Dryvetyme Onlyne Goes On Extended Hiatus

I’ve thought long and hard about how to broach this topic with you, my dear read­ers. Sev­eral drafts of this post have been writ­ten in my head, and my wife and I have had very long talks about what this deci­sion might even entail. Nev­er­the­less, much as I did back in May 2010, I am tak­ing a hia­tus from this blog of mine, yet there’s a great chance that this one will last more than two or three months.

I’ve put a great deal of hard work into this site over the past few years, as I haven’t wanted to skimp on actual, inci­sive con­tent and crit­i­cal reflec­tion upon music, as opposed to rack­ing up blog hits and street cred by focus­ing on the most minute and fleet­ing fla­vors of the nanosec­ond. On one hand, the deci­sion to go on hia­tus been rather easy to make, as I’m excited to see what lies on the other side of oper­at­ing a D-​List music blog on my own on a nearly full-​time basis. On the other hand, I know that I will miss writ­ing about music on a reg­u­lar basis, as I have loved every­thing I’ve done for the past five years.

And it’s been a great five years. The first two years of this site were filled with the occa­sional review, pic­tures of my time work­ing at Boy Scout Sum­mer Camp, half-​assed poetry, and my ran­dom thoughts and ram­blings about life, reli­gion, and pol­i­tics — much in the vein of a tra­di­tional, clas­si­cally styled blog. For the past three years, I’ve made this site exclu­sively music-​oriented, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it — from writ­ing record reviews across the musi­cal spec­trum (styl­is­ti­cally and in terms of ori­gin) to cov­er­ing var­i­ous fes­ti­vals to post­ing all sorts of free mp3’s for you to download.

Many of you might be won­der­ing exactly I have planned for the next sev­eral months. First of all, I will con­tinue to push and talk about my recently pub­lished col­lec­tion of short sto­ries — If This Park­ing Lot Could Speak. Sec­ond, I have a cou­ple of really great book ideas (both fic­tion and non-​fiction) that I really want to pur­sue, and I feel that it will be dif­fi­cult to make any sort of head­way on these projects while both work­ing a full-​time job and main­tain­ing this blog at a level I feel is worth my ener­gies. Fur­ther­more, there’s a dis­tinct part of me that wants to seek out ways in which I can employ my writ­ing tal­ents and knowl­edge of var­i­ous aspects of the music scene along a totally dif­fer­ent tan­gent than that of just cri­tiquing music, and I’m already mak­ing mild strides along that path. And lastly, I sim­ply want to write more short sto­ries, and hope­fully, I can get some of those published.

I do want to thank all of you for read­ing and fol­low­ing along over these last five years. Specif­i­cally, I want to extend my sin­cer­est thanks to all my friends who’ve served as occa­sional guest con­trib­u­tors over the last few years, most notably the ines­timable Michael Dal­las Miller and the effer­ves­cent Jenn Broad­well. And, I would be remiss in men­tion­ing my lovely wife Jen­nifer, as she’s endured all sorts of music per­me­at­ing our vehi­cles and apart­ment over the last three years — whether good, bad, weird, or intrigu­ing — but she’s never failed to sup­port my dreams of becom­ing a writer on my terms.

If/​When I do choose to start writ­ing music reviews again (whether on this blog or at another out­let), you will cer­tainly be the first to know. It’s been a great expe­ri­ence, and I’m glad that you’ve been here with me. If you’re inter­ested, I’d encour­age you to keep fol­low­ing me fur­ther online at Twit­ter and Tum­blr. Thanks so much — you’ve all been great. Peace.