What is your focus?

Sometime late yesterday evening I got an e-mail from somebody who asked me “what is your focus” these days. She made the case that I had used to focus primarily on reviewing books and my own writing, which she grudgingly conceded was interesting at times, but these days I was “vomiting” my personal life all over the blog and nobody cared. After quoting snippets from far more famous blogs than mine and the accompanying newsletters, she made her case how I was failing at what I used to do. She wrote that talking about my health, my wife’s health, my hamster’s health (for the record I do NOT have a hamster and they are forbidden in this apartment complex along with having an aquarium, barbecue grills, and lots of other things) the CITIBANK lawsuit, and my pleas for help made my blog forgettable as well as “boring and unreadable.”  After telling me how sick and tired she and no doubt the entire planet was with reading about my life, she then insisted that I read and review her attached horror novella that she assured me was “simply wonderful.”

I guess she missed the posts I wrote in the past about what I do review and what I don’t.  I don’t read horror. On about two or three occasions I have made exceptions for authors who I knew to be very good in other genres but to do so is rarer than rain in Texas during a drought. Something she should have known if she truly had been reading me “forever” and knew what I review. I have made it perfectly clear that while I am open to lots of things, the whole horror genre is not my thing. Real life has often proved horrible enough that I don’t need to deal with the walls leaking blood, zombies walking around eating or not eating brains, etc. Just not my thing. I’m certainly not looking down or casting aspersions on those who read and write in the genre---it just is not my thing and as such, I am not the reviewer for such books.

Something I would have made clear last night in probably what would have become a very pointed and strongly worded e-mail. I was spared replying last night thanks to our latest power outage that ran an hour and a half. Once the power was back on right before midnight, I was way too busy worshipping the twin concepts of air conditioners and box fans. Think of a whale breached on shore and you have a good idea of what I looked like in front of two box fans last night. Unfortunately, everyone else went to bed so no one was around to spray water on me.

While at the food bank this morning, I thought about what I should say to her and how I should say it. Beyond the clear and absolutely hilarious conflict between telling me my blog was “unreadable boring garbage” while at the same time insisting I review a book I had not asked for or had any interest in, she did have a basic point. This blog used to be about books and my writing back when it started years ago. I didn’t talk much about my family or other things. The focus was on books, writing, and little else.

But, I am not the same person I was years ago and neither is the blog now. Life happened and continues to happen in often personally devastating ways. I can’t separate my daily experience from my fiction writing (when I can actually physically write) or what I do review. This may be part of the reason why I never could easily answer where my ideas come from for my fiction stuff. I get an image of something, or an idea, and I have no idea where it came from or why I thought of it. It just is there in my head fully formed at some point. The same is true with this blog these days. What is happening to me, both from a physical standpoint as well as a mental standpoint, is all part of everything. I can’t separate the two.

So, I will continue to vomit forth stuff about my personal life from time to time. It is going to happen because of the nature of my chaotic life these days. But, I promise to continue to hose off the deck with the book reviews and other posts about writing.

I do hope that you watch your step around here and stick around for the journey….

Kevin