Monday, September 11, 2006

Temporarily Unplugged

Forgive me readers for I have sinned. It's been, um, 31 days since my last post.

Though I can't be entirely sure, I believe this is the longest period of silence since I started this blog.

Why? The main reason is that I've been working on a few other more "serious" projects lately, or at least attempting to work on them and then falling into deep gloom and frustration. In between those, a fairly demanding day job, some well-meaning gestures at a social life, occasional exercise, cooking, cleaning, and the odd few hours of sleep, blogging has kind of fallen off the end. As has any attempt to update the Daily Minion in the last couple of months.

But serious projects are a cruel mistress. Newspaper and magazine editors must be the most fickle creatures on this earth. Funding commissions for documentary films seem equally unpredictable - though fortunately I don't have to deal directly with that particular negotiation.

Two other things.
1) All this faffing around trying to get things published...you have to worry so much about the publication's parameters, style, and whether it will be "of interest" to their audience. It makes you appreciate anew that feeling of just shooting your mouth of, pressing a button, and hey presto, it's out there.
2) This much time unplugged from the interwebs, you start to wonder whether you even really exist anymore. I mean, there's nothing new when you google yourself, you've got no new comments notifications...are you even part of the Matrix?

So I will be returning to the blogosphere - but there will be changes. I'm considering setting up a new website for all Latin America-related things - travel blog, stories, politics, culture, travel tips, photos, etc. I'll then work on getting it fully linked up and improving its Google ranking. Could be quite good - just need to think of a catchy name...

Then, depending on how things actually turn out with aforementioned serious projects, I may have another crack at updating the Minion and improving its profile. Had a few ideas for new stories a while back, but they didn't get written, and I've had to question whether any of it was even funny to begin with. Steve Braunias had a satirical piece today in the Sunday Magazine on Brad and Ange which was laugh-out-loud funny; aimed at much the same things as my Angelina story, I'm afraid it was much funnier.

In any case, this blog will probably return to being simply "Bidsta", and will stick to a core content of politics, philosophy, issues of the day, a bit of sport and music, and just general shooting off of mouth. Can't wait to post on how serious international public intellectuals have written things recently that agree exactly with Stuff I Said about a year ago.

There's nothing quite like hitting that "publish post" button.