Clearing the Cobwebs

Before we get to our next topic, a little housekeeping business. I'm afraid I've been neglecting this, one of my suite of blogs devoted to my rather diverse fields of interest.

One reason is that I've been much more focused on our "core" blog, www.YorkWriters.com lately for publicity reasons. Chris has a new series of mystery novels coming out starting this fall, and we're trying to build traffic and awareness there. I've also made "YorkWriters" available for subscription through Amazon's Kindle store, and if I'm even allowing, much less asking people to pay even a modest amount for something, then I feel some obligation to deliver regular and substantial content. I haven't listed this blog on Amazon, not because I'm unhappy with the quality of content here. Quite the contrary. But in terms of quality and regularity, no, it's just not there.

But the result has sometimes been that things I might formerly have posted here, simply in the interest of evenly spreading interesting content around the various blogs, has instead ended up on YorkWriters by default. Sorry about that.

That doesn't mean I've given up on this blog, or that there aren't some things that are going to end up here that you'd never see on YorkWriters. Here's my general mission-statement about how things will break down.

Things that will end up on YorkWriters: Most posts about writing and publishing. Posts of general interest, opinions, current events, and major career announcements.

Things that will end up here at the Multiplex: Things from me that are of a more personal nature. My ramblings and rants about technology, science, space, and the future. Things that reflect the more nerdy aspects of my persona: posts about pop culture, movies, toys, comics, etc. Most anything that's just a little too off-mainstream or quirky to fit on YorkWriters.

I hope not to go so long between posts here in the future, but no promises. One aspect of what I write about here is that the posts are often much more personal, passionate, and technically complex than what I post elsewhere. A lot of though, hard-work, and research goes into many of these posts, and I approach them as though I were writing an op-ed piece or magazine article.

Okay, I won't claim that the polish of them always gets to that level, but I don't just dash them off in fifteen minutes and post them. A lot of sweat goes into some of these posts, and I don't usually even start one unless I think I have a topic, and an approach to that topic, that's worthy of that effort. You won't catch me blogging just to make noise and fill dead-air. I don't roll that way.

Anyway, I've got some ideas rolling around my head about what is necessary for a society to create complex technological projects (like airliners, or Moon rockets), and our ability to maintain the culture that makes such things possible. I'm worried that we're losing our abilities in those areas, and the costs to our society may be more significant and far-reaching than we imagine.

I'm on the road in Los Angeles, and have the starting-gun on a new novel project looming that could start at any moment (or be several months late, as it is right now), so I'm not sure when I'll get that through the pipeline. Hopefully in the next few days to a week.