I haven't thought about the nature of apologies (although I am sure that Montaigne or Bacon probably did: they seem to have an essay dedicated to just about everything). However, given the title of this entry, I suppose if one is apologizing to someone that person or persons should be a known entity. In this instance, since there really is no one particular person I am apologizing to,  it comes down to myself.

But for what, you ask? Why are you apologizing to yourself?

I am apologizing for the fact that, as I near the first quarterly review of Scribblings and Bibblings, I have not set out to do what I initially intended to do. And that is to blog at least three times per week on subjects concerning literature, the nature of writing, books, and the various directions and those subjects can take, the tangential lines that all lead back to writing and reading or art in its myriad forms.

I originally started this blog as a means to continue writing almost daily and to create a growing marketing platform for my (hopefully) published works, and as I attempt to go about the process of breaking through into the publishing industry, either via employment or as a published author. Or, perhaps, more ambitiously, both. This has not been the case.
As is often the case, I have created obstacles for myself, some of which make sense, others of which are of my own choosing. Falling in the former category are those entries that do not get written as they require a little research and also a little fine-tune writing, much more than the random thoughts and natterings of a live blog entry can convey. However, there is nothing that prevents me from living up to the title of the blog itself and inundating my scant reading audience with my own scribblings and bibblings.

(And oh how most of my thoughts resemble scribblings, And O how I can bibble!)

For all of that I owe an apology to myself for not keeping up with what I intended.

Now, on to the second part of this title: resolutions. How do I intend to resolve this issue? By writing, and by eliminating that need to present to the world a polished product each time out.
(Internal voice: Did you really just refer to your previous posts as polished?
Me: Yes, but not in the complete sense of the word, as a diamond. Just polished like an old shoe, making it look not as dirty and scuffed up as it really is
Internal voice: That's still a pretty generous definition to be giving youself for these posts.
Me: Oh, shut up, internal voice.)

I, as the creator and primary contributor to Scribblings and Bibblings, hereby announce that I will no longer be holding back in terms of posts. I will attempt to ensure that each post, regardless of content, will be in the roughest and most incipient form possible. Some will be a bit more polished than others, as I do not want to come across as a nattering fool, however, many of the updates from here on out will be in first draft form. These will be the journal entries that become the stories, the essays, the books, the more polished blog posts that sit in the ethers of the internet. tiny bytes of wisdom or miscellany just hoping for someone to grab on to. 
I also vow to put aside my compulsion that each post be complete: beginning, middle, end. Some posts from here on out may not be cogent, they may only be a few words or sentences long. However, they will be much more frequent.
As such, I will shortly make a post regarding the nature of live writing over polished writing, whether an audience wants to read the nascent stages of a story, the outtakes, the journals, the idea stage; or whether they would rather read the completed, polished versions.

That is my resolution.

I also vow to hope to never have to apologize to myself for the lack of blog posts again.

That, dear readers, is what I solemnly vow to attempt. I do not vow to succeed. But I vow to attempt those blogging resolutions.
 
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud

I recently completed a massive revision of the second half of my graduate thesis. The second half of the thesis is a novella, currently titled "I'm Hoping This Will Work." This arduous, and ultimately rewarding, process obviously caused me to think about the nature of revision itself. It is much like how a child views school: you certainly don't enjoy it while you're doing it, but after it's done, you enjoy the results and see how necessary it was.
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I will be the first person to tell you that I am not a poet. I dabbled a bit in poetry during my undergraduate years, as all writers do, but I soon gravitated towards fiction and essays, where my interests in writings still lie. I know many astounding poets, and I have read wonderful works from these and other people. I read it on occasion and am always envious of their ability to parse and expand the language, to imbue an entire world, emotion, and theory in the briefest, most efficient use of language. I wish I could write that concisely. (I wish I could think that concisely, actually, but that's a separate neurological issue.)

I recently attended the AWP conference in Denver. While preparing for the conference I pored over the schedule of events and narrowed down the seminars, workshops, and lectures I would attend before I arrived. There were many attending that were poetry oriented. In my effort to whittle the hundreds of lectures per day down to a handful, before I later pared that list, I ignored anything that had poetry in the title, or anything that had to do with poetry. This makes it seem like I am anti-poetry. I am not. I just did not have a need for it during the conference. That is until the last lecture of the week. I was convinced to attend this last lecture, which concerned the digital copyrights of poetry and music, and the changing and emerging legal issues concerning digital copyrights and the use of other persons' words. (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/poetryinstitute.html) While at this lecture, I began to wonder why I had so abdicated poetry over the years, why I had stopped any of it, why I had stopped taking an interest. Even though I had stopped writing it years earlier, why had I abandoned any interest in poetry with such fervor, as if it had nothing to teach me?
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While conceiving of the idea for a quick blog post about revision, I realized that some of my undergraduate attempts at poetry weren't entirely awful. They weren't entirely good, either, which is why I write fiction and essays still, and not poetry. One of these less embarrassing forays into poetry went through many revisions, and I kept every version, including the original longhand scribbles. I kept each copy as a means of showing myself, and possibly other people, how revision is necessary, how much a poem, a story, an essay, etc. changes from its original incarnation to its final state.