i've gotta quit blogging

With a sendup like this, and on my birthday no less(!), now seems like a good time to get out of dodge.

I'd like to write fiction. But I have a limited number of hours in the day. I can't see how I can make a serious stab at fiction writing and maintain the posting schedule that I've maintained over the last two years. Something's gotta give, and I choose to say Goodbye (for now) to the blog.

I loved to write stories when I was a kid. I remember writing a parody of the "Who Shot JR?" storyline on the TV show Dallas and gave it to my sixth grade teacher to read. She didn't say anything bad about it, bless her heart.

But something strange happened. I was in our school's GT program. (That's "Gifted and Talented." How obnoxious can you get?) Anyway, it was decided that the four of us had to do a special project, and mine would be creative writing. I had to write a story and read it to my class. Well, that wasn't any fun. They'd taken my joy and turned it into, into... A FREAKING ASSIGNMENT! I can remember reading my story to the class, feeling miserable. They weren't miserable, just confused. "What's he doing?" their expressions said. Heck if I knew.

Then I went to junior high school, and all we did was gerund, infinitive and participle worksheets. That pretty much snuffed out the spark of creativity.

Not quite. I started writing for the school newspaper. I wrote lots of papers in college and in seminary. I write a sermon 46 out of 52 weeks in a year. I write plenty, but no fiction. Not since I was 12. I want to try again.

But there's more to it than that. Blogging has encouraged in me a rather superficial reading and writing style. I've become too focused on the daily news cycle. My writing tends to be too reactive. And in the end, unsatisfying. There's three and one-half years left for the Bush administration to find news ways to amaze and confound me with their mendacity, incompetence and cronyism, but there's only a limited number of ways to point this out in writing. I'm tired of pointing it out. Tired of reacting to them.

There's a lot of blogs that aren't political in nature. There's some that are personal, tragic or hilarious. There's others that explore theology. But I can't seem to separate blogging from a certain sense of superficiality. I think it's computers in general, and not just the weblog thing. There's lots of academic articles online, but I find that reading them on a computer screen is a different experience from reading them in a bound journal in my lap or on my desk. Online I always read them in a hurry. I scan. I can't slow down. And nothing sinks in. So when I say I'm taking a blogging sabatical, I think I'm really going to try to get away from computers, period. I'm going to read books. I'm going to write, longhand, in a three ring binder.

The best thing about this blog is the new friends I've made. Can I call you friends even if I've never met you? I never had a pen pal in school, but I've thoroughly enjoyed getting to Lee, Jennifer, Camassia and others through their online journaling. Sky Bison and Kyle too, but they never leave a link when they post comments, so I can't link to them.

So from now on The Ivy Bush will be under Jonathan's management. He'll be free to edit the sidebar so that he's no longer one link away from snarky liberals like Atrios. And I may post something every once in a while. But in the near term, I'm sharpening and pencil and sticking my nose in a book. Bye y'all!