Introducing Albumen!

Today I am excit­ed to announce the addi­tion of Albu­men to my (already ridicu­lous­ly ambi­tious) col­lec­tion of blogs. On this occa­sion it may be appro­pri­ate to attempt to pro­vide answers to a few ques­tions that may well arise in the ever-prob­ing minds of you, my readers.

What on earth do I need anoth­er blog for?

Well, as with most of my actions, “need” is prob­a­bly not the first con­cept that comes into play. I have my rea­sons, and they (usu­al­ly) make sense to me; what more can I ask?

Why seg­re­gate my writ­ings from each oth­er? Does­n’t that just make it more trou­ble­some for my read­ers to find my words?

For sev­er­al years I pub­lished a newslet­ter, The Float­ing Egg, which after much refine­ment of con­cept even­tu­al­ly bore the mot­to “A Jour­nal of Sass and Sub­stance.” My voice had by and large land­ed very heav­i­ly on the “sass” side of that dichoto­my, and my ill-con­ceived attempts to leap into top­ics beyond my grasp as a writer and (more notice­ably) as a thinker were painful and dis­heart­en­ing. Even­tu­al­ly the ten­sion between my nat­ur­al out­pour­ing of self-cen­tered writ­ten ban­ter and my thwart­ed desire to craft solid­ly-rea­soned essays on top­ics of weight and moment brought the whole project to a standstill.

As I grad­u­al­ly rebuild my chops as a writer, I find that, mag­i­cal­ly, I have changed: I am more and more nat­u­ral­ly cre­at­ing the kind of prose I so des­per­ate­ly want­ed to be writ­ing back in 2001, while my once-trade­mark brand of over-the-top flam­boy­ant self-reportage feels almost like a for­eign lan­guage I used to almost know. I am (under­stand­ably) enthu­si­as­tic by this devel­op­ment, and after an uneven start I have endeav­oured to make Egg Yolks the organ of sub­stan­tial prose that I so want­ed the Egg to be at the begin­ning of this cen­tu­ry. As a con­se­quence, how­ev­er, I have kept out any­thing that is a) short and b) light. But I don’t want to stop writ­ing such things, and hav­ing writ­ten them, I want to be able to share them.

Which is where Albu­men enters the pic­ture. If I was still desk­top pub­lish­ing and send­ing out papery arti­facts filled with my words, I would use dif­fer­ent sec­tions and for­mat­ting to keep the var­i­ous spheres of my writ­ing dis­tinct and yet togeth­er. Some­day my hope is to be able to do that same sort of thing here in elec­tron­ic form. But until that day comes, and while I am still reliant on the won­der­ful ease of Blog­ger to dis­sem­i­nate my work, it is for me a far-sim­pler thing to have these two sep­a­rate blogs which I think of as two halves of a whole; I hope that read­ers will come to think of them the same way.

Will this mean that you will post even less often if your minis­cule out­put is stretched between two venues?

I cer­tain­ly hope not! I will not lie: my cur­rent life cir­cum­stances (ten-hour work­days at a soul­less job, a viva­cious tod­dler to help care for when I return home, and ear­ly to bed so I can rise at 4.30a for anoth­er ten-hour work­day, et cetera) do not leave a lot of time or ener­gy for writ­ing, no mat­ter how much I may feel the resur­gence of the pas­sion to do so. That being said, I feel like I am increas­ing­ly find­ing ways to take time to put pen to paper or fin­gers to keys, and these twin blogs will, I hope, quick­ly reflect that increased output.

As much as I would LOVE to be so, I will not be a quo­tid­i­an blog­ger any­time in the fore­see­able future. But, giv­en the more var­ied and less tax­ing para­me­ters I have set for myself in regards to Albu­men, I believe it real­is­tic to expect that you will actu­al­ly see more posts from Bean­er, and that it will, like New Mex­i­co, grow as it goes.

So wel­come to the next stage of The Float­ing Egg reborn! I will con­tin­ue to deliv­er prose of sub­stance as I have done, and now I hope to start sprin­kling the blo­gos­phere with some sass as well. Please keep read­ing, and don’t for­get that the oth­er half of the Egg expe­ri­ence is now only a click away!

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