I’ve been wrestling with this sustained near-complete cessation of writing lately…It’s been a while! This writing break-time for me is drawing to a close, though, and as July starts, I’m re-committing myself to building more disciplined habits of writing, both online and off, and perhaps to submitting my ideas and my posts to publications that might be interested.

I’ve been enthusiastic and overjoyed to re-ignite my music blog, The Needle on Vinyl. It has always been a personal project, so far, and worth the experience of searching for great music and writing about it, and the elusive joy that has given me. I’ve always used proprietary photos pulled from Google and songs streamed via Spotify, and felt a bit sketchy about those practices. But, since I’ve always self-produced this endeavor on my own time and dollar I don’t feel terribly bad about that aspect of the project. At best, it’s essentially been a channel of free publicity for select musicians, and oftentimes for ones who hardly need the word-of-mouth… Not to mention that it’s also been a dearly-needed and valuable release of tension during the challenging time I had getting started in the Northwest. I’ve had fun with it, so I’ve decided to start it up again. For fun, mainly, though.

Launching today, I’ve totally refashioned the landing page, with a far more visually-grabbing look. Check it out, and check out my first new playlist, Hearts and St@rs, on the fully remodeled site, at www.needleonvinyl.wordpress.com.  Hope you like it, even you House-Music-Haters out there!