1. Julian Finds a Blog.

Julian stared at his keyboard, numb. From his fingertips had just flown the last word and final period of his third unsold novel. He felt utterly drained, unable to stir himself to get up and see if the world at large still existed. He thought to himself,
“Writing a novel is like being in love or, perhaps, like having diarrhea. What, really, is the difference between the two? The same urgency, if not desperation, the same cramping pain, the same messy results, the same desire to keep it hidden from one’s colleagues and friends.”
He could not make up his mind which metaphor to choose. And, now, after all the decisions he’d made about another innocent character’s life and existence, did he even have the energy to make a decision about the dregs of his own internal dialogue.? He did not.

In the weeks that followed this mini-event, Julian was obligated to go back to his day job as Dr. Julian Gray, Professor of English Literature at Blue Ridge Community College. His feeling of depletion lingered. He stumbled through his lectures without his usual flair.
“Are you even listening to me, Julian?”
The young woman sitting before him, on a simple wooden chair in his cluttered office, was one of his advisees. She’d been going on about her course load and plans, but he’d zoned out. When her drone ceased and broke out into the interrogative, he’d gotten so far out into the airless void of inner space that he had to struggle to remember exactly who it was he’d stopped listening to. Was she a student or a colleague?
“I’m so sorry. Please tell me again what you were saying…”
So it went.

In an earlier event, about two years before beginning that third novel, he’d decided to start a blog. He often had his students create blogs. He urged them to write about what they were reading. It more than just urging, – he also graded them. He had to read what they were writing about their reading, and then write them little epigrams about why the writing so little resembled the reading. Reading, writing; he was passionate about literature. That facet remained undimmed. His mind was always hard at work cranking out words. He could only tell the students so much. They were young and full of their youthful inexperience and insufficiencies. Some of them could listen and understand him; some of his students had minds second to none. To these he shared as much as he felt he could. There was a limit, though. He found that the excess thinking was either too dark to admit or too beautiful to squander. He decided, therefore, to spare both his sanity and the mind of his wife, to blog. He had the idea that in the land of the free and home of the brave, what with freedom of speech and all of that, that he might be able to speak out on a blog about that dark matter and exquisite wisdom. He was quite wrong. But for a while there, he had this blog.

Having a blog meant scanning the blogosphere. The blog sites held all sorts of caches of wisdom about all sorts of facets of life. He could, it seemed, Google anything, and there would be a blog about it. He Googled “post novel writing post-partum.” Up popped that exact title as an article in some woman’s blog. The woman had a link to another blog that dealt with writing about sex in a novel or story. This article was on a content rich blog about writing issues, particularly issues that dealt with craft and sales. Clicking his way through the many posts and comments, he came upon an intriguing sounding blog title: “Amy Tells All.” The pictured waif looked like a grad student, but one of the more alluring ones. He clicked and began to read the post at the top of the heap.