Correspondence

Writers who do not make themselves totally available to everyone, all the time, are frequently tagged with the “recluse” label. While I do not consider myself a recluse, I have found it necessary to place some limits on my direct interactions with individual readers. These limits most often come into play when people send me letters or e-mail, and also when I am invited to speak publicly.
Neal Stephenson, “Why I Am A Bad Correspondent“

I like correspondence. I enjoy answering emails. I like writing letters.

But I also like doing the things that matter most. And correspondence can take a lot of time. For writers, the best way to continue connecting with readers might not be email. It might be more books, articles, and essays.

Stephenson adds:

There is little to nothing that I can offer readers above and beyond what appears in my published writings. It follows that I should devote all my efforts to writing more material for publication, rather than spending a few minutes here, a day there, answering e-mails or going to conferences.
Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

I’m thinking about ideas like this one a lot, because I’m thinking about the things I want to do in the next few years and how most of those things require blocks of uninterrupted time. That means there are other things I will need to say no to. Maybe not emails. Maybe not letters. Maybe other little things, even good things, that subtract from what would be otherwise.

Football: Know Your Terms

bank-phrom-352283-unsplash — Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

I’ve made another appearance in the Waco Tribune-Herald’s Letters section, this time talking football terminology. Click and read my letter.

The Trib printed this article from the AP, which I read on Saturday. I wrote my letter that afternoon, and it appeared locally in print on Tuesday. Here’s the play, and the term, that came to mind:

I never knew this play inspired an ice sculpture.

A few years later similar action occured in a game I cared about.

Sports are great. People are, too, especially in their inventive use of words.

Letters Page: The Waco Trib

Waco_tribune_herald_building_2014 — Image via Wikipedia

I made a third appearance in the Letters section of the local paper today. You can read my thoughts here, composed in response to this opinion piece by Bruce Wells on the Ten Commandments, first appearing in the print edition of the Waco Tribune-Herald on February 1, 2019. I disagreed with Wells, believing he skirted the key issues, namely religious freedom and free exercise and expression, and misrepresented the Bible and the convictions of the religious communities who include the Ten Commandments in their sacred texts.