The Bumpy Road of Blogging

Well, that’ll teach me to be patient. A full 12 months after the pseudonymous August West of Vintage Hard-boiled Reads declared that he would be “away from my blog for 2-3 weeks” to take care of “a personal matter,” and just as I preparing to excise his inexplicably unattended site from The Rap Sheet’s blogroll, he’s suddenly back with a short review of The Liquidator, R.L. Bent’s 1974 “cop against the mafia” novel. Let us hope this is a portent of many more good things to come in 2010.

Unfortunately, just as Mr. West is once again making himself comfortable in the saddle, The Naked Truth About Literature and Life seems to have reached the end of its life. “This will be the last post of The Naked Truth About Literature and Life,” read a note put up yesterday in that group blog. “The bad news is we are too busy writing books to continue blogging. The good news is we are too busy writing books to continue blogging. And since we started this project together, we have chosen to end it together.”

Patricia Smiley, Jacqueline Winspear, Paul Levine, James O. Born, Cornelia Read, Ridley Pearson, and--for a while, at least--James Grippando had kept The Naked Truth lively ever since its inception in April 2006. It’s too bad to see them stepping away from their blogging efforts now, but at least the Web page itself is apparently going to stick around. (Among my pet peeves: Bloggers who, after writing diligently for some while and having their material linked to from other sites, summarily delete their blogs, leaving dead links all over the Internet.) In a comment posted yesterday afternoon, Winspear wrote: “Just to let you know that the blog will remain ‘up’ for the foreseeable future--we are still getting many, many new readers each day, so our past posts are new to quite a following.”