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I Think I'm Back ...

I always hate writing a blog entry after I come back from an extended absence. I never know what to say.

Well, I guess some kind of explanations are in order.

First off, I didn't die or go through any kind of emergency. I was going to try coming back online after Christmas, but the holidays hit hard in a couple of different ways, and then I needed to recover. And after that ...

Well, among my Xmas gifts were some volumes of "The History of Middle-Earth," which is the multi-volume series collecting and commenting on Tolkien's rough drafts of LotR and the Silmarillion and other works. Isn't there a line in LotR about "the lesser spider being caught by the greater spider"? Anyway, that's what happened to me. I enjoy world-building, I was entirely ensnared by Tolkien, and not only got lost in the Xmas volumes I got, but in the additional volumes I ordered. I even got into some really deep-diving podcasts on Tolkien and the "History," listening to them while reading the "History." To top it off, I was inspired enough to try writing some additions of my own to the historical corpus -- filling in corners of Gondorian history, for instance, or composing alternate versions of Silmarillion stories [*]. All of which scratched an itch to write while not working on BoM.

And in truth my own interest in BoM waned considerably over those months. It looks so petty and ugly next to Tolkien.

Still, I did miss BoM, and I spent the last month trying to get restarted with it with some new and resumed storylines. It's been hard, though. After some struggling, though, I've decided that I just need to get back online here and see what happens. There has been a very encouraging community around BoM, which humbles me and for which I am very grateful. Though we'll have to see how many are still left after that embarrassingly long absence.

I especially want to thank those who sent in GiftPoints while I was gone -- those are the ones I can't quite bring myself to look in the eye. Some of the gifts were Anonymous, and I have no way of thanking you except here. Those whose names were attached to their GPs will have a suitably red-faced email expressing my gratitude.