Why I might blog…

I want to write, or at least I want to want to write. I truly enjoy it. I also enjoy several other amateurish pursuits such as reconciling bank accounts, cooking for my husband, traveling on mission trips, running, volunteering for good causes, going to church, learning random bits of information, drinking coffee, mopping the floor, riding horse, taking stitches out of people, substituting for school teachers, reading old favorite books, and encountering other humans of as many different temperaments and habits as possible. That one, that last one is probably the underlying interest behind nearly everything I’ve done in my life. More than anything else, I am a connoisseur of people and experiences and thoughts; therefore, I wish to write about them.

One time, I got married, and I thought, that with such an energy-consuming question settled, creative brain space would go vacant for the production of many wonderful works. In getting married, I moved to a northern country, one with a slower pace and a prejudice against me earning money. I planned to live a moldy life on the sofa with a book in one hand and a pen in the other… I forgot how much work that is. I’ve been married well over three months and have yet to produce a manuscript of renown, only a couple of dubious family emails.

So… I thought about writing, and I thought about blogging. I privately sneer at blogs because they are cheap platforms for writing, requiring no skill. Anyone can and usually will write, and so we have a noisy literary world in this twenty-first century.  The bookstores are bursting with New York Times best sellers, and the internet is foundering with second- and third-rate accounts of lives and opinions. It is like a massive and bigamous deer population with no natural predators.

I thought about how writers used to get started. They used to write for magazines, and sometimes those articles and stories later became a book. (See Arthur Conan Doyle.) People don’t read magazines anymore; instead they read blogs. If I start to write now about all the different things that I wish I had written down, someday they may make up a book, and a regular blog commitment would force me to write. I also recognize that writing does not just happen. At some point, I will need to commit myself, instead of sticking drafts in private places until I can screw up enough faith in the document to show it to my sisters.

So… for about the eleventh or maybe it’s the twenty-third time in my life, I find myself sighing and climbing down off a throne of mockery. I eat my words and all of that. In only 25  years, I have stampeded through half a dozen short careers and encountered so many interesting people in various parts of the world that I think I had better start writing about them now before the next 25 years happens.

If you do not enjoy reading anecdotes of people and places, my stories are not for you. If you do not enjoy being written about, you should move far away from me. Capturing people and culture in words is my trade, and I love my characters very much. I like colorful people rather than nice people, and since almost everybody in the world fits into that category, the possibilities are endless. That being said, I truly want to respect people’s privacy and sensibilities, so I may take the liberty to change some names and details.

And I commence.

 ~ Every poet and musician and artist, but for grace, is drawn away from the love of the things he tells, to love the telling till, down in deep hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about him. -C. S. Lewis