<thumb-twiddling>Dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum.</thumb-twiddling>

Back? OK, now I’ll explain.

I discovered Lileks several years ago now, when someone pointed to the original Interior Desecrators portion of his website, where he made hilarious fun of the horrible interior design notions of that most regrettable of decades, the 1970s. I worked my way through everything he had posted on his site, and soon became a regular reader of his daily Bleat, which was a kind of daily journal very much like a blog before anybody had really heard of blogging.

I soon noticed a few things we had in common. We were born within a few months of each other, so we’re almost exactly the same age. He’s married to a professional woman (a lawyer), as am I (an engineer). He has one daughter, as do I. His daughter, Natalie, happens to be about 10 months older than Alice, which means that for many years I’ve followed his writings about his daughter’s interests, activities and personality as a kind of coming-attraction feature for what my daughter might soon be like. (Case in point: Lileks’s daughter was, a few months ago, enamored of Warriors, the fantasy novels involving cats. My daughter is just passing through that phase herself, and gets quite frustrated when we can’t keep the various This-paws or That-stars apart…)

And, of course, we’re both writers. Lileks works for the Minneapolis Tribune, but he also writes fiction, non-fiction (I recommend The Gallery of Regrettable Food and, yes, Interior Desecrators as the places to start), and newspaper columns. He’s a regular guest on radio shows. He even hosts symphony orchestra concerts.

I’ve done all of that, in my own way, though generally on a smaller scale than he. I even live in an old house, though not quite as old as the home he calls Jasperwood.

So why, if my life is so similar in so many ways already,  do I wish I were him?

Well, right now, I wish I were him because, as you’ll see from the latest Bleats,  he’s been sailing warm waters on a luxury cruise ship, giving talks. That’s something I’ve never done, and looking outside right now, this would be a really good time to be doing it.

But really, there’s only one thing I really envy Lileks, and it goes back to our mutual passion for writing. I envy his turn of phrase, his ability to take the ordinary and make it, if not profound, at least fascinating. I enjoy reading his Bleat even when it’s about nothing much.

That, I think, is the mark of the truly talented writer: that apparently simple, and actually oh-so-difficult, ability to lay down words, one after the other, so well and so fluidly that even a reader who is not naturally or  initially interested in your topic becomes interested…and will keep coming back to see what you might have to say about something else.

I think Lileks does that better than anyone else I’ve run across.

If he could bottle that ability, I’d buy a caseload of it. But since it isn’t currently available in stores, by mail-order, or even on the black market, I guess I’ll have to just keep honing my own skills.

As every writer eventually learns, there’s only one way to get better: write, write, and write some more.

Practice isn’t just the way to get to Carnegie Hall: it’s the way to get anywhere.

The photo: Dolphins leaping at the Vancouver Aquarium.

Let is examine the evidence.

Cables tangle when I’m around, and wrap themselves around other objects that fly off shelves or out of drawers when the cables are pulled, crashing onto my foot. Objects leap out at me so that I either trip over them or stub my toe on them. Walls lean in as I walk by, so that I run into corners and doorways.

Ice creeps around on sidewalks when I’m not looking, positioning itself just perfectly for me to slip on it. Shoelaces tie themselves in knots overnight. Stones hop silently over the threshold, wriggle under the front door, then make prodigious leaps to get inside shoes that were stone-free when I last took them off.

Clumps of snow hurl themselves from branches just as I walk under them. Coffee shop tables that were perfectly stable for the last person to sit there start wobbling the moment I sit down. Coat zippers catch cloth (or worse, flesh), unzip from the bottom, or simply jam and become immovable…waiting until I’m in a hurry.

Our basement ceiling gets lower when I walk through, just so I’ll bang my head on the heating vents. Wet spots on the floor, tracked in from outside, slither around until they’re under my socked feet. Splinters form on our hardwood floor or stair banister seconds before my bare foot or hand comes sliding along.

Pens flee into hiding at the slightest indication I might need one. Socks escape from the dryer into an alternate dimension.  Coat hangers proliferate, breeding in the darkness of the closet, yet cleverly evolve ever-more-sloping shoulders to insure clothes slip off them to the floor.

Light bulbs know just when the most inconvenient time is to burn out. Computers hang or crash only if I haven’t saved my work for a while. Computer printers work perfectly until I’m really, really in a hurry, or really, really need to print a photo, then either jam or run out of ink. Camera batteries die suddenly without warning just as I’m about to capture a once-in-a-lifetime moment.

And today…today, a large portion of the city of Regina blacked itself out solely to prevent me from doing the work I desperately need to do on Twist of the Blade, the next Shards of Excalibur book; and then just to ensure that I couldn’t access my email and therefore get a copy of the latest revisions to Blue Fire so I could at least work on something down here at the Good Earth coffee shop, SaskTel’s email server started acting up.

So I really must apologize to all those other people in Regina inconvenienced by a lack of power and/or email access this morning. You are, I’m afraid, simply innocent bystanders in the never-ending battle between myself and the inanimate world.

Sorry about that!

The photo: View from the top of Mt. Whistler, B.C., August, 2010.

If you’re going to build readership on a blog, you have to post regularly. Everyone knows that. I know it; you know it. And periodically I’ve attempted it, never with any great success.

But you know what? Hope springs eternal, and with the start of a new year, I’ve got another chance to do several worthwhile things: lose weight, write more, and blog more…beyond simply plugging my latest book or pointing out reviews.

I read quite a few blogs, political blogs, science fiction blogs, science blogs, and more. Perhaps I would get more readers if I were to focus on one particular topic land stick to it. But my interests are too eclectic, I fear. So what you’ll most likely get, if you keep coming back and I keep posting regularly, is a mixture of all of the above, along with a heaping helping of none of the above.

This won’t be a political blog, but I’ll probably venture a political opinion from time to time. I mention this because it’s something a bit unusual for me. I’ve always been reluctant to write much about politics online for the very simple reason that I’m a writer and actor in Canada. There’s practically a law, it seems, that such an individual must be left-wing. I am supposed to hate Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, vote NDP only because there isn’t an even more left-wing alternative, despise America in general and the wrong sort of Americans (you know, anyone who ever voted Republican or attends church regularly) in particular, and keep a voodoo doll of former President George W. Bush in my closet, sticking it with pins at regular intervals.

Well, sorry, but that’s not me.

See, I’m a dual citizen. I’m a Canadian, with a Canadian wife, a Canadian daughter, a Canadian house, and a great love of Canada; but I was born and remain a citizen of the United States of America, and I love that country, too, and believe it has been, by and large, a force for good in the world, economically, culturally, and politically. I find the default anti-Americanism I have been exposed to my entire life in Canada stupid, repugnant and infuriating.

Similarly, I was raised in the Church of Christ, and the finest people I’ve ever known are staunch members of that church…which is why I have little patience with those in my writer/actor circles who attack those with deeply held religious beliefs, or denigrate those beliefs as evil or stupid.  Again: stupid, repugnant and infuriating.

I generally don’t argue with people about it in person, though, and there’s a very good reason for that: I don’t want to lose friends, and perhaps I’m being unfair, but I have the distinct impression that many of my acquaintances of the left-wing variety would be so horrified to hear what I really  think of their casual slagging of, say, Americans, or their idiotic equating of someone who supports a reduction in government expenditures with, say, Hitler, that they would no longer be comfortable in my company. (During a break in rehearsals for Beauty and the Beast at Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon in 2007 I casually mentioned in the green room that I had, in fact, voted for George W. Bush over John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. You could tell by the horrified expressions of those present at the time that they had never even dreamed that an actual Bush voter might appear before them in the flesh, especially not an actor in a theatre, normally a comfortable cocoon of doctrinaire left-wing though; I was almost surprised they didn’t run screaming from the room, shouting “Canada has free health care! Canada has free health care!” to ward off evil.)

It’s funny, though. Although I’ve had a blog now for a very long time, I’ve never felt any great urge to express a lot of political opinion in it, either: and that’s a change, because I started my career as a newspaper reporter and photographer at the Weyburn Review,  and eventually became editor, and I was certainly willing to express strong opinions in the weekly newspaper column I wrote most of the time I was there. I’m not sure what changed, except I got older and less sure of myself, I suppose.

Anyway, all of that is to say this: going forward, as I (hopefully) blog each day (or almost), I may express a political opinion or two, but if you don’t like what I say, well, skip that entry. The next day I’ll likely be saying something about writing, or musical theatre, or the weather, or science, or cats, or wine, or food.

But this is my fair warning that if you simply cannot bear the thought that you might occasionally read an opinion here that is not at all what you expected from a Canadian writer or actor, something, say, supporting the war in Afghanistan (which I do), or suggesting that perhaps not all government spending cuts are bad (a particularly heretical suggestion in some quarters), you might not want to check back here regularly.

The fact is, you never know what I might say.

But that’s only fair, because, after all, I don’t know, either!

P.S. Oh, the picture. Well, among other things, I hope to start posting photos regularly again (I used to do a Photo of the Day) like the one at left (actually taken a year ago, not this winter, but the same decorations were at the Wascana Country Club this year, so what the heck.)

At first, the column quite often focused on something related to events at the Science Centre; so, when we had an exhibit on memory, I wrote a column about memory (and also wrote Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star, but I digress).

When I left the Science Centre to become a full-time freelancer in 1993, I took the column with me. It kept running in the Sun and on CBC, but the various weeklies around the province who had been willing to take it for free refused to pay for it (including my own former employer, the Weyburn Review! Not that I’m still bitter), so I quit sending it to them.

At some point the Red Deer Advocate picked it up, and for a while the St. John’s Evening Telegram ran it, but though I periodically tried to get more newspapers interested in it, nobody ever wanted it. I did build a pretty good list of email subscribers, though, as people signed on through my website.

The Evening Telegram only ran it for two or three years. The Leader-Post kept it, though it got much shorter (in the Sunday Sun it used to run over 1,000 words, and by the end it was under 700). Then, three years ago or so, CBC decided 17 years of me as a science columnist was enough, and they stopped using me for that (though I did other things). And then, just last year, the Leader-Post, ordered by the financially struggling CanWest to cut costs and use fewer freelancers, decided to cut my column (because the $25 a week they were paying me–if you call that pay–was apparently going to save the chain from bankruptcy).

I had almost pulled the plug on the column with the CBC stopped carrying it, but at least I still had two newspapers, even though what they were paying barely made the column worthwhile. When the Leader-Post dropped it, that left only the Red Deer paper, and while I was happy to keep appearing there, it really no longer made any kind of business sense to keep writing the column. Still, I plugged on for a while because of all the email subscribers and because the column provided regular updates to this site, and helped drive traffic to it.

But…not very much traffic. And as I took on more and more editing duties with the Fine Lifestyles stable of magazines here in Saskatchewan over the past year, while still writing fiction (with a five-book YA fantasy series beginning this fall, my first adult fantasy for DAW and other projects), writing the column went so far on the back burner that it was anybody’s guess which day of the week I would get to it, if I did at all–and when I realized this week I’d missed two weeks without writing a column at all, I realized it was time to pull the plug.

So the science column is history, after more than 20 years. That’s a pretty good run of columns.

If anybody were willing to pay enough for it to make it worth my while, I’d love to keep writing it. But, given the circumstances…

I’m going to keep scanning the science sites for interesting items, but in future, I’m more likely to just put up a short post with a link rather than writing about it myself.

If you’ve been a reader of the column, I hoped you enjoyed it! And if you haven’t and are wondering what you’ve missed, well, pretty much every one of those 20 years’ worth of columns is right here on edwardwillett.com. Lots there to keep you reading.

Heck, at one a week, it will take you 20 years.

It’s a great place to find all my books listed in one hand-dandy location. Be the first on your block to collect them all! (Hey, that approach works for toy-stuffed breakfast cereals…)

It also echoes these blog posts. Which means you could be reading this post on Amazon, and discover a link to the page you’re already reading…hopefully this will not result in an endless recursive loop, collapsing down to a black hole from which you will never escape.

Someone click the link and find out for sure!

Nice!

• Do newspapers have a future?
• Is Twitter a threat to morality and ethics?
• A cure for honey bee colony depopulation syndrome (a.k.a. colony collapse disorder)?
• I think, therefore I Tweet
• Best way to clean up the environment? Make everyone richer.
• Internet to be an “unreliable toy” by 2012?
• A drug to help recover “lost” memories?

At just about the time I came to that conclusion, Justine Larbelestier‘s new site went live. I liked the look of it, and she seemd pleased with the service she had gotten from PagedMedia, which specializes in writers’ sites. So I contacted Stephanie Leary there and we began the process of designing the new, improved, edwardwillett.com.

And now, just in time for the launch of Terra Insegura, here it is! It’s much cleaner and simpler. Not everything made the journey over from the old site, which was getting quite dated-looking, but among the things that did make the journey were all of my science columns, reconfigured as blog posts, dated (as close as I could figure, anyway) to when they were originally written. (Which is why I now have “blog posts” that predate the World Wide Web by two years!)

I suspect I’ll take a big hit in visitors until the search engines catch up with the new URLs for my columns, which have driven the bulk of the traffic to this site. But it needed to be done!

So take time to poke around the site and let me know what you think. Now that it’s up and running I’ll be tweaking it myself going forward.

And thanks to PagedMedia for all their work!

• Never mind Darwin: hockey players as religious icons
• Chessmen that debate every move
• You are reading Futurismic. You find a post about how you imagine the events described in narratives…
• A new use for social networking technology: examining patents
• Are religious skeptics bound for demographic doom?
• Thought-controlled wheelchair developed in Italy
• Fear-free living through pharmaceuticals