An end to the interlude

And so, after an interlude from this blog, I have returned to posting.

The rule of blogging is to do the exact opposite of what I’ve been doing - to be regularly punctual, pithy and profound. As I am not particularly talented at the latter two, the least I could’ve managed was the former.

To you, my friends, I confess some significant reason for not being diligent in my writing. By way of full disclosure, my activities up to October 27th were directed toward some immediate goal. In the Canadian province of Ontario, where I reside, that was the date when all local governments and municipal level councils were elected. As coincidence would have it, both my wife and I were candidates for office.

While Jodi's run for School Board Trustee was agonizingly close - losing by less than 30 votes - I was elected as a member of council in the Township of Central Frontenac.

This has been something I have contemplated for some time, and it holds a great deal of significance for me.

I grew up in a municipality called Hinchinbrooke Township. It has its own Reeve and Council, fire and roads department. There was a Hinchinbrooke Public School where I first began my education. My grandfather was the grader operator and retired as the head of its roads department after over 20 years of service.

In the late 1990’s, there was a round of amalgamations of local governments in Ontario, and Hinchinbrooke was combined with three other townships to form the Township of Central Frontenac. Last year, the school was closed, and my grandfather has been gone for eight years.

What was once Hinchinbrooke is a district that has two elected representatives, and I’ve been honoured to become one of them. My term gets underway in earnest in 2015 – the year my grandfather would have turned 100 (Given his mother lived to be 103, not that implausible).

So, what does that mean for my writing?

Well, not all that much, really.

My council commitments will take up a lot of time, but my full time job at Queen’s remains in toto.  In addition, my writing time tends to be in the morning – after I arrive on campus but before I start work. Also, my employer closes between Christmas Eve and the New Year. Long story short – I can still write if the words and ideas are there.

Are they though?

Well, yes. Even though I am still pushing to get ‘Barricade Diary’ into a more public distribution, I have other projects in varying stages of development.

One project which I confess I did not plan on taking on was a sequel to ‘The Barricade Diary’. To be honest, I never considered it anything other than a stand-alone work. Of course, I had feedback from readers, and more than one wanted to know if a sequel was in the works.

I took a couple of weeks to figure out whether or not there was a story to tell, and I’m happy to say that there is. I’m still working on the outline, but it didn’t take long for the story to reveal itself.

Still no idea how long it will take to write, but given that ‘Barricade’ took, off and on, over 15 years, I’m guessing it will be quicker – even with my new ‘political career.’