This site was born of an
experiment with two separate blogs in early 2006. I
called my first effort "In The
Wilderness."
That blog began as a forum for theological reflection
on matters having to do
with the the Spiritual Journey with occasional
digressions into commentary on the
Episcopal Church. ITW tended to head off in a variety of
different directions, most significantly
periodic reflections on the Liturgical Year and
a series of reflections on the people
commemorated by the Episcopal Church in the "Lesser
Feasts".
I called the other blog "A
Thousand Miles of Beaches... Connected by Traffic
Jams
." That was supposed to be both my "personal
blog" and a place for me to to practice humorous
writing on the subject of the weird and occasionally
wonderful experience of life in Florida.
As a kid, I devoured every word written by Irma Bombeck, and,
later on, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins
(God rest their souls). Today I read Carl Hiassen, Tim Dorsey and Dave
Barry. I wanted to try my hand at
humor and, since living in Florida had better make you
laugh because taking it too seriously would make you crazy, that
seemed like a good subject matter. There are many
things about living in Florida that are anything but
humorous and I have a lot of opinions on a subjects other
than the Sunshine State so that blog, too, started to grow
extra arms and legs.
My purpose for blogging in the first place
was simply to write (and write and write),
testing different writing voices. It turned out to be
an incredibly liberating experience which, unleashed
a creative genie that has taken
over my life. I
frequently found myself writing things that didn't
really fit on either blog, and I also felt
increasingly schizophrenic bouncing back and forth
between the two of them.
Sometime in mid 2006, I decided I wanted one place to
put all my work, on whatever subject I happened to
choose to write, and to organize it into categories
that seemed to make sense to me. I had always
wanted to build a website anyway. A Homepage
seemed to be the solution to my
problem. Instead of a blog, I decided
to build a regular "old-fashioned" website and to
populate it with my own writing on whatever topics
happen to fascinate me at the moment.
My avatar on the Florida site was
"Resident Observer". Somehow, she was always
just me. "In The Wilderness" however has become
something else. ITW is me, also. But it is
a nom de plume that resonates for me on many
levels. In The
Wilderness
is both where I find myself on Life's Journey as
well as the point of view from which I write. In
The Wilderness is both where I live and who I
am. Therefore, when I moved the content from
that blog, I decided to keep the name.
Almost
immediately after populating the site, the Muse caused
me to abandon this project in favor
of writing fiction for the first time in more
than 15 years. I've spent most of the last year
furiously churning out several draft novels. I
do not (at this point) intend to post fiction on this
site because I still labor under the delusion that
someday I may be able to sell my fiction to an actual
publisher.
Right now,
I am "between stories" so overhauling this site
seems very much in order. When the fiction Muse
calls again, I will probably disappear once more, but
for now, I'll hang out here for a while.
If you
have comments or suggestions, please contact me at:
itwilderness (at) earthlink (dot)
net
