I'm Back

And here's what's happening

For the past several months, I have been stuck. Nothing to say. Or at least nothing to say that I thought ought to be sent to your inbox. I've gotten increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that everytime I post something, it is distributed via email to my followers/subscribers. That seems so invasive.

In the old days of blogging, when I was writing Theatre Ideas on Blogger (more on that later), people had to seek the blog out to see whether I'd written anything new. There was Google Reader, of course, which allowed readers to be notified when there was new material on the blog, but that was their choice. And now there’s Pocket and Feedly, of course. The point is that I wasn't pushing my way into their inboxes. 

For me, this created a pressure to make every post polished and long enough to be "worthwhile." I didn't feel comfortable simply sharing quotations or cool sites or ideas I came across, which would have led to many emails each and every day. Eventually, I stopped writing altogether, which meant that my facility with language started to deteriorate. I was a very fast writer, but now I struggle to write in a way that sounds like me. Essentially, I've lost my "voice." 

So I've been trying to figure out how to use the various tools that are available. A couple days ago, an author and academic that I admire and whose weekly newsletter I subscribe to, Alan Jacobs, has been having similar struggles to my own. He posted the following: 

I’m always negotiating the relationship between micro.blog and my big blog, but I’m getting closer to a system in which micro.blog is a box of delights and the big blog is a Memex. Gonna try to stick with that model.

The word "Memex" in the above was a link to novelist and internet commentator Cory Doctorow's May 9, 2021 essay entitled "The Memex Method" which was posted on his Pluralistic blog.  And what he wrote about his online blogging life inspired me.

So here's my plan.

I want to use my old blog, theatreideas.blogspot.com, as my "commonplace book," where I will share things that catch my imagination--quotations from books I'm reading, links to websites I find interesting, ideas that have occurred to me that will require further development. These posts will likely be shortish, and mostly unpolished. I’ve put something up there yesterday called “French Farming and Theater.” If you're interested in seeing how my brain works, this is the place to be.

Then I will then use my new blog, Creative Subordination, to develop longer, more polished articles that may draw on the material I post on the old blog--or not, as the case may be. There’s nothing on Creative Subordination yet, and I still have some work to do in getting things set up.

But what about YOU and Substack? I don’t want to lose touch with all of you who have so kindly subscribed or followed me. What I’ve decided is to use my Substack as, well, a newsletter to send out a weekly (give or take) list of things I wrote during the week on the other sites that I think you might find interesting. It probably won’t be a complete list; more of a curated one. Then you can read the things that sound interesting to you.

You can, of course, follow any of these three sites.

This probably seems pointlessly elaborate, but I'm hoping that it will help me get over this writer's block!

Teaser: I’ve begun research for a new book called The Rooted Stage that, in many ways, will be a companion piece for Building a Sustainable Theater. I suspect that a portion of the stuff on my old blog will involve things I run across as I do the research.

I hope you’ll join me.