Back and Thanks

Many thanks to the very kind people who read this blog on a regular basis. I very much appreciate your sympathy and support when this blog went involuntarily on vacation for eight days. Dale, Tanya, Pogblog, Pink Fluffy Slippers, Parklife, Benny, Charles, BellaRossa, you all went above and beyond not as fellow bloggers but as friends.
I also want to thank whoever it was at Blogger/Google who helped me to restore it. I have no idea who it was. My blog simply reappeared Thursday night after 3 e-mails and a fax to the legal department. They don't make it easy to contact anyone directly, but obviously someone did help me out.

In the meantime, the enforced vacation was good for me. Despite the fact that there were any number of events in the regular world that seeemed eminently bloggable, I couldn't and didn't. So for a week, there was no OJ, no troop respite vote, no Floyd Landis, etc. I doubt that my not blogging about these topics had any impact on the world at all. Of course, Bachelor 11 starts on Monday and that's a different matter entirely :}.

I did learn that I had come to think of my blog as an extension of my thoughts and thus my mind. It was a document as well both how I get my ideas for stories and how my writing changes over time. At the same time, it was clear to me that I was losing track of a more critical writing goal. I honestly need to have a book to be taken seriously, maybe even an unpublished one. For that reason, I opened a second blog to concentrate on that.

I'm very much here, but I need to slow down a bit with Chancelucky. I need to be less compulsive about news events, etc. I'm going to stop checking my hit counts religiously. I might miss an episode or two of my reality television writing. Even before this happened, I'd determined that I wasn't going to do the pre-final rounds of American Idol this year. Also if Bachelor 11 turns out to be a bore...
Like my former boss Karl Rove, I need the time for other priorities.

Many thanks to all of those you who expressed your concern when Chancelucky turned up on the back of milk cartons. I had backed up the posts that I considered important. One of the odd things was it struck me that the really important items here were actually more personal posts, interaction with many of you, and the flow of the posts themselves. There was something to looking at a month's worth of posts and recalling what I was doing back then.

chancelucky