Reading Time: 2 minutes

This week was another one of frequent travel. We fought Memorial Day weekend traffic on a trip to New Jersey. We made frequent excursions to Westchester County on business. This morning, I’m in Vermont, headed back to Connecticut tonight.

When the demands of real life cut into my creative time, I put the major projects on hold. These require large blocks of time and concentration, a combination that is hard to find these days. At the encouragement of my wife, I did find a few hours Saturday afternoon to continue my work on the Bubble Wrap book before heading home today.

Many readers don’t even have the time or focus to read an entire book, let alone write one. The culture of short videos, messages, and podcasts has taken over, to our detriment.

That is, in part, why you’ve seen so many of my journal entries from 1979 recently. Another reason: I’m trying to catch up. Previously I published these on the anniversaries of when I wrote them, to give a more contemporary feel.

But I fell about a month behind posting when I took time off to prepare for my History Channel interview. Since then I’ve tried to catch up. Unfortunately, I’m getting into a part of the journal where I had something to say about my career, or about writing, just about every day. At the rate of a post a day, I’m slowly catching up to the current date.

Posting every day is a hectic pace. I would prefer the three-times-a-week schedule of Archon’s Den, who I’ve been following since the early days of this blog. This week we had a Comments chat about the estimated reading times that show on my posts. (Another result of the short-attention-span culture.)

Dartmouth contemporary Frank Batten’s name pops up in the Award-winning coverage? post. I reached out to him through the alumni network, a useful tool that came about 40 years too late for me.

During the past week I also grabbed photos for the blog and began working on new essays that will come up in the next month, so stay tuned!

In case you missed it …