Where to put stuff -- blogging edition

My house is somewhat cluttered. There are magazines and books and newspapers and mail I've meant to look at but haven't yet and these do tend to accumulate over time. Like the checking account statements from the last 12 years. One of these days we really should try and balance that account....

Long Suffering Spouse fights a never-ending battle to keep me from turning the house into one of those awful houses you see on that cable show about hoarders. (No, I've never seen the show -- but Younger Daughter has and she says it's truly frightening.) My office, the Undisclosed Location where Long Suffering Spouse never goes, teeters even closer to the brink. Mostly, I think, it's because I'm behind in my filing. And the aluminum cans and plastic bottles that the cleaning people bring me for the recycling. And there's all these cases I print out and never read. (Other writers have notebooks; I have piles.) Sometimes I'm planning an article; occasionally, I'll even write one.

And in that last sentence lies the problem.

(Only in that last sentence? you ask, arching eyebrows.)

(As Durante said -- "Everybody wants to get into the act!")

I'm running two or three blogs these days, depending on how you want to count it. There's this one and the one that I write in my own name. That one has two pages. And then there's my Facebook page, which also requires attention. This blog gets updated far more regularly than any of my other pages. It's much safer to write anonymously. Of course, sometimes I have a great idea for a post and then I dither about where to put it -- here or on my other blogs -- or maybe on Facebook? By the time I'm done dithering, the idea is stale and the post is abandoned.

I used to write for publication -- meaning real publication, in someone else's newspaper, for example -- but, since I've gotten caught up in the blogging craze I think I've had exactly one article published. The return on blogging is too immediate -- no delayed gratification, no waiting for an editor to pass on one's work (though regular readers will no doubt agree that I could use some serious editing -- starting with all these parenthetical asides). At least the return would be immediate if I got more comments. And, with blogging, no one rewrites my lede but me.

A morning blog post is like a stretching exercise, I've decided, and heaven knows I could use the exercise....

Of course, I won't lose any weight typing.

I need to get some work published again, just to make sure that I still can. And that's my New Year's resolution.

(Hey! The calendar used to start in April... so in a historical sense, my resolution is not that late....)