Good evening readers—or morning, or afternoon. I suppose it depends less upon when I am writing this post than it does upon what time it is for anyone as they are reading it. So good whatever it is to you wherever you are.
I haven’t even started on my point yet, though already I digress. Forgive me, please— my ramblings are a method of procrastination. Simply, I think, because I feel a bit sheepish. In all honesty I realize that I have been less than vigilant in my (perhaps entirely self-imposed) duties as a blogger, and as such I would be remiss if I did not make an attempt at for one: offering an apology, and for two: explaining myself to you—anyone that has read my blog in the past and/or cares to read on.
I didn’t love it. I’m sorry to say it, but I was not crazy in love with the act, nor the art, of blogging. As a blogger I had reached too high, too early, and I was trying to offer advice on something that I hardly understood myself. I was beginning to actually dread the next blog post. I felt real anxiety about it. Thinking about posting stressed me out, and so I simply tried my best not to think about it. I had, not just one, but two blogs wasting into oblivion, no new content, and no desire to write anything for them. And why should I? I wasn’t being paid for them. I wasn’t about to start using my blog as a forum for my day to day life, like regular 800-plus word status updates that just wouldn’t fit into Twitter, and would look nothing more than narcissistic and awkward if posted on Facebook. But it just wasn’t any fun anymore for me to sit and listen to myself talk about things I didn’t understand. So what must, my wife pointed out, any readers I might have think about my writing if I wasn’t enjoying it?
What I needed was help. And I got it.
My last post was one of the first I ever actually enjoyed writing—the one about my conversation with Mike Sager. The conversation was eye-opening for me, and sitting back to think about what I could glean from it, to mill over the lessons therein, listen to the recording later (I try and record anything I do that may be of import for a piece to compensate for my Swiss-cheese memory), to hear all of the places where I sounded like I might know a thing or two about something and then immediately hear me make a complete fool of myself and try to recover, was dare I say, educational. And then to try and sit down and compose a post about it was even better.
I didn’t have to do all of the talking this time, which was better for everyone, I suppose. Rather, I had found someone who actually knew what they were talking about and I had let them do it. The talking, that is. And I learned something. And it was fun. I had the pleasure on a recent family trip of visiting Mr. Sager at his home office in La Jolla as a result of our contact—to see a glimpse of the man at work, if you will—and that, too, was inspiring in many ways. Never mind that once I was in the car again my wife kindly pointed out that my fly had been down for perhaps the entire time. It was like getting a tour around an exclusive night club while all of the lights were still on, before the real work began.
There had to be something to this, though, I thought, this method of reach out and listen, and so I did some more reading and reached out to someone in my community this time, someone that is doing some pretty amazing things as well—far outside the scope of what I am capable of at this moment—and it turns out that they were available for a brief meeting. Excerpts from that conversation will follow soon, but I didn’t want to overwhelm any cyber-readers who, if they are anything like me, should be applauded for making it 700 words into a single post without so much as a click on anything else.
Anyway, I digress. The point is, I have decided to do a lot more listening and a little bit less talking, and that is what you can expect to find here, on this blog, in the future. I may not always have someone famous to talk to, and at times there may not be anyone to listen to at all, but the quest has begun, and the rambling, stopped.
Thanks for your time, fellow readers and writers. Should you find my posts of interest, believe me, I am grateful for it. I would love to hear from you—your own tips, successes, and failures—and I wish you the very best on your own quests to create prose worth writing, whatever that may be. I hope only that you might find a sliver of something beneficial to yourself here with me at some point along the way.
Cheers,
Craig
Working on it... 