State of the Puddles Address

 
A brief update on the state of the blog.

Hello, my Puddlers, how many little of you out there might still exist. For those of you who still check up on the blog from time to time, below will serve as a State of the Puddles address.

Over the past few months, as I am sure you can tell, the posts on the site have become fewer and far between. This has occurred due to a variety of reasons. The main one being my increased attention to outside freelance work. Between writing my 4-6 monthly posts for the The Manual (which I get paid for) and doing pro bono work for sites that I love like Splitsider and The Paris Review, as well as working over fifty hours a week at my office day job, it leaves precious time for me to update the site.

In fact, I have been using the precious free time to revise the manuscript of my second novel. When the blog first started, I posted sections from the book up here under the title of "From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt," but for now the manuscript is officially "Untitled." Working on the novel consumes my lunch hours, my weekday evenings, and the occasional wide-open Sunday.

I don't know if anything will become of this second novel, but I have sat on the manuscript for a few years while I tried to cobble together a career as a freelance writer. In that period, I've spent a lot of time writing short stories and I think my eye towards evaluating and editing my own work has gotten better.

This summer, I got some good advice from a writer a few years older than me. After messing around for the last four or five years, I realized that I don't particularly care about being a blogger or great Internet writer. I just want to write novels and short stories and, when I'm not doing that, interview comedians, athletes, and musicians I believe in, or write about albums that are painfully important to me. So now is the time to take my chances again with a large work of fiction—one that I still feel confident in.

That being said, I'm not retiring this blog or anything like that. Puddles will always be here and be used as an outlet for whatever I want to write that is too timely to wait for an editor to choose to run, or that can't really be used elsewhere. For example, the Lou Reed post I wrote last week.

Also, since I am extremely disappointed that I did not have the time to do a comprehensive 2013-2014 NBA Season Preview, each Monday I'll be posting (perhaps from time-to-time with the help of some friends) my NBA Team of The Week. These posts won't be based on the team that performed the best during a given week, or who had the most newsworthy headlines, but based on the team who, in my opinion as an objective NBA obsessive, seems the most "interesting" to me after a given week of action. This could be something as subtle as a promising 9th man starting to develop; or as big as Chris Paul putting on a string of virtuoso point guard performances that make me want to cry for all that is pure and beautiful in the world.

That should set all blog-related and Matt Domino related business in order. I once had high hopes for this blog as some kind of multimedia culture magazine. Unfortunately, I'm not a new media mogul or genius. I just like life and writing about the endless pains and joys that it causes me on a daily and hourly basis. So, the blog will continue to be a space for me to sporadically express those things from time to time—without some kind of greater new media vision in mind.

I'm still fighting the (I think) good fight. I will write until I die. It's the only thing I truly enjoy doing, and I want to continue to improve at it with each passing year. I don't know if I will ever be a good writer, but I can at least try.