Winter Break

Barring world-shattering events, I will not be posting for a little while.

Longtime readers will recall a little hiatus I took last July, wherein I promised I'd get something done with my writing. Oh, I wrote, all right. But not as much as I should have. When I ran up against a brick wall in my short story, I banged my head against it for a little while and then gave up.
Well, I've long had a novel incubating on a mental back burner. Unlike the short story, I have a pretty good idea where it's going. Nothing so tangible as an outline--I don't do outlines--but a sort of mental map.
I've doubled its length in the last few days, editing as I go, and it's now sitting at nearly eleven thousand words. What's more, I've barely started...and this time that's a good thing. My mind is fully engaged with teasing out little nuggets of story (I just had a delicious plot twist exfoliate itself in the shower this morning) and I don't think this one's going to peter out on me.
I've resolved to treat this story the way I used to treat my daily diary back when I was a teenager. Back then, it was imperative that I wrote something every day.
That's a start, anyway, and marks a hell of a lot more discipline than I've brought to bear so far. The truth is, writing's the only real ticket I've got out of a dead-end career, and if it takes a little work to cash it, so be it.

I'm not abandoning the Breadbin, but I expect it'll go down to a once-weekly thing for a little while. Have fun and play fair, folks.

500 and counting

Welcome one and all to my 500th post.
When I started this blog a little over three years ago, I had little idea where it would take me. Five hundred posts, well over a million words, and untold skullsweat later, I'm still not sure.

The nicest thing about Blogger, for me, is the chance to be an editorialist without all that tedious drudgery of being a lowly reporter. No, better yet...I don't have an editor. Doubtless that has led to some rambling, out-of-focus posts, not to mention a small mountain of typos (I'm particularly negligent at closing brackets. But ask any professional writer to name the bane of his existence and chances are it's Mr. Bane, his editor. The nerve of those people--who would try to temper my love of the emdash--who would dare to tell me I use more italics than Cosmopolitan. I know the job of an editor is to make a writer's message clearer, but for a stream of consciousness writer like me, that's akin to telling me what and how to think, and I resent that more than anything.
This blog has witnessed a host of world events. Some momentous ones, like the tsunami and hurricane Katrina), dominated my thoughts for days or weeks. Others were forgotten almost as soon as they had been committed to screen.
Unlike many bloggers, I made a decision early on to alternate political with personal posts. The Breadbin has seen a slow but steady evolution in my politics, even as it has catalogued my biggest biggest ups and downs. But the most important function of the Breadbin in my life is to keep me balanced...and to promote balance around me whenever I get a chance.
This blog has exposed me to other bloggers whose missives I read routinely and whom I count among my friends (hi, Peter!) I tied it to a group blog which has, in spite of being rather dormant of late, provided me with lots of food for thought. And the mere fact I have a blog means I've had to scrounge endlessly for stuff to write about, menaning in turn that I have learned a lot.
I have put more effort into this blog than maybe anything else in my whole life (with the exception of my marriage, of course). A friend of mine once had to delete her blog and start over. At the time, she had put about as much into her blog as I have now into mine. I don't know how she did it. The idea of all these thoughts, emotions, words going poof! fills me with horror. Even at gunpoint, I'd hesitate before I hit that delete key.
Because this blog has been my truth. Not the truth--one of the things the Breadbin has reinforced is that there is no such thing--but my truth, and I types it as I sees it.

Thank you, everyone, for reading my ramblings, for sticking with me, for commenting and making your presence known. Writers write to be read: an audience is our sunshine. This ongoing document just wouldn't be the same without you.

Switchover

Note to readers:
Now that blogger is supposedly out of beta, I've gone ahead and switched to the new version. I've done this despite serious misgivings, after my friend Jen was driven off Blogger entirely. Having invested something close to (or over) two million words into this blog, I would never kill it willingly. Faced with the dilemma of continuing to post on a creaky, doubless-soon-to-be-unsupported system versus undergoing some growing pains, I've opted for the latter.

Jen's problems included the inability for people (i.e., me) to comment. If anyone wishes to comment on a particular post of mine and has a problem doing so, please email me at keneva1(at)sympatico.ca and let me know.

Meanwhile, back to our regularly scheduled insanity.