Comments

Since I rebooted the blog, I think I've grown more comfortable with the time it takes up, what I can do with it, and what I expect out of it. (We'll see how long that feeling lasts.) Laura's right that a lot of what goes into a blog is about "honing" yourself, your ideas and arguments and thought processes, "finding yourself," as it were, in the midst of intellectual currents, the news of the world, and most especially the everyday. Obviously, one of the best ways to measure how that honing project is coming along is through feedback. At first I was wary of installing a comments feature; now I'm delighted I did. Reading comments is such fun, and so helpful. Of course, so long as I'm on Blogger the best patches in the world still won't give me a platform where real online discussions can easily take place, but that doesn't bother me too much; if I went to Typepad or some such system, I almost certainly wouldn't be able to resist interacting with those of you who comment, and that would throw whatever balance I've achieved with the present blog out the window. I admire very much the wonderful online communities which have grown up around the great, interactive blogs out there (Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Crooked Timber, John and Belle, etc., as well as my own Times and Seasons), but even attempting to replicate that here (assuming I could, which almost certainly wouldn't be the case) would take a lot more time and energy than I'm willing to give.

But as I've read the comments from many of you, I've become dissatisfied with just leaving them down there. So I've decided to institute an irregular "Comments Post." I might end up doing it weekly, but given that there are some weeks when I don't write, that might not hold up. We'll see how often I do it (it'll probably be an end of the week or weekend thing). Laura used to do a "reader e-mail day" on her old Blogger blog; I hope this feature can be something like that. I'll just sample (or excerpt) some recent comments, publish them as a regular post, and add some comments of my own to some or all of them. I hope it'll work. Anyway, expect the first such entry before the end of the week, and thanks for reading.