My Blog, It Is a'Changing

I'm a slow learner.  Sometimes painfully slow.

You may have noticed that in recent months, I've been slower than I used to be to blog, respond to comments, and Tweet.  To be honest, I'd gotten a bit tired of always talking about good ol' Harry.

Not that I don't love Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling's incredible writing... I do!  But I love so much more than that.  My interests are wide-ranging.  And yet, because I believed a blog would work better with a decided focus, and with my past experience I'd carved out my niche here as Harry Potter for Writers, I didn't want to muddy the bloggy waters.

So, inevitably, I got a bit bored, and was thus slow to get on line and share with all my friends here.

Here comes the slow-is-me part.  I recently realized, it doesn't have to be that way!  No, I don't have to give up writing about craft techniques I've discovered in the fabulous Rowling writings, but I don't have to limit myself to that either.  I can write about new discoveries in anthropology, interesting secrets from old mystery cults, what's happening in the world of publishing today, reviews from some of my favorite books, even how to make kefir.

I'll be honest, I haven't just been AWOL because I was bored.  I was also writing, quite a bit, and editing as well.  And the result of all that work is that I have some news that I hope to tell you about soon...perhaps later this week.

So, it's time to change.  Starting now, Harry Potter for Writers is now Myth, Magic, and Mystery.  I'll still write Harry Potter posts, but in between those will come more frequent, and shorter, posts on anything that interests me which I hope you'll find entertaining or enlightening as well.

For example, did you know that cave-age parents not only let their children draw on the walls, they encouraged it?  New research on cave art in western France shows that many of the wavy designs are actually finger flutings done by children, one as young as three.  One area of the cave seems to have been so filled with child flutings that it may have been set aside especially for them.

Can't you just picture a group of mothers, trapped inside the cave on a cold and rainy day with restless kids, giving them some mud and charcoal and having an impromptu art lesson?  Or perhaps a shaman would show the children, one at a time, how to make a mark on their world while helping them explore their creativity.

That's part of what I love about writing -- getting so deeply into someone else's POV, that I feel a connection with a person totally outside my own social network, culture, even century.

My drawings on the wall of this blog-cave are changing, but I'm still here, still the same, just widening the scope of what I share.  I hope you'll enjoy it and share back with me! :-)

What's been going on with you lately?  Anyone have good news to share that I may have missed out on?