Greetings virtual friends! As you look around I’m sure you’ll see some updates to the website (I know, I know, when am I finally going to be finished with my website design!). Well, I finally believe that, aside from the occasional cosmetic tweak, this will be the look of JHW.com for a while to come (at least 6 months!). Looking over past incarnations of the site, I believe this one is the cleanest and most easy to navigate. There are still some bugs (such as the search bar not working) but I am working those out.

In other news, my secret project is nearing a point where I can actually talk about it. I’ve been hard at work on a book for the last several months and it looks like I will meet my goal of having a workable draft together by the end of the year. I am quite excited and can’t wait to share some pages with you in the coming months.

Anyone who has seen how I write knows that I use a literal “cut and paste” method, splicing sections of manuscript apart, juxtaposing those with other sections, and creating something new from the fractured parts. While this process is fun, it’s also painfully slow, kills more trees than I deserve, and makes a mess out of my workspace. Hopefully when I get around to writing the next book I’ll have the process more under control. For now, though, I just have to wade through a few more piles of paper to put this manuscript together.

The book has taken over most of my free time, which is why the blog posts here have become shorter and why I haven’t posted a DJ set for quite some time. Well, I have 5 mixes that are put together and ready to go—I just need to mix them, upload them, and post them. Hopefully you’ll start seeing those appear here in the coming weeks.

Most importantly, though, in order to get any of this done I have to prioritize how I spend my time, and one of the ways I plan to do that is to continue the “media diet” that I started last week.

The husband and I pride ourselves on not watching television , which has made us both more creative, open, and productive. But, for the last few months I have allowed the internet to stand-in for television. Leading up to the presidential elections I monitored multiple news outlets on a daily basis: Truthdig, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, Politicstv, The Real News Network. When you add to this the podcasts that I regularly follow: Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill Moyer’s Journal, The Rachel Maddow Show, The New Yorker, the list goes on and on, you get a sad picture of an internet junkie.

So, for the month of November I am on a low-calorie internet diet. Only the essentials, only at designated points in the day. To counter this impulse I’m considering renewing a subscription to a good critical magazine—perhaps Harpers or The Atlantic? I want to go back to the day where you could sit down on the weekend and read through the important things that happened that week. I don’t need to hear about John Edward’s haircuts, Sarah Palin’s clothes, or Cindy McCain’s prescription drug woes. I want real news that matters, not the glossy fluff of the Huffington Post.

The “tagline” for this website (since every website apparently needs one) is “do what’s important.” Well, I think it’s time I heed my own advice. Hopefully I’ll have some results to share with you very soon.