Welcome, Concerned Reader, to the new and improved Box of Books. Have a cookie. And what, you ask, have I been doing with myself lately? Obviously not blogging, as my two-week absence from Yon Internet suggests. Before I get this new site going, maybe it’s best to discuss my theory of crop rotation.

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Crop rotation, as I’m sure you already know, is what farmers do to sustain the nutrients in their fields. One year you grow corn, the next year you grow spinach, the next you grow soybeans, and by then you have enough nitrogen in the dirt to try corn again. No need to grow an increasingly poor crop of corn; no need to let your back 40 lie fallow for a few years until the soil improves.

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The jump from dirt to brains, and particularly creative and intellectual stimulation, is a pretty obvious one to me. I like to write, but when the story or whatever’s done, I need to do something different for a while; make repeating floral designs, for instance, and color them in with Henry’s markers. Rotating that sort of crop does me good. And this is why I have spent most of my twenties jumping from one career, city, hairstyle, apartment, to another. Maybe now that I have turned 28 it is time to settle down and make some permanent decisions? I don’t know. It seems so all-corn-all-the-time.

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So, over the past few weeks, I have been working on this novella (why does nobody write those any more? They are the perfect story form – not too long, not short enough to require a strict attention to economy) and having a lovely time with it. I did not even miss losing my blogging time. I mean, I didn’t miss it at first.  Now that I’m a few thousand words in (yes, I write slow) I am realizing that that kind of writing supports this kind of writing in a weird symbiotic sort of way. Who knew?

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Anyway, all that is a long way of saying that the Box of Books is back, and I am going to try for three posts a week or so, which will probably not be book-related. But definitely life-related, and maybe even my-writing-related.