All the time I get mail addressed to “Dear Christ…” I guess this just means my full name is too long. Every time I see this on Amazon though, it makes me want to log out thinking, No. No I’m not.

I started writing poetry again (after over a decade long break) a little over three years ago. To me the writing has always been the beginning. Once I have a piece done I want to see how far I can take it. Produce spoken word audio. Throw it on a website. Put it together into a chapbook. Hell, even illustrate it (or have it illustrated). But the poem has always just been the start.

It’s also the easiest part of the process for me. I’ve got a backlog of poems with ideas of what to do with them. Getting to this is the rub. I decided to quit writing again partly to make things fresh once again, but mostly to force myself to approach these other projects. All I’ve managed to do, for the most part, is quit writing. Hey, it’s a step, right? Not really. I’ve been bouncing certain ideas around in my head for almost six months now with very little progress.

I guess updating my sites is a start, but not what I really want to get done! I want to put together another collection of my poems. Want to do audio for everything I have done in the last year or so (I eventually want a CD of my spoken word stuff). maybe bitching about it here will make me get off my ass and get some of them finished. I’d be happy to get just one done!

I will be coming back to this site, but I am slightly burned out here. It’s close enough to how I want it that I can see the end. Everything I have left to do will be kinda on the boring side, so I am losing excitement. I’m far from a perfectionist, but I do want this site to be as close to as possible. But I also want to work smarter and not harder. Now I have to figure out a few things and get them set up on this page before I turn around and use this template on multiple pages. Any changes I make here after I call it done will have to be made at least 5 more times. I’d rather not have to do that.

So I am taking a functionality break and won’t be doing anything more here until I get my other site rolling a bit. I’ll still make updates to the journal part, but anything else will probably have to wait.

You know, pretty much like anyone with an online journal, I’ve got little to say, so focus on the minutia of life. I have to update the templates on the other pages here, but think I am ready to call this site good enough for now after today. That means I get to move onto working on my fiction/poetry site. I’ll work on that one behind the scenes until it is good enough to go live.

This site now has class tags to everything I have left to style, but since that can be done through CSS, I’m not worried about getting to that right away. There’s still a lot of tweaking to do yet, but I am close. I think I have most of the base functionality done for this site, but I will be adding more at a later date.