Regular visitors to this site — all three of you — may have noticed that the frequency of my postings has become erratic of late, and that the posts themselves are shorter and, well, lamer than they used to be. I feel like I owe you guys an explanation for what’s going on.

(That’s probably not true. I probably don’t owe anyone anything, and the posting situation most likely hasn’t been of much concern to anyone but myself, and this is just another case of me making a big deal out of nothing. But that’s what I do: make a big deal out of nothing. It’s kind of the raison d’etre of blogging, isn’t it?)

Contrary to any rumors you may have heard, I have not lost interest in blogging, nor have I run out of things to say. Quite the contrary. I’m as chatty as ever, if not a little moreso. Unfortunately, I’m suddenly faced with a dramatic decrease in my available leisure time. You see, when I first started writing here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense, I was what the people who think up polite, euphemistic terminology for harsh realities would call underemployed. Another way of saying that is that I spent much of the last three years doing contract work for a former employer. A third way to say it is that I have known the torments of the damned.

That’s not a slam against my former employer. I have no bad feelings toward him and, as far as I know, he has none towards me. Let’s just say that he did what he had to do for the sake of his business and, for my part, I’ve never been as smart or as pushy about my career as I should have been. The important thing for you to know is that up until very recently, I’ve been working only sporadically with long stretches of inactivity between projects, which has given me lots of time to blog frequently and at length.

Everything changed about three months ago when I accepted a permanent position as a proofreader for a large — make that a very large — corporation that operates under a very different paradigm than I am accustomed to. You know all those want-ads in the paper that ask if you’re up for a “dynamic, fast-paced environment?” Yeah, it’s one of those kinds of places, a pressure-cooker of barely controlled chaos and constant workflow. It wasn’t bad when I first started working there, but then the summer doldrums ended, and ever since it’s been pretty much pedal-to-the-metal. Most afternoons, I feel like I’m in that famous I Love Lucy sketch where Lucy and Ethel are trying to keep up with the ever-accelerating conveyor belt by shoving unfinished chocolates down their bras. Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of time for blogging while I’m at the office, and when I get home, it’s usually pretty late and I’m almost always too slagged to even consider turning on the computer. (You wouldn’t think that looking for missing commas and inserting the little trademark symbols would all that tough, but you’d be surprised. I personally find proofing to be more taxing than actual writing, or, as we call it in the biz, “content generation.”)

I’m really quite frustrated about this situation. It’s a relief to finally have a steady income and a set schedule after such a long period of uncertainty, but I miss having the freedom to spend several hours working on a really good film review, or a reminiscence, or any of the other longer-form entries I’ve typically done around here. I don’t know if you people out there look forward to reading my online spewings (especially the truly lengthy ones), but I certainly look forward to writing them. I’ve come to very much enjoy the outlet, the opportunity to vent and to share, and the interplay with those readers who comment regularly. It tickles me when something I’ve written provokes a lot of conversation in the comments section, and I love it when total strangers feel sufficiently moved to decloak and announce themselves. It’s a little bit like being an actor on stage, I suppose, feeding on the energy of the crowd. Even when no one comments, though, I find that I just like expressing myself about the things that interest me. And it’s frankly driving me crazy that so many good topics are falling by the wayside because I don’t get around to writing about them until they’re grown cold and stale. (I have a whole list of links that I keep meaning to comment on, but I never seem to get to them, and quite a few of them are now far past their sell-by date.) I also don’t like the feeling that I’m not producing the best entries that I can because I feel too rushed to really think them through or to take sufficient care as I’m writing. Blogging isn’t held to the same standards as academic writing, true, but I have my own standards and I take pride in producing a good blog entry. I don’t think I’ve done enough of those lately, and it bugs me something fierce.

I don’t know what the future holds for this blog, to be honest. I don’t want to give it up, but this blog isn’t the only type of writing I want to do, and if it comes down to choosing which project is the best use of my precious free time, Simple Tricks may lose out. Or it’s possible that the current circumstances at work are only temporary and I’ll once again sort my life out well enough to get back to regular blogging. In the meantime, I’m going to try for at least one or two entries a week. Hopefully, I’ll find time for more, but if you’ll check back at least once every five days, there should be something here to greet you. As a certain lovely space princess from Alderaan once remarked, “It’s not over yet.”

I just thought you all ought to know what’s going on…