I have not done much blogging recently. The last blog post I wrote on Penning Ink was way last May. There are reasons for that.
One, I was busy writing other things. As an academic I have always maintained a healthy research and publication agenda. These have been mostly academic journal articles and conference presentations. I could easily keep up regular blogging while doing that.
But in the past year and a half I had opportunities to take on larger publication projects. In addition to three journal articles that involved teams, which can be time consuming, I wrote a book and two book chapters. The book was something I proposed and wrote during a fall sabbatical in 2024. It was published last spring. My most recent blog post was about the publication of that book.
Meanwhile, my journal articles caught the attention of peer scholars working on books, and two of them reached out to me to invite me to write a chapter in books they were editing. So last year I submitted those, one having to do with measuring organizational reputation and another about public relations history. Both of these were submitted late last year and should be published in 2026.
Another life situation also slowed down my writing. Both of my elderly parents simultaneously started having significant health issues. There were trips to the hospital for various problems. The long story short is that my family had to make a sudden decision to move them from their independent senior living situation into a facility where they get the care they will now need. Anyone who has had to help their parents in this fashion knows the time demand for everything from physically moving to handling medical and legal paperwork.
So now that my academic writing projects are complete and my parents are safely moved, I looked at the dawn of a new year and decided to reboot and rebrand for 2026. As a result, another blog I wrote for years called PierPoints blog will no longer have new posts. Instead, I am merging it with this PenningInk blog. PierPoints has always been the place where I posted my newspaper column and other posts that were a variety of social commentaries. Penning Ink was where I wrote about public relations and communications.
Penning Ink has long been the name of my freelance business, which has been about freelance journalism, to public relations consulting, and now is the imprint for my independent book publishing and my blog. You can find my professional and non-fiction books there, and soon I hope to add Christian fiction.
Going forward, the Penning Ink blog will have a broader focus on writing, communications, general commentary and Christian themes.
If you have been a subscriber to Penning Ink, thank you. I hope you’ll continue to read what I have to offer, and I promise to offer more in the new year.
