Resurrection? Or Regurgitation?

Posted by Mick Arran in News and articles

Those of you not getting Witness via RSS will have noticed a few changes to the sidebar, viz.: a whole new collection of links to “Serial Fiction” blogs. Well, three links, actually. Not so many as to justify the word “collection”, but I digress. Oh, and a new link to an old blog.

Briefly, I discovered, much to my surprise and amazement, that Squarespace Hosting did not after all delete the old Resistance blog. It did delete everything I uploaded – photos and resource materials, most of them in pdf. format – but the blog itself remained intact.

Long story short, I re-animated it. Squarespace is the best blog platform and best blog host on the net – and I think I’ve used them all at one time or another – and while it will cost $7/month, it’s worth it to be able to access the old posts (all the stuff I wrote about Bush’s attempt to declare martial law in NOLA after Katrina is there), use their amazing word processors (there are four different platforms), and build things like discussion threads and photo galleries into the same site, making it a real resource instead of just another blog.

As reported by 7D News, to avoid confusion, I’ve renamed it The Matewan Chronicles and I’ll be doing all my labor, working-class, union, and class war commentary there. Dispatch is going to become an aggregator blog dedicated to links and summaries of news stories and blog posts about labor and unions – iow, TrenchNews on steroids.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting the last old-style TrenchNews and cleaning up all the links I’ve got stored in my folder. After that’s done, there will be 2 or 3 posts a week with whatever I’ve picked up since the last one. They’ll be shorter and with less commentary, which means there will be more of them. There are a few other labor/union aggregate sites out there but they don’t have the breadth of TN and they don’t refresh all that often. I’m hoping it will become a home for people who want to keep up.

Which brings us to the fiction.

Re-animating The Resistance got me to thinking about all my old sites, and that in turn got me to thinking about how tired I get of writing about depressing current events every day. I’ve been wanting to go back and finish the two novels I started (one of which was born on a blog called Carry-On Luggage, which no longer exists) but I’ve been stuck for months.

Part of the reason for the block is the deadly intuition that I’ve gone off-track. I can feel it but I haven’t been able to figure out how I got lost or where I should go to get it back. It occurred to me that I needed to start again and re-write the books from the beginning in short, controllable chunks in which I can play with the characters and story lines a bit and see what happens.

Well…. Short, controllable chunks? Blogs, of course. Perfect. Plus there’s a chance of getting feedback about how it’s working from actual readers.

That means you, my fine buckos.

So, if you have a minute and a taste for comic fiction, click on over to either Wilbur or Aunt Harriet’s Revenge and let me know what you think. The posts are fairly short (some of them are very short) and I’d appreciate any and all feedback. Wilbur is a dramedy – it has as much pathos as humor – and is meant to poke gentle fun rather than stick shivs in people. Aunt Harriet’s Revenge is a flat-out comic novel in which I’m writing as funny as I can. Lines are crossed and envelopes pushed with abandon. They’re quite different so you can choose the one that’s right for you.

Well, I feel re-invigorated, anyway.