Tag: writing

New year, new writing

I haven’t written much on the blog in a while. But that’s not because I haven’t been writing.

On Wednesday, December 30, I finished my first draft of a book I’ve been working on, off and on, for years: the history of the first 150 years of the Virginia Glee Club. Sort of finished, anyway: I closed the document, took our dog for a walk, and realized when I walked back in the door that I had forgotten things.

I expect to continue to have that realization for a while. There is, of course, a lot of ground to cover, and I’ve inevitably left things out—like the biographies of many individual Glee Club members I’ve researched over the years. Or important historical events that add context to the work. Or…

Well, you get the drift. The reality is that the work that I’ve done on the history of the group is spread across a bunch of places: Glee Club newsletters, the history wiki, even a Pinterest board I started over the summer. The book will hopefully, for the interested reader, be the tip of the iceberg.

And now I can, maybe, start writing in other places. Like here. Someday.

Just as soon as I get the thing published. And that’ll be a whole different journey that I will share as I am able.

Getting back on the horse

It seems like a very long time since I’ve sat down to write anything longer than a tweet or a bookmark. The usual reasons apply–family pressures, work getting crazy, etc.–but a big part of the reason is simply that I’ve been blocked.

A big part of what I used to write about used to be the technology industry. Paradoxically, the more successful my company is, the more constrained I feel writing about technology, simply because so many of the players are our customers. (And it had really been a while since I wrote about technology anyway.)

I’ve never been one to write a lot about the family. So that’s out.

That leaves, of the former obsessions that have powered this blog, cooking–and my chance to do much of that has been constrained by the same factors that have taken my time to write away–and music.

Well, then: music it is.

As luck would have it, I actually have a reason to write about music. Next month is the 140th anniversary celebration of the Virginia Glee Club. (You are going, aren’t you?) So in preparation for the anniversary, I think now’s as good a time as any to start to synthesize all the historical research that I’ve been building up on the Virginia Glee Club history wiki, and pull out some of the more illuminating bits. It should be a good exercise in warming up, and I’ll try to do one or two a day.

After that, who knows? Maybe I’ll have succeeded in unblocking myself. I’ve got to try somehow.