1 October 2023

· Things flying in different directions ·

The blog’s eighth birthday has arrived. It’s been a quiet year here. I knew it would be, my sidebar note from last December foretold it. I thought I’d use today’s special occasion to check in and update the status of a few things in the air. The first one may go down in flames, the second should land safely in about a month, and the third is cruising at altitude but has no ETA yet.

The (probable) crash and burn

Eight years plus a couple of weeks ago my internet-based postlife commenced on Twitter. The blog you are reading would not exist but for the 140-character limit in place there at the time. It didn’t take me long to realise that I needed more space to yap– here I am eight years later, still yapping. Twitter remained its own thing. I made some good new (now old) friends, and had some good times.

Anyone with an online pulse is unlikely to be unaware of the ongoing metamorphosis of Twitter into X, and the reign of chaos the platform’s new owner has wreaked since buying it a year ago for 44 billion dollars.

death spiral  n

1. (aviation) The descending helical motion of a disabled aircraft, unrecoverably corkscrewing, heading for a crash or splash.

2. (figurative, by extension) The situation or course of action of someone who is on a path toward an inevitable catastrophic failure.

For what it’s worth: my account is now generally idle, not checked often. If rumours of a paywall become fact, I’ll delete everything and jump before impact. A sad day if it ends that way, but the parachute is ready.

Cleared for landing

There are two more incoming blips on 2023’s radar. The first is due to touch the tarmac on November 8th, the 400th birthday of the First Folio. The big book wasn’t published until nineteen years after I bought my one-way ticket to the undiscover’d country, but I have a story I’ve been saving, one that I haven’t told before. Look for it on 8/11, or 11/8 if you’re transatlantic.

The second will arrive a week later. That should be it for the year.

Getting closer

The large project mentioned last December has kept me working hard throughout the past year, as predicted. At the moment it looks like it will finish up in the first quarter of 2024. I’m not putting a firm date on it because that guarantees the date will be missed.

I’ve been reluctant to yap about this because it’s a bad sign when a writer spends his ink and hours writing about what he’s writing instead of writing it. But the project has reached the stage where it’s reasonably close to being real, and it’s time to let the book out of the bag.

More later as it nears its destination.

VERO NIHIL VERIUS