changed - at all - but I can't do the (overtly) political blogging thing anymore. Despite the tagline, Suspiciously tolerant of ambiguity that had accompanied the (unpronounceable and admittedly irritating) blog title, Anachroclysmic, I was painting myself into rigid ideological corners with everything I wrote, and in the meantime I wasn't getting anything done toward any of my books.

It's nice that you feel better,

(But I'm sure glad I saved copies of a few my favorite posts of yours.)

Thanks for your understanding, caprice. Let me be clear that my taking this action should not be taken as a sign of ingratitude toward my previous (and especially long-time) readers; I just had to make a radical course change.

And if you or anyone else I cared about were to need to reference specific previous posts and/or comments, I have backed everything up, and I'm happy to make that material available by email. Just drop me a line w/ whatever you remember of the post(s) or comment(s) and I'll do what I can.

Congratulations.

Thank you kindly. And how lovely of you to comment... all things considered.