Chip on Your Shoulder

On January 17, 2006, I launched "The Mechanic and the Muse," a blog that would, I hoped, track my continuing quest to master the writing craft and share the lessons that every act of writing contains -- from fact-gathering to revision.

There were other, more personal reasons, why I felt compelled to replace "Chip on Your Shoulder," my weekly writing advice column, with a blog. I laid these out in "Why I Blog," an essay that will reappear in "The New Writer's Handbook 2008."

Fourteen months and about 120 posts later, I was ready to put "The Mechanic and the Muse" to rest and return to writing "Chip on Your Shoulder" -- first as a column and now as a blog. I never knew how big the audience for that blog was, but now I realize that once a week I could glean a useful post from that collection.

I think of them as "M&Ms," an allusion not only to the blog's name, but to that chocolate candy encased in a rainbow of sugar shells. My aim: refresh these "Mechanic and the Muse" posts with new lessons and links -- fresh, colorful shells -- and share them with the larger audience of Chip on Your Shoulder."

Today's post, "The Smell of War," is the first in the series of M&Ms.