The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” my mother often says. That sums up my blogging history quite neatly.
Blogging was supposed to be a fun diversion (read: “procrastination tool”) that helped me keep in touch with family and friends while sharing a few tidbits from our daily grind. Videos for the grandparents. Quaint anecdotes about the kids that I wanted to write down but always forgot before I located the baby book. Things of that nature.
Good plan.
I never intended to make it my occupation — or even an abstraction. And it wasn’t.
I had “real” writing to do, after all. Wouldn’t it be better for me to get “serious” writing done than to fritter away my time [pretentious sniff] blogging?
Naturally.
Except I never seem to get any of that serious writing done.
I read. [“Books, Jerry.”] I launder. I make meals. I volunteer. I watch reality TV. I intervene in very promising plans my two boys concoct toward becoming one boy … or perhaps even zero boys. I invest endless hours combing the internet with search terms like stair rails and purse inserts and potty training resistance. I sleep.
And I keep saving my creative impulses for “important” writing rather than squandering it on blogging. As if there is some virtue to refusing to eat a burger because you don’t have time for a steak. Even if blogging is the fast food of writing, that doesn’t mean I ought to throw up my hands and starve merely on principle.
I told the trainer at my gym: “If good intentions and a rich fantasy life had any impact on physical fitness, I’d look like Demi Moore in Charlie’s Angels 2.”
Which I don’t. Yet.
If they counted for anything in the literary sense, I would also be an amazingly prolific and successful writer.
Which I’m not.
Yet.
My mother says my inner editor is taking over: I’m too conscious of editing things I haven’t even written to actually buckle down and write the friggin’ thing. Discipline was never my strong suit.
Now, well-intended resolutions purposed to change my entire life in one fell swoop — those I do very well.
So, as they say: “Trying this again…”
Remaining faithful to a blog will be no picnic, I realize. My writing won’t be as perfect as I would like it to be and I’m trying to get used to that fact. But my intention is to write something — often. Long, short, funny, serious, true, total crap. Just write something.
Hopefully, something interesting. But no promises.
The difference between talent and genius is how low you set the bar.
— William Faulkner
Just kidding. That was me.
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