Getting Started

I have joined the ranks of bloggers. What's my cipher? Millions and millions of us are out here, all with our own little chunk of Internet real estate, all convinced we have something unique enough to say that we just gotta drag out our little soapbox and start blogging.

It took me four tries to come up with a URL that would be accepted. Doesn't bode well for the originality, does it? Here's the thing: I fell in love with writing when I was in the third grade. (My first manuscript, "Marshmallows for Mouse Pillows" has, sadly, been lost to time). This is what I've always wanted to do, even when I wasn't doing it. There have been times when I've thought it didn't matter. People have been writing for, like, a really long time. You'd think that at some point we'd start running out of stories to tell. But oddly, for all the billions of words that get written every second all over the planet, there is something unique about each one of us, about our vision or our twist on some subject, any subject which simply must be heard. Or at least that's what I've got to believe if I'm going to keep plugging away at this writing thing.

So why is a middle-aged, SAHM starting up her blog? Aside from the obvious reason, which is that I can? It's because I have things to say, of course, but mostly, I need the discipline. Writing every day is the hardest thing in the world for me to do. I want to do it. I think to do it. Once I get going I sometimes find it hard to stop. But getting going, yikes. I can think of a hundred things to do before I will sit down to write: unload the dishwasher, bail out the contents of The Child's closet - again, email everyone I know, try to beat my high score at Tetris or Destruct-0-Match. The possibilities for distraction are limitless. And even though I will feel badly if the whole day goes by and I haven't taken any time to write, I will shrug it off until tomorrow, when I can avoid writing, again.

I used to write a column for a parent newsletter at The Child's old school. It was an important experience for two particular reasons. First, I found my voice. After years of writing mediocre fiction and bad poetry I realized that what I really wanted to do was write essays. There are very few people on the planet who have been allowed to read any of my fiction or poetry, and no one alive who has read all of it. I couldn't share it easily. It took me roughly 38 years to figure out that the reason for that was simple. My fictive voice sucks. Real world writing, though, that is something else again. Not that I'm particularly brilliant, mind you. But telling the truth about the ordinary in life, celebrating the little stuff, that seems to be where my heart is and consequently, what I want to write about. "Write what you know" they say. So I do.

The second thing I learned, which is the point here, is that my lack of discipline for writing being what it is, I work best when I have deadlines. I wrote consistenly for the newsletter because I had an editor who expected something on her desk (actually, in her computer inbox) by a certain time each month. I delivered because I had to. When I transferred The Child to a new school that gig went away and with it the discipline. And so, I figure, if I have a blog, I'll write. Because there is nothing more annoying that finding a blog you like and then going back to it only to find that there hasn't been a post in 4 months.

So there you are. In the galaxy of blogs I do not expect that this will be discovered by anyone outside of my circle. (There is, now that I think about it, something absolutely egomaniacal about all this: "Hey gang, check it out! I'm so sure that you care about what I have to say that you must, must, must check out my new blog! Put me in your favorites! Read me every day! Be dazzled by my brilliance! Look at me! Look at me!" Yeah, that will be a fun email to write). Really, I'm just doing this so that every day, no matter what, I sit down and write a little something. Think of this as an electronic composition book where, as I draft little exercises in writing, you get to read over my shoulder without annoying me.

Let the blogging begin!