Yacht America

“What is Mostly by Knight about ?” .  A writer ought to have an online journal. A thing that gets called a blog.

Blog !. Now there’s an ugly word.  It comes from “web log“. “Log“, for a periodic record of events is a mistaken word anyway. A log is a piece of wood. In a ship, a chunk of wood was thrown overboard  to measure its speed: mark the time it goes into the water, and how long it takes to drift by a certain distance (that from bow to stern, but for better accuracy a measure of the amount of a line dragged out of a spool by the log tied to the other end and in the water).  With a little arithmetic, it’s easy to figure the distance traveled in an interval.  Get the direction from a compass, and voila! A navigator can draw a line on a chart, from position one to position two.  And from two to three, three to four and so on. A list of measurements that, if kept carefully over a long voyage, can render a pretty accurate idea of the ships position at any time.  Before GPS,  it was the most important tool for navigation - in the age of sail, through steam and and beyond, to present … in a book, kept daily: The ships log, or Master’s Log.  The captain would keep another book, the Captain’s Journal, with a record of what went on each day .  Or the captain would add  comments in the margin of the Masters Log.  So a daily journal of events got called a log.  Ugly word on not, it came from another bit of lazy wording - so I’ll allow blog here, and not wince very much when I hear it.

So Mostly by Knight is about words. Old stuff;  Horace (65 BC thereabouts): You will have written exceptionally well if, by skillful arrangement of your words, you will have made an ordinary one seem original. so Mostly is also about arranging words, and my own journey into doing it skillfully enough to seem original. Or worth reading, or amusing, or satisfying to the reader, or whatever this thing called literature is about.

Literature? In a journal? Ezra Pound this time: Literature is news that stays news.

Journalism is ephemeral, to be read once and thrown away or at best for as long as the subject stays interesting. A blog is dynamic - note, the content slips down into the archives as soon as it is replaced by a new post (”dynamic web page” - another elegant, internet-age, description).

So what is this all about? Learning how to string words together, maybe literature, certainly writing. For writers, readers and specially writers and readers.

A writer that would be published is only as good as the readers that would read him or her. So it is also about publication, challenges at the start of this new millennium - that by all accounts are many and diverse: We live in interesting times.

So this about page will be dynamic too  in its way, changing just as surely as publishing will be, and if the art of writing does it should reflect that (probably not, but my own perception of the craft most certainly). It may stray from writing and publishing (my other journal, Q’s Place should catch my personal rants, raves and whimsies but some will spill over here). And of course there is my storefront, the “shop” pages on each of these.