Welcome!

It’s always exciting to start something new. This is a new blog. I am excited.

I’ve been blogging for many years, but almost exclusively in Russian, initially on such a marginal platform as LiveJournal, more recently on the vastly more marginal Dreamwidth (an idealistic, not-really-for-profit clone of LiveJournal). If you’ve been following the Russian blogosphere, these choices won’t surprise you, maybe even seem the only possible choices. If you haven’t, you can’t possibly care.

In any case, from time to time I feel an urge to share my writings with my English-speaking friends, who can’t possibly care about my old blogging baggage. There was a need in the air, the need for a brand new blog. I almost got lost in evaluating different blogging platforms, considering hosted vs. self-hosted, lamenting the general decline of blogging and the rise of the abominations of Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and the like,—almost, but not quite.

The present times required something simple and flexible. So here we go. Welcome to The Slow Life Chronicles! I am going to write about my concept of slow life, about some its delightful manifestations like biking and sailing, and about my ongoing projects to explore the Boston Harbor islands and the Boston area lighthouses. My goal is to write one post a week. I have some old supplies to keep me going for a while.

Couple of housekeeping notes. To subscribe, you can use the RSS feed, or just drop me an email. In the old-fashioned, slow life way I will manually add you to my mailing list to receive updates about new posts.

There are no comments in this blog (yet), but I still love hearing from you. Again, email is the simplest way to say hi, or thumbs up/down, or to send me your actual comments, which I will happily publish. I am also going to cross-post to Dreamwidth, so it would be possible to comment there.

When the (not yet) great American science fiction author Ray Bradbury decided to publish his first book, in the late nineteen-forties (or was it the early fifties?), he bought a bus ticket to New York and started paying visits to the publishing houses. He had a big collection of short stories, some published before, some new. The response he universally got was, the reading public doesn’t care for short stories. The public wants a science fiction novel. Write a novel, he was told, and we will publish it.

Bradbury has spend two days and two nights in his hotel, assembling his short stories into one novel-like work and writing a few more very short stories to hold it together. He called it a novel, sent it to a publisher, and it was immediately published.

It was The Martian Chronicles, a famous and touching book.

I am not trying to compare myself to Bradbury, not for a second, but rather to hopefully learn something from his method. As he put together his short, not necessarily related, stories to create something bigger than all of them taken separately, so do I hope that all my future posts will paint a bigger, more coherent picture of slow life.

Thus, The Slow Life Chronicles.

Hopefully we will even manage to escape the nuclear war together, you and I.