A Tour of Menus

Image description: Meme of Back to the Future
Marty: Doc, we've gone back in time
Doc: No, Marty.... It's just a repost

If you've been following Writing About Writing with any degree of attention since about last November, you know that I'm going through what is probably (literally) the worst year of my life, and that I'm trying desperately not to put the blog on hiatus while I grind through being a primary support person for someone with cancer and get ready to move out of what I thought was my forever home.

In a lot of ways, this is the best decision I've ever made, and I'm going to write a lot more about that next week. (Well actually, I just did, but it was way off track, so I'll post it later.) 

However, I've been taking Friday's off about since we heard the cancer diagnosis. Before that (when we knew something was very, very wrong but not WHAT) it was just the weekend lightweight posts that I couldn't keep up with, but even then I was still working 40-50 hours before I wrote a word. That number has gone up to 50-60 hours consistently, so I added Fridays onto the pile. (Every third week after chemo wasn't too bad but there was usually a lot of catching up in the housework to do.) Even getting up a post four days a week–even jazz hands–has been pretty harrowing some weeks.

Eventually, I'll go back to posting six or seven days a week, but it will likely be August (when I'm in my own place) before that's possible. Radiation is next, and that will run into my teaching summer school, which those of you who've been with us for the past few years know is a rough time for the blog. And either somewhere in there or after that, I'm going to be moving. At that point, in theory, I should be settling into my new schedule. 

[By the way, I've got a question here that is too short to make into a proper mailbox post. Tony asks: "Chris, I thought you didn't have to do summer school this year because of all the donations you had gotten through W.A.W. I don't actually care from a reader's POV. It's not like your blog is awful for those six weeks. But it sure seems to be a stressful time for you. What happened?" My reply: Let me explain.... No there is too much. Let me sum up. The situation where I do househusbandry for room and board and live an idyllic life of leisurely 50 hour weeks cleaning poop and dishes is going away. I'm moving out and the many hours I used to watch The Contrarian and clean house are being cut by a little over half. When my teaching was a gig that primarily paid into my retirement account and the occasional commission to make my bust out of asparagus pudding, I thought I could afford to quit because a year's writing income was roughly the same amount I made in those six weeks of teaching. (Yesterday...I made a DOLLAR!) But now I have rent and groceries to pay for, and I can't be picky about a gig that's paying over $35/hour just because I come home tired after being overwhelmed by tiny minions of satan and don't want to write. Hopefully the free time I have from the shift in my life situations will help those six weeks not quite be so stressful for me, but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.]

At that point (August) my writing life should have a definite upswing. I've lived alone a little bit in my adult life and been effectively single during most of that time, and one thing I remember is having a lot of time to write. In fact, my last big bout of bachelorhood was an amazing time for my writing development and part of the reason that I am able to write for six to ten hours at a stretch without a break even today. This time around, a lot of that is going to end up in work I hope to publish.

HOWEVER...and now we finally reach the point of this post. I've decided that rather than simply hit you with radio silence on Friday's and weekends, I'm going to do a reposting tour of the menus here at Writing About Writing. I haven't archived and organized everything I've ever written (some posts are just destined to be better left forgotten), but most of the major articles are tucked into a menu with the rest of their kind. I'll start giving you a end-of-the-week/weekend tour of the places to dig around and find some of the best articles of the past. 

I get a lot of questions about where someone can find X or if I have all the Y sorts of articles in one place, and so I think fewer people know about The Reliquary and all of its menus than I'd like. So until I'm back on my feet, that's going to be a Friday/Saturday feature here is just a quick repost of some of my existing menus.