I’m starting a new feature, News & Muse, to be published on this site the first of every month. As most of my readers know, I’ve been a very irregular blogger over the years, and my social media activity can be described as erratic at best, but I thought it would be fun to try more of magazine-style approach to this blog that combines lots of “features” rather than spreading them over many individual posts — the piecemeal method certainly being more the norm, and what most SEO gurus recommend in this age of supposed short attention spans. But hey, if the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that you should try to find a way to do things your way. (Cue Frank Sinatra singing “I Did It May Way.”) I also don’t think attention spans are all that short, really. Otherwise, who are all these people buying my books? So I can at least say that my readers have longer attention spans, and those are the people I’m most interested in anyway.
I’m going to let News & Muse evolve over time, but for now this is the basic structure: 1) A short news update or “muse” on a topic; 2) A Bit of Whimsy: Usually pictures or random drawings, occasionally a second cartoon, but be prepared for lots of gratuitous photos of my pets or other random stuff; 3) Scott Recommends: At least three, and possibly more, books, videos, lectures, comics, websites, or anything else I’ve really enjoyed recently that I think you might enjoy too, usually with a few sentences of commentary. You’re about to find out exactly how eclectic my taste is, and how out of step I usually am with whatever is popular at the moment; 4) A new Run of the House comic. This is the cartoon strip I started last year that went on hiatus because, while I was enjoying it, I’d become disenchanted with the way I was distributing it (on a separate site or via social media, giving it all away for free). I’m glad to bring it back here at least once a month, kind of like the comic section in a newspaper. I’ve got some other ideas regarding the strip, but I’ll save those for later. I want to mull it over a bit more.
Other news? Nothing big, just working on a new book, of course. Can’t say much more than that, which is usually the case. Just got back from a quick getaway to Sunriver, Oregon with my daughter and Rosie, where we visited with my father, went on some nice walks in the woods, rode our bikes, and binge-watched Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor. Both of us like the scary stuff, which isn’t the case for other members of the household. A fun time, though driving through the devastation from the Santiam Canyon fires was very sobering.
A Bit of Whimsy
Rosie, at five and half months now, has discovered the joys of a warm fire as the weather in the Willamette Valley turns a bit cooler.
Scott Recommends
GRANT by Ron Chernow. I think the best compliment I can give this mammoth, mesmerizing biography is that I truly hope someone makes it into a miniseries, much like HBO did with David Mccullough’s John Adams, another presidential biography I really enjoyed. He was not without his flaws, but I don’t think anyone would be tearing down statues of Grant if more people knew the kind of character this man had, and how ahead of his time he was in his treatment of African Americans, even compared to Lincoln.
SQUIRREL SEEKS CHIPMUNK by David Sedaris. When he’s at his best, Sedaris is both witty and poignant, and he is certainly both in spades with this “bestiary” of fable-like tales involving very anthropomorphized animals. Funny enough, even though I’ve been a fan of Sedaris’s writing for years, having read pretty much all of his collections, I missed this one when it was published and stumbled across it in a Little Library in our neighborhood. Hooray for Little Libraries!
LUANN by Greg Evans. I came to this comic strip pretty late (considering it’s been around 35 years), but I stumbled across it one day and ended up getting hooked on the slowly unfolding dramas of the titular character, her brother, parents, and everyone else connected to Luann’s life. You can read the latest strip online at gocomics.com/luann, or do what I did and get into the strip through one of the major storylines, which you can find at http://luannfan.com/. Or even better, buy one of the print collections. To me, it served as a reminder of how easy it is to become emotionally invested in a bunch of squiggly lines, if there are characters you care about.
