Lost Time

It looks like I've been out of the loop for, oh, a year and a half. That's terrible. Embarrassing. Laughably sad. And there's really not even a good excuse. 

It's not like I've done anything shocking or depraved in the meantime. No binges, scandals, torrid love affairs to add fodder to my literary life. No alien abductions or any such reasonable excuse. Sad! I've still been writing... and reading... still toiling at the day job (which is time consuming)... still buying some literary magazine subscriptions to support the industry once in a while... sometimes even getting around to reading those literary magazines! (Although right now I have a major backlog of magazine reading of all stripes lying around here needing to be read.) And of course, I've still been writing (I've probably created about five or six new short stories over the last year and a half), sending out submissions, and getting rejected just as regularly as before. 

I still love Duotrope's Digest for tracking my progress (or lack thereof) even though I often wonder about the folks who apparently report an unrealistic ratio of acceptances/rejections (Duotrope blocks them from their data). Losers (the people who don't accurately report, not Duotrope). Come on, tell it like it REALLY is! It's a rough life in the literary world, and I'm pretty sure you'd need to be some kind of Pulitzer Prize winner to have some kind of crazy 100% acceptance rate. Sorry, maybe I'm just cynical.  

I believe I posted here ages ago about the site LibraryThing, but in the time that's passed it looks as if GoodReads is the social networking tool of choice for readers these days. I felt like LibraryThing had a better, more intuitive interface than GoodReads does now, but then again, GoodReads is a better name for the thing and seems to have taken off much more. Kind of reminds me of how everybody seemed to forget all about Friendster for MySpace (and maybe eventually will ditch MySpace for Facebook)? Ah, the fickle world of social networking tools. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have definitely had more friends invite me to GoodReads. 

Anyway, I guess I've been going for the prize for lamest blogger ever (and this is a blog about writing, no less!), but I'm going to try to get this going again, and post a bit more often than every year and a half, and definitely add some comments about some of the stuff I've read/encountered recently. Quite a goal!! Let's see if I can handle it... baby steps... hopefully the next post won't be in 2010!!  

LLB