Blogging on...Blogging

I love the idea of writing a blog—mostly because I’m vain enough to believe, to think, that you and the rest of world not only needs to hear what I have to say but wants to hear it, that what I’m going to write is so clever or interesting that a light bulb will illuminate above your head, you’ll see the world in a different way and recognize my brilliance.

Then I start to write the blog and discover I’m not nearly as clever or interesting on paper (or the screen) as I sound in my own head.

As I fiction writer, I’m a good judge of my own writing, what’s working and what’s not. I might not always correct the problem but that’s usually from laziness or deadlines. Or the overwhelming realization that if I fix that one problem, I have to re-write the whole book so I make a decision to live with it.

When writing a blog, it's more real, more personal. And the words don’t sound like me. They don’t have the inflection or the pauses. I can’t jump into a character’s voice or describe actions. And sometimes, I just sound mean. Words that I speak out loud sound much more harsh when written. And in the end, I scrap the whole thing and write something less interesting, less controversial, less clever.

There are a lot of blogs out there but none that I return to time and again. The last blog I read consistently was of porn star and that was years ago before the term “blog” even came into being. She posted a weekly update on what she was doing and how many movies she’d done that week. The insights into her life were intriguing and it gave me a sense of “knowing” her. (And yes, out of curiosity, I watched one of her movies and realized, it’s still just porn).

I wanted my blog to be like that…to share with people my daily adventures, but you know, I don’t have that many adventures. I enjoy my life and have fun but can’t really imagine that most readers care that I’m knitting an Entrelac shawl. I certainly can’t compete with the adventures of a porn star (and wouldn’t really want to).

So, here’s the point where I normally start deleting. It’s not clever enough, or it feels like it’s a bit depressing. But I’m not going to. I'm going to post it as it. Well, I'll have to do some editing because that's just who I am. Now to wonder if I took out all the really good stuff...