Several analogies come to mind as I try to explain how the gap in my blog can be blamed on too much paying work.

The condition is the cheery opposite of explaining a gap year in a work resume.

Sowing seeds for writing and web work: Everything came up

It is like a yo-yo, the usual issue with any freelance-style work. But is it like being up and secure with the world in the palm of my hand because of frequent pay checks or is it risking being at the end of my string and over-extended?

One Friday afternoon in March, in the hours after accepting a nice, creative position, no fewer than nine more inquiries came in by way of email. Startups that didn’t start up were ready to try again. Fabulous work for a company that shuttered its doors now was needed at the acquiring company.

Along the way, my business partners and I declared the recession officially over. At summer’s start, several of these jobs are at full steam, and the emails keep coming.

I keep thinking of a line from the movie, “Stevie,” with Glenda Jackson playing the English poet, Stevie Smith. Remarking on an older relative’s impossibly flowered dress, Jackson labels it: “Everything came up.”

So the blog goes fallow as everything comes up from the seeds we’ve sown the past two years. Until we’re sure the dust is out of our lungs from the long dry spell, we’ll keep saying a bloomin’ yes to almost everything.

Researching work distractions, Part 2, I watched my seventh consecutive YouTube video, dashed to the kitchen and scribbled:

“Dinner will be late. Still too much work to do!”

There. I’d written something for the day. To justify, I decided those videos are not distractions but storytelling insight.

Many corporations attempt the close connection of this “view from the couch” with consumer storytelling. Whenever speaking to college classes about writing profiles, I encourage students to snuggle readers closer to their subjects by including conversational asides that seal universal ties: “No, it had to be more than five years ago, Vera, because we still had Puff.”

A friend emailed a YouTube link of decade-old Seattle square dancing that includes “our old friend Lee Stripling,” my late dad. Once in YouTube, my mind drifted to my other 2009 loss, my dog. That took me to “Intelligent Border Collie Puppy” with 206,271 other viewers, all probably also ignoring deadlines.

In Texshan74’s popular upload, Star, 3½ months, picks out different toys by name to the command “brang-it!” She shuts herself into her own crate for “nigh, nigh” and fetches a newspaper half her size.

Like all the best dog stories, this one has a beginning, a middle but no end. In other installments, Star shines in her first agility test. She holds a paw over her one eye in mock shame when her ribbons, strung like fish, include no blue. We see Star collecting trash at 7½ months, Star’s failure at herding deer, Star leaping on and off her owner’s back to catch a Frisbee at age 1.

No Hollywood script. No high budget. But enough intimacy that soon I envy not just Texshan74′s two-way devotion to this pup but also her brick-red tile, clean house, snaking driveway and off-porch wildlife.

Ties that bind. Evidence grows that we’re hurtling through a creative period rich with storytelling. If Star also celebrates her second and third birthdays on YouTube: I say, “brang-it!”

Reading your writing aloud to pick up inconsistencies and make sure your voice flows smoothly is common practice. I got the rare treat of hearing how my writing voice sounds on film when I wrote and spoke the narration for “Winging My Way Back Home: The Stripling Fiddle Legacy.”

This intro has evolved into the trailer for the film about my dad, Lee Stripling, as Seattle filmmaker Jeri Vaughn works on the final version. It sets the tone but feels long, as if it delays meatier parts of the film. We welcome your suggestions.

Stripling Brothers Documentary from Jeri Vaughn on Vimeo.

“When you put your heart out to him, there’s his heart ready for you, and probably he goes first.” – Sandy Bradley, Northwest musician and the folklorist who found Charlie Stripling’s son in Seattle, helping my dad keep the music alive.

In April, I wrote here about helping filmmaker Jeri Vaughn rework the narration for a final rendition of the documentary “Winging My Way Back Home: The Stripling Fiddle Tradition.” Within days of my meeting with Jeri, my father’s lung condition deteriorated, and by April 20, Lee Stripling was gone.

Lee Stripling on his 85th birthday

Now, as I face this task, the work becomes past tense. It is still a tribute to a resilient man who started life as a sharecropper’s son in the cotton fields of Alabama and twice pulled himself forward with fiddle music. But it is not something he will see. It will be difficult to carry on with the happy, optimistic tone that marked his life.

And yet that resilience is exactly what came through at a May 13 memorial celebration of the life “of a happy man.” Hundreds attended, all inspired by his journey and good nature, and dozens of old-time musicians and dancers pitched in to pull off the event. Vaughn showed the 21-minute preview version of the documentary to great fanfare, reminding me of both the quality of the work and the importance of capturing an interesting life before it’s gone.

Now we must regroup and decide how to continue. My hope is that the final version will not be sad but focus on the spirit of a man who came  through the Great Depression with his sunny disposition intact, living a life most would envy, with a national gig still on the books for what would have been his 88th birthday.

I begin work this week creating the narration for the documentary on my father, fiddle player Lee Stripling. Though the hard work has been done by others, the narration may have a major role. First I need to restructure the story line to bring the focus back through the filter of my father’s experience. Then I must use the narration as the thread from which to hang all the golden nuggets, which include:

• The importance of his father, Charlie Stripling, Alabama’s most recorded fiddler
• My father’s role in passing on a music heritage he learned at the knee of fiddlers who date back as far as the Civil War

A flyer for a preview shown at 2008 Fiddle Tunes

There are 30 hours of rich video shot on location in rural Alabama, Seattle, the Berkeley Old Time Music Festival, and the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, WA. Fittingly, a preview of “Winging My Way Back Home: The Stripling Fiddle Legacy,” was shown at Fiddle Tunes last summer when my father, then 86, was once again on the faculty.

The documentary was instigated by his bass player, Tony Mates, in 2005, and brought to fruition by Jeri Vaughn, now of Frause Visual. I wrote and spoke the narrative introduction to the preview version. More key interviews were added in a second edit last winter adding insight but losing some of the story’s drive.

Thus, Vaughn the director has called me back as loving narrator, attempting what she optimistically hopes will be a blend of “Scout” in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” with NPR’s wonderful Bailey White in anything.

Hearing how stories sound when read aloud has always been a key writing tool for me. That’s made writing and speaking narration feel surprisingly like home.

Vaughn wants to recapture the warmth, optimism and sense of survival she felt when reading the version of my father’s story that I wrote for The Seattle Times in 2002. That story told of how fiddle music had twice been my father’s salvation, first as a sharecropper’s son in Alabama, and then, picking up the fiddle after decades of absence, as a man in his 70s grieving for my mother.

We will try to seamlessly blend in lessons from the Great Depression and why my Alabama grandfather’s music is played throughout the Northwest, where old-time music thrives today. By filtering it through my father’s story, I hope we can show his essence, which is:

How he passes on the benefits of kindness, optimism and maintaining a zest for life along with the toe-tapping music from America’s roots.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.