All over the place.

Today, I can be found here and here. A new column pubbed here last week. I filled out the staff questionnaire here. More freelance work is simmering in my head or just finished, held in the hands of editors and waiting to be served.

I'm starting to feel strangely settled, here in my apartment with no job -- no real job, anyway -- and the endless clicking of the keys, and the funny sensation of a narrative untangling itself in my head. I've started to recognize the different voices that echo in there. They're all me, but in versions. There's the typoed tumble that spills forth when I'm hurried; the shallow, stilted, plodding dryness when I haven't had enough to eat; the jittery delete-and-write-and-delete-and-write just after coffee; the slushy effusiveness and made-up words that pour out after I've had a beer at lunch. It's funny the way people will sometimes look at me when they ask what I do and I say, as though I'm not sure myself, "I'm a writer?"

I am?

I haven't lost that question mark at the end; I drown in words all day long, but when I step away from the keyboard and the sun goes down, I feel like I don't know what I'm doing. I try to explain about how it works right now, the unsureness of it. I'm waiting. I'm writing while I wait to find out whether or not I'm really a writer. Earlier today, I came across this photo of Roger Ebert (who you should be following on Twitter, if you're not, and whose story you should read about here, if you haven't); he's holding a newspaper, and the caption explains about writers and how they like to see their words made physical, because it feels permanent.

I don't know if "permanent" is the word I'd use. I'm dimly aware that this blog will exist forever, pretty much -- barring an apocalyptic event that wipes out the whole internet, or a decision on my part to delete it. (No, no, don't worry. I'll never.) But there is that unfinished feeling that online, it's all ether. Print might not feel permanent, but it's unequivocally real. It's there. The feel of paper, the smell of ink. It's got a life cycle all its own; your words come to life on the page, and later, they decay and disappear on the same. Sometimes it seems like writing online is so goddamn fetal, all these words floating unborn in the amnio.

Occasionally, I can see that someone has come here from their inbox -- Yahoo or Gmail or whatever -- and I know that something I wrote is being forwarded here and there, and it's like, wow. Vindication. Birth.

Congratulations, ma'am, it's a blog post.