Perhaps it is to state the obvious, but cliches are not inherently wrong. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. They are inherently right. Too right. There is undeniable and easily recognizable truth in every cliche. They are comfortable. And they can be employed in myriad situations. Such is the source of their overuse and that which makes them so…undesirable. Something so familiar can be boring. Tedious. Worthy of an eye-roll. The same thing over and over again just doesn’t give you that fresh all over kind of feeling. Which, after all, is what we really want. To feel oh, so fresh and clean after a visit to the blogosphere.
So, in an effort to keep my contributions to the SWC blog lively and vibrant and clear of the slippery slope of offering up too much of the same thing, I’m going to borrow a little bit from our old buddy Charles Dickens.
The primary method by which Dickens disseminated his works to the public was through serial publication. This allowed him to break up his rather lengthy novels into episodes that would appear monthly or weekly and made his works, for the every day reader, far more manageable and pleasant to sit through. And exciting. Cliffhangers, ya heard?
Dickens was paid by the word and he was rather wordy, so the writing installment plan made sense for him. I sometimes worry that my posts read as though I too am being paid by the word and that the commitment being asked of the reader to sit through almost 8,000 words per post (lately, at least) is just a bit much for the blog format. So, my next couple of blog posts will be offered up episodically.
The mechanics of this exercise will be simple. There will be a once a week update, or wherever there is an appropriate break in excellent new content being posted by the SWC team. The “episodes” will appear with the same title and banner image as the week before. So, when you see what looks like the same post from last week, well, you’re half right. It will be the same post from before, with all the copy that has previously been posted, only with a new “chapter” tagged onto the end of it. This way you don’t have to wade through old posts to find what came before it. That’s pretty much it.
Hopefully, it works out and makes for a fun and engaging reading experience and is something that we can keep doing in the future. Only time will tell. Also, the long, epic posts are not gone. Those will still show up from time to time. And there is more food writing coming too. I promise.
Keep your eyes peeled for the new stuff which should start popping up in the next week and I’ll see you around the internets. Or if you’re around the Everglades during late September, in the flesh at the Herman Lucerne.
-Baz