Thursday, December 31, 2009

Back from exile...

                                                        



Greetings and Happy New Years. I'm back from a sort of self-imposed month-long exile in which I tried to figure out what exactly I wanted to do with the blog, what I wanted it to be, how I wanted it to look and if - to be honest - I really wanted to continue it at all. I was hoping a break would give me some inspiration for some big, dramatic change; a clear direction, focus. Exactly the kind of things at which I normally suck.

And I can report that I figured out pretty much none of those things, so I just said to hell with it and decided to continue writing.  I've always been better at tinkering around the margins, anyway. As you can see I've been playing around a bit with things, and I'll continue to do so incrementally as the mood strikes me.

I'll leave you with an image from yesterday afternoon's bowhunt, the last one of 2009 (but not the season, still have two more weeks of that) and a quote. The picture is as uneventful as the hunt was. No deer in the field before me like there normally are, but I had a nice time thinking, anyway. The quote is from Kurt Vonnegut, and is, I think, apropos of the vagarities of creativity.

"Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everbody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization."