More than a delay ...

It will not have escaped your notice that the last issue of my Tolkien Transactions that I have managed to put up covered the month of July, though it was posted towards the end of August.

Since then, silence ... 

In order to be able to get back on track, I have, though not without regret, decided that my only option is to cancel any coverage of August through October. I hope that I will be able to post something for November, but this is still doubtful, so don't expect too much. 

I have kept hoping that I would get the time to write up the next issue – if not today, then tomorrow ... or next week ... 

But time has not materialised. 

Therefore, I have had to acknowledge that I do not currently have the time to produce these issues, and if I tried to catch up with it all, it would just become increasingly impossible to find the time at all. 

The main reason for this is quite simple: I am very busy at work. Since starting my new job a year ago, my manager has discovered that whatever qualities it is I use to compose my posts here, can also be used in the service of the company – and for some odd reason, she thinks that my wages pay for a priority claim. The final straw, making me give in now, has been the announcement of a major re-organisation to take effect by November 1^st, and with an internal audit to fill out the intervening time (I am in the medical device business, and our internal auditors have a reputation that makes the FDA auditors seem like your favourite kindergarten teacher ...).


In the meantime I will work on updating my sources page, so that you will be able to follow all this wonderful stuff yourselves. There are a wonderful lot of blogs and others that publish Tolkien-related stuff and who provide RSS feeds. I used to use the Google Reader to organise my RSS feeds, but after they closed that, I have switched to Feedly (www.feedly.com), which I find suits my needs (lots of feeds of various kinds, organising, tagging, saving, etc.). The advantage is that I don't have to download the feeds to each device, but I can read my feeds on my private PC, my work PC, my phone etc. and not have to worry about synchronising.

All the links in my sources section have feeds that you can subscribe to using e.g. Feedly (or another reader of your choice). Even Google News lets you set up an RSS feed for a search term, so that you can have a feed of all news-items including the word “Tolkien” ... (yes, that is quite a lot, but I skip about 95% of it anyway, since I am not particularly interested in news relating to any products licensed from Middle-earth Enterprises – formerly Tolkien Enterprises, the division of The Saul Zaentz Company that holds rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings).



So, the short version: no Tolkien Transactions until the November issue, or possibly even the December issue.

Sorry!