Hey, it’s been a while. I took an unscheduled break last week due to out-of-town interviews and other work to update the website and to push my search for an agent and a publisher to a successful conclusion (sooner or later, anyway).

“Notes from a Boy @ The Window” is now a year old. Thanks so much to all of you for reading, reflecting and commenting on my blogs over the past 52 weeks. I hope that my blogs have inspired, depressed and even provoked anger over the past year. But I hope, more than anything, that they’ve make you think more deeply about our lives and our world, to not take everything at face value or to make assumptions without noting that there are always exceptions to them. I’ve discussed my life, my education, the education of others, domestic violence and abuse, infatuation and obsession, homelessness and religion, salvation and wisdom, race and gender and coolness, and life and death over the past year. I plan to be both as serious and as entertaining as I can in the next year of this blog, hopefully picking up a book contract along the way.

I’m in the process of making two Boy At The Window related changes to the site in the next week or so. I’m adding two pages: one a photo gallery that would end up in the book once published, the other a list of the music I listened to during my Boy At The Window years. I plan to create an iMix via iTunes based on the list, but the webpage will include commentary about the music list and what did and didn’t make it.

I decided to expand the Boy At The Window offerings because it would give all of you the opportunity to visualize much of what I discuss in my blogs. But I have other reasons as well. Based on the agents who’ve read the manuscript and provided even a little bit of feedback, my “marvelous manuscript” tells a “compelling story” that “deserves to be published.” Yet some of them “haven’t fallen in love with it” or aren’t “enthusiastic” about attempting to sell it because of the “current state of the market.” The upshot is that I need a business or publishing-related hook to sell the manuscript. I proposed months ago that because Boy At The Window is a narrative nonfiction memoir, it should be connected with other efforts, including popular music from the 80s. So I’m adding these features to the site as an experiment to take readers beyond my blogs and some manuscript excerpts to the visual and the musical. Don’t expect to download music here, though.

Please send me your comments and questions as I expand the website. I hope that you’ll enjoy these changes and continue to read my blog as we move into our second year. Thanks again.