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!
