At the beginning of this summer, I promised you, my blog readers, that I would avoid blogging about writing as much as possible. No more false promises, or brilliantly naive insights. No more progress reports on still unfinished works, or scathing commentary on how the trials and tribulations of trying to figure out what is missing from my writing that keeps me from being published and how much its vexing me.
That last one, by the way, is still a major thorn in my side.
But anyway. This summer I learned quite a few things about my writing – about my habits, about what motivates me, even about how I work. Today, the first topic will be about blogging, and this is something I’ve only just come to grips with this last week.
My blog isn’t for you. Its for me.
Don’t get me wrong, like any social animal I welcome the attention and sharing, but it has finally broken through my thick skull that blogging does me a lot more good than it does you.
First, blogging gets my fingers and brain moving. Sure, this isn’t usually creative gold I’m producing on the blog, but it does get me putting words together, grouping and groping my thoughts. Which in turns get my brain moving, thinking, considering. Words start popping into my train of thought and then the magic sauce starts to boil. Fiction is born in this stew.
Second, its really therapeutic to talk about my writing on the blog. To whit (do folks still use that expression?), in the time since I started the summer of limited writing blogs, my writing has steadily and rapidly declined. In fact, its only been in the last week or so, when I started blogging regularly again, that I’ve seen my word counts rising. Not skyrocketing, I’m still not writing as regularly as I should be, but rising. In fact, it was when I realized that correlation that I came to the conclusion it was time to start this chain of blog posts.
So here I am. I can’t promise a post every day, no matter how good this week has been (work and life are like that), but I will do my best. And expect to see both more posts in this series as I recap some of the things I learned this summer, as well as a lot more posts about how my writing is doing.
Now to keep moving forward!
