findings, by pen

Hello BlogNation,

We're back. We missed you! I might have missed you more than mendacious, I can't be sure. My compulsion to share all the boring details of my life only increased over the past month, whereas mendacious still seems hesitant? But this yin-yang-i-ness is typical of what we found while kickstarting our book project(s). Rest assured that in a month's time, I won't be able to think of something to blog about for the life of me, and mendacious will be all about it.

What we did during our hiatus: mendacious compiled all of our brilliant blog posts from the past 3+ years and whittled them down to something readable. Which means she read it all and was able to get a sense of our progression, and note themes, threads, and startling facts such as my apparent absence during 2005. It's really not that startling to me, because I know where I was and what I was doing, mainly puking my green guts out while pregnant with K.Lo and working at the evil corporation of VZW. And buying a house, moving into that house, and not blogging. After initial edits, mendacious passed along the blog copy to me, so I can read it, and I'm still reading. I know, it's sad, but we're talking about nearly 600 pages here, and I'm a slow reader, and hello, I have an infant and a toddler and a husband to tend to. Excuses, excuses.

Here is what we have accomplished: I think there are a few long narrative projects hidden in our blog, and this year it is our goal to develop them. My personal opinion (please weigh in) is that mendacious' job saga in particular is worth persuing, and she needs to pluck all job posts, dump them in a Word document, and take a good look. Also, mendacious and I will be working on a project together, as we have always dreamed of doing (like for real), by creating sitcom-like episodics from our blog matter. Because we are TV junkies, this project truly matches with our sensibilities, and will in fact be an homage to our favorite show forms. Does that sound all full of hot air? But no, seriously, picture it: a book featuring the characters of mendacious and penelope, with their (mis)adventures presented like a TV show, a three-act structure, and then End Scene. The blog-matter will provide the material for these episodes. You're so jealous.

You can think it's stupid if you want to, or overly ambitious, or still lacking a hook. But really, it's going to be a lot of fun, in the way that it will play with form and also (most importantly) celebrate us and our lives and our friendship, and also you, our BlogNation.

Here's what else we found:

-In the old days, mendacious and I struggled a lot to find our blog voice. Many times, and still to this day, we wrote a lot of stream-of-consciousness mumbo-jumbo, oftentimes in all lowercase. We're going to try to quit that. For the masses' sake.

-We also struggled very much in the beginning, in our Post Grad-School Purgatory-Like Existence, with the legitimacy of blogging, and whether it really "counted" as writing. Or at least I struggled. By now we (I) know it does, at least the way we do it.

-Mendacious and I used to blog back and forth a lot, each with a different spin on the same topic, and/or like we were having a conversation. We'd like to try and do more of that, from here on out, because it's fun, and because we are co-bloggers, after all.

-Some of our early blog posts could have been written yesterday, and some of them seem 10 lifetimes ago. This realization was shocking, and kind of sad, and kind of comforting all at once.

-Especially in the beginning, but still to this day, hardly anyone comments, and we both find this frustrating, mainly because we are complete narcissists and attention whores. This lack of readership and appreciation is really beyond our control, however, and we realize we need to get over ourselves. To some extent. Not really.

There are more blanks to be filled in regarding our absence, what we did, where we went, what we learned, and where we are now. But I will leave those blanks to mendacious for her return post--mainly because it is late, and my mind is mushy. See how that works, though, setting up the perfect lead-in for m?

For now, we are back, we are refreshed, we are ready to go.

Now, who wants to talk about the Gauntlet? Yeeeow!