Which Would You Rather Read?

School Daze

Bookstore and Clock Tower, Fresno State

Things in my life have been moving quickly, and time has once again become my scarcest commodity. Over the winter break, it was my habit to work all day on my woodcarvings, at which I make a humble living. Then, as night fell, I would come inside to read and write. I started blogging to fill this niche. It's better than watching television.

But now, I am troubled.

Let me fill you in. I have some very intense classes, and I take my schoolwork seriously. Here's my class list, in order:

• History Writing. This is one of the main classes required for my degree, and it will require the longest research paper I've yet done. The teacher is tough. This class is so tough, a "B" or higher means one need not take the GRE (Graduate Record Exam, normally required to get into graduate school)
• Advanced Greek. This semester we are translating Euripides' Medea. The department head chose Euripides because he is not too difficult. But Ancient Greek is difficult. Period.
• Humanities Honors Seminar I. This is a special class in which we will be reading a vast selection of important works in the history and development of the humanities. We will develop a prospectus for a thesis. This is stage one of a three stage process. This will be a fun class.
• Advanced Latin. Virgil! Finally! We will translate "Book IV" of the Aeneid. This will be work, but Latin and Virgil have always clicked for me.

Yes, I'm getting a proper gentleman's education. Enough said.

The problem is this: I find that these scholarly activities exhaust the part of my brain I use to blog. Reading. Thinking. Writing. Reading. Thinking. Writing…

I have a meme I use to describe this. I call it "Q." "Q" for "Quotient," that variable quantity of mind which when full allows for intellectual work and which when drained, prevents it.

I know that school is going to drain my "Q," and blogging uses it up too. But I need it all to handle my tough classes.

But I do not want to stop blogging. I find the experience too valuable, yet I know there is no way I will be able to write four, or three, or maybe even two good posts a week.

Doing the two reviews I did has taught me that each of them is about a week's work. It takes a lot of digging. I should have done more. I should have gotten more material together. I should have run my stuff by those I talked about. I should have put together a list of questions in advance.

I have made commitments, and commitments, are, well they are commitments. One doesn't want to be a flake, but I want to be more conscientious and write a little more slowly. If I lose readers and comments while at the same time increasing quality, well, is the fault mine?

I know what the I Ching would say, "The way of the superior man. No Blame."

So "Rick's Blog" might become the "Sunday Review."

Might

So there's that.

And now there's thisThe reason I returned to college in the first place was to improve the accuracy of my fiction. Not by studying writing, per se, but by studying history and the classics. My passion is classical history. I have one novel written and another in the works.

And now, I am seriously thinking of publishing the first on the web. I know enough Roman history, and I know enough Latin to fix the errors in my draft, and here's a neat segue. I am going to propose, as my Master's Thesis, a paper documenting the true history in the fiction. I do not know if that will fly, but in order to make it fly, my novel will have to have been exposed to critical review, and a blog is certainly an advantageous way to do that.

Also, since I've started the new novel, I'm not feeling too stingy about sharing the first. My Well, in this regard, has proven to be deep.

The beauty of this last idea is that the work has largely been done. I have many hundreds of thousands of words already written.

But there's more. Here's a little fact I have been kind of cagey about. Though I now make a living as a woodcarver, I used to paint for a living. Portraits, mainly. Then, one day, a friend talked me into doing the art for a comic book, but we never finished; still, I became intrigued with the idea of doing illustrations rather than painting, and from the very first moment I began my first novel, I had planned for it to be illustrated.

The Oracle, Oil on Canvas, 24x36, 200524

So far, I have only a lot of sketches, but it would actually be not that difficult for me to do the drawings while in school. Drawing does not burn up "Q," it burns "X."

If you read my review of Bruce's blog you may recall me asking if he rests from one kind of work by doing another. His answer was, "Absolutely."

These are my thoughts. I am known to change my mind. I am not sure what to do, but I do intend to keep production rolling. That's a given.

Which would you rather read? A beautiful, but tragic, love story taking place in the Age of Augustus, or reviews of more blogs?

[Footnote: Notice that the above photos have captions? I just I figured out how to do that in Blogger, but I'm not gonna tell you how to do it. You have to ask. Hah!]