Dear From the Seasonally Occupied Territories:

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been around much lately.

It’s not that I don’t love you, or think of you often. It’s just that I’ve, well, sort of opened the relationship.

Back in February, I started another blog: Write Through It: On Writing, Editing, and How to Keep Going. In March one of my posts, “Like Driving,” was featured in Freshly Pressed — an ongoing “Best of WordPress.” This was a thrill, one, because there’s a scary number of really excellent blogs out there, and two, because it attracted lots more readers and comments to Write Through It. Some of them even came over here to check you out.

Over the winter I wrote an essay. “Make Room for the Wild Card: On Art in Public Places” is a response to the controversy over the installation of the Sleepwalker statue at Wellesley College. It came out pretty well. It also reminded me what it’s like to actually look forward to writing every morning. I had not felt that way about Squatters’ Speakeasy for quite some time. It wasn’t coalescing. It wasn’t moving forward.

So about a month ago I pulled my other novel in progress off the back burner and turned up the heat. Wow. It’s on fire. It’s cooking. Like The Mud of the Place and Squatters’ Speakeasy, it’s also set on Martha’s Vineyard — big surprise there, eh? For several weeks now it’s been absorbing most of my write-about-the-Vineyard energy.

Between that and Write Through It — well, that’s why I haven’t been over here much.

I thought — briefly, very briefly, but I did think of shutting you down. You kept me going through some very discouraging times, when I thought that writing about Martha’s Vineyard was just about the stupidest, most useless thing I could do with my time, but maybe you’d done your job and it was time to retire?

Immediately my mind filled with half a dozen things I still want to write about. If this blog were more bloggish and less essayish, I could write about life in the Seasonally Occupied Territories and still keep the novel and Write Through It going. There are also other people out there writing about and photographing and otherwise telling stories about the year-round Vineyard. I’d love to feature their work in this blog.

So let’s keep going, OK? I’ll be back.

Soon.