Look, I realize that in Blog World having your last post dated December 12 when it's now the following mid-April looks bad. Really bad.

I've had my reasons. New book (Bean by Bean). Book tour. Elder care. Not home much. Blah, blah, blah.

But, I do walk the talk writing-wise, pretty much. I do writing practice, daily or near-daily. And I do a lot of semi-thoughtful quick writing; a paragraph or two on the issue or experience or thought or or insight du jour --- on  Facebook. These quick paragraphs are more like the majority of blogs, or micro-blogs, out there. (If you click that link you'll see it takes you a 'fan page'; which I just started. Facebook made me, refusing to allow any more 'friends' to my 'personal' page. Since I consider the cult of celebrity part of the DNA of the spawn of the devil, I am not happy about this. Anyway, that's why you're not seeing many of my paragraphs/'micro-blogs' there. Yet. And maybe one day all the language around 'social media' won't seem so distasteful to me that I have to keep putting it in quotes. Maybe. ) 

Thing is, as you know if you read me here regularly (or irregularly. That being my fault, not yours) what I do here are not that.

They're what my wise and funny friend Ronni Lundy calls 'blongs': 'blog' + 'long' equals 'blong.' They're what used to be called essays. And to "essay', of course, means, to try.

And these just take awhile, mostly. This kind of writing takes uninterrupted, open-space, free-range thought-and-writing time. Time to get it wrong. Time to get it right. Time to figure out what it is you're trying to get. Just time.

Exactly what you don't get on a book tour where, paradoxically, you are talking about your writing, or at least the subject of your writing, all the time. (It is the writer's need for uninterrupted time that led me, in the course of my life, to periodic stays at writers' colonies, and eventually to co-found one, the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Another story)

But. Even blog-, or blong-wise, I haven't been a total slacker.

In addition to Nothing is Wasted on the Writer, I have another blog, which I keep up with even more sporadically. It's called Deep Feast: Writing the World through Food, and it focuses on culinary writing and the larger questions eating, cooking, and writing about them bring up. It too, like this blog, is usually in the 'creative non-fiction' (was there ever a more pretentious-sounding term?), or personal history, line.

And there, at Deep Feast, I wrote a blong only last month (which makes it practically current events for me, though for no one else in the online world). It's seemingly about my discovery of goongoo peas.

But it's really about why there's no such thing as a definitive cookbook. Or for that matter, a definitive book of any kind.

As such, it's also germane to Nothing is Wasted. So I'm sending y'all over there while I finish up the book tour and related stuff, as well as write the next post for her. And the rest of my life. Unpacking. Laundry. You know. 

Not to give anything away, but I think the next post for here is going to be about the myth of getting caught up, and how it hog-ties us. A blong story, if there ever was one.


P.S. If you're interested in some of what the book tour bebopping included, here are some of the high points that've made it online. In February, I was on NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook, a stellar interview, who really, really takes the time to be well-informed on the subject and asks erudite and thoughtful questions. And, in late March, Sheryl Julian, food editor of the Boston Globe, wangled an invitation for lunch, and wrote about it here. It should be said that the wangling was not very difficult. I would frankly prefer to be talked to in my native habitat, over food. And Sheryl's an  excellent, thorough, old-school, dig-deep journalist; she actually talked to people who knew me (and got a few hilarious quotes).