Given time and opportunity, I always favour writing longer, thoughtful pieces. When we first relaunched the site as The Local Yarn, I didn’t even have a place for short posts. Surely, I reasoned, everything I write and publish here will be long and satisfying, a thoroughly-cooked multiple-course meal of prose, themed to fit neatly into any of several pre-planned “series.”
Enter a new job, an additional freelance job, and preparations for first child due in July. The weeks fly by like minutes, and the pump over the old writing well sits forlorn and un-primed.
But it must be primed, even if it can’t be manned long enough to fully irrigate the fields of desired output (have I used up this metaphor yet?). So over the past couple of days, I’ve kluged together a blog on this site, a place for short posts that don’t fit anywhere. This is where I’ll be for awhile, writing short, opinionated pieces about anything that interests me. “Depth without duration” – that’s the theory, and the hope.
This isn’t something I’m doing out of guilt; it’s something I’m doing because when I don’t write, I get cranky. It’s a compromise I can live with for now, given the other choices I’ve made. The rivers of living water will have to come when they come, and until then it’s one cupful at a time.
And if you think about it, cupful is a weird word.
