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What's (Not) Going On around Here: Craft

Posted on by Brooke

A very short while ago (subjective time) I announced a plan to pen a short series of insufferably self-absorbed, navel-gazing gritty, fact-finding posts about what goes into this particular web address. For my purposes, the series amounts to an attempt to respond reflectively and directly to the fact that a five-post-a-week habit had fallen into…irregularity.



This morning, I take a moment to stir into that glass of water a few words on writing.

For me, putting words on a page is enjoyable in direct proportion to how much attention I can give them. Like anything else. It’s the difference between a leisurely afternoon maintaining your bicycle and sweating out your shirt to patch & inflate a torn inner tube on the way to your first job interview in three months. Or, to return inadvisably to the theme of “irregularity,” it’s the difference between crafting your martial arts patterns & techniques every morning and flailing through them in miniature while behind the wheel driving late to the promotion test.

To put it in terms of product rather than process, a blog post worthy of the name is, on average, a good 250+ words that are lovingly chosen to accomplish some keenly-felt goal…not, as Drifty reminds us through prophetic sign-act and through don’t-miss dialogue with Blue Gal, twelve words wrapped around a link to Digby. Or to James, or Peter, or Mark.[1]

So I offer what another craftsperson, Poul Anderson, liked to call “the triumphant discovery of the obvious”: it turns out that, when one is five-alarm, brain-yammering, cringing-and-trembling, fear-mad busy on most days of your vain life that are given you under the sun… one finds that opportunities to craft quietly-running bicycles, effective Taekwon-do patterns, and satisfying strings of words fall as few as workers, and as far between as pebbles in the sky.

BACK TO POST (N.B.: Secondly, I've got to get more bloggy friends with OT names. But firstly, we need to make permanent the thread about Where All da [Biblical-Studies-Bloggin] Wimmin At?)

[What's (Not) Going On around Here: Craft was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2011/02/16. Except as noted, it is © 2011 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]