I’ve decided this blog is going to be more like this one. I was thinking about the blogs I most enjoy reading, and they are the ones where the authors permit themselves to verge on conversational. When I started SOS, I wanted it to be very professional – and I still think it’s important to be able to refer intelligently to things like writing and theater in this space. But the only way it is ever going to be interesting to read, or to reread, is to make it more messy.

I reread blogs sometimes like rereading novels, and I read them like stories. There has to be more of a story here. And by story, I mean plot.

Last night, at the low-lying couches of DOC Wine Bar in Lincoln Park, I am asked (I ask myself) to explain the ideology of the title of this blog.

I locate it in an interest in exploring style, and in thinking that forms and styles have as much meaning in them as ideas and content. I also talk about how it could just as easily have been titled “praxis over theory.” It goes back to certain ideas I was working on at school.

But I realize, in explaining it, that the extremism of the statement is something I haven’t really held for a long time. It’s like wearing the bumper sticker of a party you joined when you were seventeen and for which you no longer vote. I’m still interested in style, but not to the exclusion of anything.

There is no me and there is no writing without it. But that doesn’t mean that it is the only thing I do.

I don’t think I can seriously consider retitling this page, except that I already have.

are ( belong to) out of date. I spent hours on them about a month ago, and now I want them to change. The bio, the resume. It’s all wrong. Or, it’s all right, but it’s only half the picture.

Pondering Twittering under the name of my old alter ego Sander Lamori, the angriest thirteen-year-old boy in Los Angeles. The idea continues to appeal.

Having finally found the paint job for the site, it’s now time to turn to the substance. (Style first, always, baby.) How, in 2009, can we substantiate the substance of S.O.S? Building a Better Blog? What in the hell is going to make this pile of ASDF more than SDFA?

The blogs I read most often are:
a) Bookslut, which I read for the links (and the gossip)
b) About Last Night, which I read for the quotes (and the criticism)
c) ArtsJournal, which is a news roundup site, which I read for everything that’s important to me.
d) any of the blogs belonging to a really upbeat, successful, usually mainstreamed and outside-my-genre working writer, which I scroll through for process and for an unreasonable amount of unfulfillable hope and expectation.

Since I can’t actually be Jessa or Terry – don’t have the wardrobe – and my attempt at starting a similar news roundup site for the theaterworld has stalled, I might as well try to be a working writer.

I think I have to continue exposing process gears all over the garage floor of this blog. Only in that way will the blog become something I would want to read.

I have to write about what it’s like to write.

…

[any time now, hotshot…]

…

Well, a great way to start doing that is to avoid doing it by writing a post about how I’m going to start doing it.

cheesy as it is, appeals to me more than all the previous versions. I give it 24 hours.

is that, readable and professional as it is, it looks like the blog of someone who doesn’t know much about the Internet and picked the WordPress template that was the least “bloggie.” It’s not technophile enough.

Does anyone but me think the new site template is too feminine? Something about the 1.5 spacing.