My recent period of productivity on Benzene, which began on Christmas, lasted about six weeks before it fizzled, a casualty of the tax season. For those who don't know, my day job is in tax accounting, so I get very busy at work this time of year.

It's not that I'm too busy to blog at all; I'm just too busy to write the sort of long expansive pieces that I always write. If I could just content myself with making one point and not elaborating on it too much, I could probably post every day without much trouble.

One reason I've resisted this is that I think short-blogging, particularly with respect to politics, pulls one strongly toward publishing gossipy little remarks on whatever mini-controversy is news today but will be stale by Friday. I strongly believe that if something isn't sufficiently interesting to stay interesting for at least a week, it probably wasn't worth writing about in the first place. I like to imagine that anything I post here is no less relevant two weeks from now than it is today. That's particularly important for Benzene where, I'm pretty sure, the few regular readers I typically are reading two weeks from now.

I also worry that a move toward shorter posts would tempt me to the sort of traffic-director posts that just say, "Here's a good article I saw; go read it."

I'm not sure I could resist the two temptations. I'm even less sure that I could succeed in being brief on a regular basis. As regular readers have noticed, brevity does not come naturally to me.

Still, it's a good skill to have, and I could certainly use the practice. So after years of contemplating it, I think I'm going to try short daily posts for a while. We'll see how it goes.

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