Dead developed out of the Empsom Lectures at the University of Cambridge, where Atwood was invited to speak in 2000.  Neither a book about how to write nor an autobiography, the book is  instead six essays ruminating on writers themselves, their relationships with their work, and their relationships with their readers and society.

I’ve decided to blog my way through the book.  It just seems like a blog-like thing to do.  :)

1.  Index

2.  Introduction

3.  Orientation:  Who Do You Think You Are?

4.  Duplicity:  The Jekyll Hand, the Hyde Hand, and the Slippery Double

5.  Temptation:  Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co.

6.  Communion:  Nobody to Nobody

7.  Descent:  Negotiating with the Dead

(more to come)

This blog exists because I have decided to embrace pretentiousness, despite my general distaste for it. After all, the various internet phenomena like blogs and twitter arise from pretense. They thrive on the idea that we have something to say but, more importantly, that we have something to say that others want or even need to hear. That is the assumption of writing itself even.

Writers set about their work believing that their words are important, that they need to be said, and that the world needs to hear. Talk about ego! Of course, the flip-side of that coin is the constant fear that the opposite is true, that they are only fooling themselves, that no one cares about what they say or how they say it. Writers then are quite the contradiction. They display their delusions of grandeur for all the world to see (or at least their corner of it), hoping and praying that those ideas are not really delusions, while secretly fearing that they are.

I started this website as a means to admit my delusions.  I am a writer. I enjoy it. I spend my time doing it. I want to spend more time doing, and eventually I want to support my family doing it.  Am I scared?  Sure.  Am I afraid that this will never be more than just a hobby?  Certainly.  Every writer is.

But my hope is that this site will help organize my work and my goals, that it will be a place for me to talk about the writing process, a place to keep people up to date about my career, and a place to maybe even waste time discussing other things that interest me.