A Note Before the New Year

Work's a ghost town this week, and I haven't been blogging much because I figure no one's around to read it anyway. If you are reading, I just wanted to note that the last several posts might give you the idea that this site is primarily devoted to keeping tabs on comedic television and the Associated Press. That's not the case, so I hope you'll scroll through some of the archives, to learn that I'm obsessed with other useless things, too.

I started this blog with the intention of building up discipline and then transferring that discipline to continue writing larger projects; like, say, a novel. But novels are notoriously difficult to write -- thousands have died trying -- and I seriously doubt that maintaining a blog has even the slightest relation to an undertaking of that magnitude. But at the very least I hope to keep this a space for slightly meatier writing. As much as I love linking to pieces elsewhere and recommending music and just baldly stealing from the AP, and will continue to do all those things because they are in my blood (I come from a long line of wire-news thieves), I also want this to look more like the deranged notebook of a long-form writer than a typical blog. (The problem is, I've got the "deranged" covered, but not so much the "long-form.")

With that in mind, I'm hoping to write some longer posts in the new year, whether they're ruminations about Texas and New York or a series comparing North and South Dakota, though I've never lived -- or set foot in -- either place (I did fly over North Dakota once, and felt like I got a pretty good sense of it).

So there's my first resolution for 2006. In the meantime, I hope everyone has a blast ringing it in. See you in a few days.