It’s an Internet cliche that when a blogger says she’s taking a break, she might as well sell the domain because that blog is done.
I promise this isn’t the case. What’s happened is a confluence of events. First of all, the “nerfed” part of my life has been interfering with the capable and productive part. No big deal; it happens, and I’m going to be poked and prodded by yet more doctors pretty soon, so maybe they’ll turn up something.
Also, there have been some pretty big bombshells in the skeptical community lately. For one, there’s the recent avalanche of evidence against the Roman Catholic church and Pope Benedict (or Joseph Ratzinger) regarding a decades-long conspiracy to cover up horrifying sexual abuse of children by priests. When Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens started a debate over having the pope arrested on his impending visit to the U.K., it spawned a remarkable discussion among skeptics that hasn’t lost momentum yet. That debate, which has been both reasoned and rancorous at times, has spawned a lot of tweeting and blogging about the role and the scope of skepticism, for which my poem on Tuesday was just a little bit of nonpartisan cheerleading.
There have been positive steps too, such as the closing of the Australia (anti-)Vaccination Network and Simon Singh’s success in the libel case against him by the British Chiropractic Association. Not everything has been bad news. But my attention has been distracted, and that takes away from how much else I can do.
I’m not taking a break from writing — far from it. I’m taking a short break from the blog so that I can focus my energy on a couple of posts that I plan to submit to some great new ventures, as well as an application to present a paper at The Amazing Meeting (TAM), the “skeptical convention” held in the summer. And on top of all that, there is the excellent game that I have been working on, Paradox! the Musical, for which I am long overdue on a really fun project.
So while I may chime in with a brief hello, I won’t be doing any serious posts for probably a couple of weeks. If the ones I submit to other blogs are accepted, I will hopefully be able to repost them here. If they are rejected, then I bloody well will post them here. And once my deadline projects are submitted, I will be able to turn my attention back here. Seriously, you know me by now — do I seem likely to quit yammering anytime soon? I’m just conserving my energy, which hasn’t quite bounced back from a particularly bad month. (It’s also the reason I haven’t been properly citing this post with links, for which I apologize.)
Thanks for understanding, and with any luck you will see my byline around soon, either in-game or on a blog, and then I’ll be back to bug you some more about veterinary homeopathy or something. (I had to link that one.) Since I’ve, well, yammered on about how I’m shutting up, how about sending you off with something really succinct: my all-time favorite movie, in five seconds. Sorta.
