In Limbo (it's complicated)

image from here

About that sadly silent newspaper blog of mine ... it's in limbo.  I'm not writing for the Capital-Gazette at the moment; and I'm not not-writing for them either.  It's not because I don't want to, or have run out of things to say.  (Who, me?  HA!)  But. There have been a bunch of changes, some neutral and some negative.

The Cap-Gaz went to a new web format last year.  More modern, flexible, and interactive; except the blogs portion had some limitations.  I couldn't use links, for example, which meant if I wanted to comment on an article in the main paper, I had to give a long ugly url to let people read it.  And I could only include one photo per article, and that by a funky work-around devised by the online editor.  Most frustratingly, I couldn't preview items before they posted, and for the last few months, there have been no paragraphs in the finished post at all, even if they were there in the submissions.  Disheartening.

Then, the senior editor retired and the online editor who was directly responsible for my stuff left abruptly under very ugly circumstances.  Ugly as in, I-read-the-very-graphic-police-report ugly.  And it's not clear who my new point of contact is, and a few emails/voicemails to them have gone unanswered.  Maybe everyone who was even remotely associated with the old online editor was tarred with the same brush, maybe they're just busy with bigger fish to fry, maybe there are emails from them in my inbox buried in a mass of Facebook notifications and automatic sales pitches from my favorite bar, who knows?

It became one of those things that I never realized the value of, until it was (maybe) gone.  I'd been writing Life Afloat since 2008, and love (loved?) the opportunity to make a little contribution to the understanding of what living aboard a sailboat was really like, and the opportunity to articulate my own thoughts to myself.  And while I am never in it for the money, there were some pretty cool perks.  Most of all, the people I've met through writing, that I wouldn't have met any other way, really broadened my outlook and enriched my life in so many ways.  Hopefully, we'll get the kinks ironed out and I'll be back there, but until then, and always, writing right here!