I don’t plan to let it die, but I like to take a break from it from time to time. I’ve been spending more time on the social networks lately. One big reason for that is my job entails knowing the Facebooks, Twitters, and Google+ mechanisms. So it leaves little time for personal blogging.

As a means of a meager update, for anyone who may still be poking around here occasionally, please feel free to follow me on twitter or Google+. I’d be happy to follow you back and keep in touch. Relevant buttons below. Hope to hear from you.

-gordon

Follow me on Google+

Follow @theslowman

Not for this site — well, maybe (send me an email or something) — but rather for Writer’s Digest’s blog MFA Confidential. They’re holding a contest and it seemed interesting enough to bring me out of hibernation to link to it. Read more about the contest at Writer’s Digest.

If you make it, let me know. And actually if you’d like to blog for After the MFA, let’s talk…

Because of a plague of spam I had forced all comments to go through approval before going on the site. I didn’t realize people had actually been saying stuff I would have loved to have seen. Damn spam.

Thanks again, for the comments on my last taking stock post. Big thank you for the thoughts and encouragement.

Things are still as busy as ever, but I hope to start writing a bit more on here in the future.

Like the article’s author, I have always been plagued with a close relationship with the little green monster. I find it stifles me. I become overly obsessed with the details of the other person’s success, trying to find the place in their timeline where they just got lucky, sniffing out the aspect of their art that is more calculated commercialism than creative vision. Overall, I find jealousy is a serious waste of my time and energy.

No, I think what motivates me in a constructive and positive way is the notion of opportunity. If I feel like something I’m writing offers an opportunity to do something I’ve never done before, I am full of energy, ideas, and commitment. Being jealous over someone else’s work or career makes me focus too much of my precious* effort on someone else. Opportunity makes me focus on me. When it comes to writing, I think that’s probably more worthwhile. Luckily, I believe that sense of opportunity is around me right now.

It will also help if I stop succumbing to buzz about hot writing wunderkinds. That’s a work in progress, for which I’ll need to quit paying attention to much of what flows through the New York Observer, New York Magazine, and Gawker.

* I say “precious” not out of a sense of luxurious value, but “precious” in the sense of rarity.

After a few months of contemplating, procrastinating, and polling, I am just about ready to make some changes to the look and feel of the web site. Now that I’ve been at this thing for almost a year, I want to make browsing the archives a little easier. I also want to incorporate a few more links — to books I’m checking out, stuff I bookmark on Del.icio.us, for example.

And I also want to better highlight one of the best things about this site, in my opinion: the comments from readers. I read or browse through a lot of blogs, and I know that generating discussion is probably one of the most difficult things for people in on this new publishing game. I feel lucky to have had some great commentary here.

I’ve also sold out to the devil and added text ads on the site. More as an educational experiment to see how advertising works, I don’t predict or hope to make any money from it. I am interested to know people’s opinions about the ads. What I’ve seen from the first outing isn’t very impressive, but I will be tweaking it a bit in the next few weeks.

I’ll be interested to hear any opinions about the cosmetic and functional changes. As always, thanks for reading, paying attention, shouting out, and for just being there.

Anything that bugs you about the site’s design? Any features or topics you’d like me to tackle? What’s your favorite color?

For my part, I know I’d like to increase the real estate a little bit. I like white space but I think I can put another column in the design for more content. I’m also going to make public my novel writing struggles by posting my progress with a snazzy graphic.

Feel free to throw out suggestions, warnings, or critiques. I’m all ears.