Revelations 4:1

After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, "Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this."

I know what I should be doing. What I should be doing as I write, which I am most definitely not doing now, is asking myself the same questions that it's recommended every journalist ask himself when writing up an article. How does this affect the reader? Why should the reader care about this? What can the reader get out of what I'm writing? If the answer to these questions is something along the lines of it doesn't/they shouldn't/nothing, respectively, then I shouldn't be writing in the first place. What I've failed to realize, selfishly, is that writing a blog is really not that much different from writing for a newspaper or a magazine. In order to be appealing, interesting, useful and engaging (and therefore justify my existence in the blogsphere), I need to be putting stuff up here that is appealing, interesting, useful and engaging, not just for me but for others. Up to this point I haven't been doing that. The crap that's been posted to this blog hitherto has been partially for your imagined enjoyment and mostly for the massage of my own ego. How else can I explain the literature reviews, the endless blather about cocktail-mixing, the endless stream of inane personal updates and opining? Well, no more. I'll still review, and still for my own enjoyment, but I'll try to do so more accessibly. I'll still pontificate, but I'll pontificate in a way that's entertaining and relevant. I'll still post updates about my life, but updates such as I hope will be relevant to the reader, entertaining and enlightening. I'll still write about aviation, travel and literature, but in less of a indignant, hectoring manner and more in an engagingly didactic vein. (It'll be both educational and fun, instead of whiny.) And I still intend to keep up the inclusion of current events at feasible junctures. (An article in the Los Angeles Times today stated that the Station fire was now 38% contained.) And now for a quick update: I just want to say that my temporary position with the local newspaper is getting a whole lot better. The past two days I've made no major mistakes whatsoever and have been keeping up a steady level of output, mainly obituaries and news briefs but with a few genuine articles scattered here and there. An article in the Review published on Tuesday contained a piece of mine about the man who won the Apple Valley Chamber of Commerce's 2009 Samaritan of the Year Award; today my article about the Inland Empire Report on Business ran; and tomorrow there'll probably be something about the three leopards, three cougars, three tigers and two lions that were relocated from the Wildlife Waystation in Sylmar (and the path of the Station Fire) to the Hesperia Zoo temporarily. On a related note, my article about Seolnar in Seoul that was accepted at Real Travel Adventures (a free online travel e-zine) finally ran! It's on the website as we speak: www.realtraveladventures.com. Not much else to report. The valley is still smoky, despite the containment being reported, and as a result it's miserably hot. But I'm not complaining; there's been over 60 homes lost to the fires at last count, and those poor people who've lost them have more of a right to feel hard done by than I do. Signing off. From here begins a new era.