Wordstock 2009 cometh

The shame! The ignominy! A semi-fortnight since my last post. The Social Mediation Committee will be recycling all my URLs.

Woke up worrying about this today, and checking my stats I discovered that yesterday I had a total of 25 visitors. Twenty-five. That’s a nose dive of 87.5% since this same time last week. And yes, that matters to me, because now that I work from the Home Office in Portland OR, my various blogglings are the Space Age equivalents of water coolers.

For you kids, 20th-century offices uses to provide free-standing obelisks filled with H2O, and when you padded over to get refreshment, fellow quaffers were great sources of gossip, bonhomie, and free-floating anxieties.)

As always, there are reasons aplenty for my dilatory behavior, and today I’m going to blame ... let's see ... yes, Wordstock. With only 18 days to go before the region’s largest book festival opens, things are heating up. I’ll spare you the administrative details – except to assure you that they are legion – and just direct you to the Festival’s blog, where posts are spreading out like spilt honey from some of the 120+ authors participating in the festivities this year.

Check it out for interviews, ruminations, and tantalizing peeks in the mysterious art and business of writing for a living. (And for answers to the always intriguing question of what I’m doing when I’m not blogging and schlogging.) Jacquelyn Mitchard’s lovely visage graces the Wordstock blog right now; coming soon, a drily droll entry by Victor Lodato.