(Listen to the soundtrack of this post.)

Five years ago, today, I made my first post to this blog.

Oddly enough, I’ve been a blogger longer than I’ve been a lot of things, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about blogging and what’s valuable about it, and why anybody should do it. This interview I did does a good job of covering that ground.

The most important point: I didn’t start a blog because I had something to say. I started a blog because I wanted to find something to say.

Bob Pollard, one of my favorite songwriters, his career started by making up album covers for bands that didn’t exist yet:

Back in high school, maybe 4 or 5 people wanted to be in a band, but nobody knew how to play an instrument. So in art class, we’d sit there and make album covers, and the credits, and I’d have the lyrics, and we’d have everything but music. We even made t-shirts for our band. Walked around, and people’d say, “You guys have a band?” “Yeah, yeah, we’ve got a band!” And no one could play anything. So it started out as kind of a fantasy.

Lynda Barry says, “when you were a kid, you’d never write a book unless you had the book to write it in.”

The idea is that having a container can inspire you to fill it with art.

Whenever I’ve been creatively lost over the past five years, I’ve always come back to the blog, and asked myself, “What can I fill this with?” It’s kept me going, kept me making work.

Best of all, I’ve made really good friends, which, in the end, is the only reason to be here. So thanks, y’all.

For a long time I’ve wanted to start a site dedicated solely to the making of Newspaper Blackout Poems, a place where people can go read how-to tips, ask me questions, and then try out their own and share the results.

It didn’t seem right to set up such a thing on my main site. I’m thrilled to have folks making blackout poems, but my site is for my work, and I want to keep it that way.

A man’s domain name is his domain, you know?

Enter the new site. It’s hosted on Tumblr, which not only means that it’s incredibly easy for me to make quick posts and for followers to reblog them, but it also has built-in functionality where people can ask questions and best of all, submit their own poems.

I’ll still be keeping all of my original poems right here, and I’ll still be posting new ones every week, so no need to re-subscribe or anything. But if you’re interested, give it a follow on Tumblr, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

I might post old poems from the archives on the new site. I’m not quite sure yet. Still making it up as I go along.

I’d love to hear what y’all think about it. Feel free to leave me a comment or suggest the types of posts you’d like to see over there.

Let’s see what we can make together…

A few folks seemed to enjoy my Tweet earlier this month:

I have several friends who feel the same way: they’re more than ready for 2010.

For me, the year was colored by a setback at the end of January, when I learned my book release would be pushed back seven months to April 2010. At that point, I’d worked on the book seven months, it was eight months til the original release date of September. Another year and four months seemed like an eternity. In hindsight, it worked out fine: I did a big round of edits to the final manuscript in April, the fall book release schedule was incredibly loaded with heavy-hitters, and now I’m more prepared for the release. But it was tough.

The rest of the year felt like I was stuck in a holding pattern. Where to go next?

Still, there were some highlights.

The best thing I can say about February is that it bought me my first pair of cowboy boots. A perfect ending to the month that I’ve always joked is “a good month to die”, I spent the 28th in College Station.

20 days out of March we had out-of-town guests in our house, but despite the exhaustion, I met some great folks at my first SXSW, and had my first TV appearance. (Any month that ends with seeing Neko Case on the 31st can’t be all bad.)

April brought the biggest life change of the year: our dog, Milo!

Late May, my wife got her master’s, and the Vizthink Visual Note-Taking webinar was a smash hit, which later led to our accepted 2010 panel at SXSW.

In June, the official 2010 Texas Summer of Heat and Death began. The coolest thing I did was silkscreen Newspaper Blackout prints with my buddy, Curt Miller. I also saw a terrific taping of Austin City Limits with St. Vincent. My wife and I came up with an idea for a book, which we’re working on now, but I can’t say anything about…

July and August boiled my memory.

September I had my first religious experience with Texas BBQ in Lockhart. At the end of the month we released our 20×200 prints.

October, the weather broke.

November I taught my first college class, and had a terrific Thanksgiving with our friends.

The 1st of December brought galleys of the book, as if to answer January.

So here we are.

What I learned this year is that even the most modest success  comes with a lot of paperwork. A book isn’t done when you turn in the manuscript. There’s a lot of logistical crap you have to deal with, and if you don’t keep doing your job–read, investigate, dream, make up cool shit–you will be brought down. There were a few side projects that kept me exploring (I’m thinking most of my tea drawings and de-signs), but overall, I kept too busy. I didn’t read enough, I didn’t relax enough, I didn’t allow enough space for myself to grow.

But then, that’s why we tick time off in years: we can say goodbye to all that, and start over.

Thanks to everyone for reading, sharing links, buying prints…y’all are awesome.

2010, here we come.

In addition to staying up til 1AM getting these 20×200 prints going, I’m guest-blogging this week for one of my favorite blogs: Joe Sullivan’s The Book Design Review (@theBDR). I‘ve made two posts so far I made three posts:

• David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp and the need for 3-D views of book cover design
• How publishers and authors can use Flickr to set up a Blogger Kit for their books
• King-Cat Comics by John Porcellino

All of the posts got me thinking about how to best present books online and make it easy to spread them around the internet. It was really fun: Joe has some really smart readers, so be sure to check the comments.

I’ll update this post with links as I go along. Next up is the design of John Porcellino’s King-Cat mini-comics and its successful transition to the book collections.

PS. This is how my second post on the Blogger’s Kit began (with doodles, of course):

see it bigger

The content of this interview I did with Nate Burgos over at Design Feaster might be familiar to anyone who’s read my posts about blogging before, but you might want to take a look anyways.

On why I started a blog:

When you’re a writer in college, you have the ultimate luxury: a captive audience. Your teachers get paid to read your writing and your classmates pay to read your writing. And then, suddenly, you get out of college, and nobody gives a crap anymore. So you start a blog!

On my hatred of computers:

This might be blasphemous for a blogger to say, but I don’t like spending more time in front of a computer screen than I have to. The good stuff comes from your hands and your head. (The cartoonist Lynda Barry says, “In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits!” A blog is just a delivery system—a way to get eyeballs looking at your stuff (and minds thinking about it).

Read more here

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