Day one in the blogosphere

I am a writer, and I am immensely privileged to make a living at it.

For the past nine years, I have worked at Boxoffice Magazine, a trade publication for the movie theater industry. I’ve held many positions there, first as the film and technology editor, later as the editor. Now I’m a part-time editor-at-large. My two major beats are movie reviews and exhibition-related technologies, such as digital cinema. But you won’t be reading any of that material here. You can find it easily enough at boxoffice.com.

Since January 2005 I have been pursuing my graduate degree at the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. There I focus on fiction, studying with John Rechy, Janet Fitch, Gina Nahai and Judith Freeman, but also have taken nonfiction with the L.A. Times’ Kenneth Turan, playwriting with Donald Freed and poetry with Holly Prado Northup. I’m on track to turn in my thesis, a novel, at this time next year.

I also serve as editor-in-chief of Southern California Anthology, a student-run literary journal published by MPW. Our first issue will be available in the coming months. And this fall I joined the Writing Center at USC as a consultant, working with students one-and-one and in group workshops.

As a result of all this writing and editing and consulting—at which, again, I am extremely privileged to make a living—I have found that my own writing, including work on my novel, has suffered. It’s not often that I compose anything that’s not for a deadline. Regrettably, I have found myself hesitating to take the time to write, say, a poem that won’t be handed in.

And so today, which happens to be my birthday, I am launching a blog. With a debt of gratitude to Holiday Reinhorn, who encouraged me to write 10 minutes a day (it’s only 10 minutes!), and Holly Prado Northup, who introduced me to the concept, here is my online writer’s notebook.

Here I will work on material that’s not for work, that’s not for school, that’s not even necessarily for my novel. It might be poems, in which I’ve discovered an amateur interest, or other snatches of literary writing, fiction and non-. It might be a response to something I’ve read or seen or heard. It might be a current event filtered through a critical or literary prism. It might be a recording of my interactions with the world.

Whatever it is, it will, just by virtue of the fact that this blog exists, make writing—that is, my writing—a priority. I will have to hand something, anything, in, even on an arbitrary deadline. It may not be polished, but it will be considered.

Call it a structured journal. Deliberate contemplation. Purposeful escape. Habit.