Manic Bookstore Cafe, Year Two

One of the problems with retail is that you have to keep regular hours.

When a fabulous (if very bourgeois) gourmet shop opened in my neighborhood in Philadelphia a few years ago, they didn't post any hours. I would get up and go over to get a coffee and a croissant, or bagels for the kids, and the door would be locked. When I suggested that "before 8 a.m." was a good time for them to open up, the owner said: "yeah. We know. We're gearing up to committing to regular opening hours."

The Milk & Honey Market at 45th & Baltimore,
with owner Annie at the cash register.

Blogs are like that. The statistics on numbers of blogs started are, I imagine, mind-boggling. And many times they peter out. It's as hard to have something to say in a blog on a regular basis as it is to open up at 7 a.m. day after day. (Well, maybe not quite as hard.) Commitment. Difficult in all its permutations.

But in making up the silly business card pictured at left and handing it out to all kinds of folks, I thought I was ready to make a commitment. On average I wrote more than one post a week last year -- that sounds like an enterprise to which I am committed.

And since sending out the cards, I haven't written a word.

Not entirely true: I started a *new* blog that is the 2014 Recipe Project and wrote three posts there. And of course there's my academic writing. But the Manic Bookstore Cafe has been untended since the end of 2013, and that needs to change.

I have a few posts in mind, and will get to work this week. So stay tuned -- I will try to keep this enterprise in business. Retail it's not, but it's still a commitment.

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Manic Bookstore Cafe

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